The RPI Challenge

Did anyone really think that John Kerry’s nine-month effort to produce a Palestinian mini-state would ever work? If so, they were either ignorant of the Mideast, naïve, or deeply cynical. The best one could say about Kerry’s fiasco was that it was a charade designed to show America’s Arab allies that Washington was really making an effort to resolve the nearly seven-decade suffering of the 5 million homeless Palestinians. In 2002, I wrote that the latest Arab-Israel peace initiative – called...

The Senate is considering legislation to shift the war power largely to the president and a 20-person legislative committee. The result would undermine the constitutional role of 515 other members of Congress and the duty they have to represent the interests of their constituents. The stated purpose of S. 1939, introduced by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Angus King (I-Maine), is to repeal the War Powers Resolution of 1973 and create a procedure that allows for rapid...

It looks like the civil war in Ukraine is getting much worse. Western Ukraine right now is being urged on by its Western supporters, meaning its NATO supporters, the European Union, the United States, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Western Ukraine has moved to take back control of the cities in Eastern Ukraine that have been taken over by supporters of Russia. Of course, it’s said in the major media that Russia has started all of this trouble, and so all this has to be done. The...

The EU’s Eastern Partnership summit that took place in Prague on 24-25 April was called to solve the Hamlet question of whether the programme itself is to be or not to be. It was unable to do so, however. The collapse of the Ukrainian government and the cooling of relations between the EU and Belarus have virtually left just Georgia and Moldova in the orbit of the Eastern Partnership, although Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev also took an active part in the recent summit. For the European...

There is yet another victory for the national security state under President Obama. The Obama Administration has succeeded, with the help of Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, in quietly removing a provision that would seem unobjectionable to a President who pledged “the most transparent Administration in history.” The provision simply required disclosure of the number of people killed each year by U.S. drone attacks. Not the details mind you. Just the figure. That sent the...

Earlier this month, CIA-operated drones killed as many as 55 people in Yemen in several separate strikes. Although it was claimed that those killed were “militants,” according to press reports at least three civilians were killed and at least five others wounded. That makes at least 92 US drone attacks against Yemen during the Obama administration, which have killed nearly 1,000 people including many civilians. The latest strikes seem to contradict President Obama’s revised guidelines for...

Once again Americans are watching their government involve itself in an issue in which the United States has nothing at stake economically and no genuine national security interest at risk. Ukraine is a place that is worth neither a single American dollar nor more than a brief scan of the headlines by US citizens. And yet Obama and his fellow European interveners and democracy mongers are conducting themselves in a bellicose manner that could lead to some kind of military conflict in eastern...

Anti-government protests in Venezuela that seek regime change have been led by several individuals and organizations with close ties to the US government. Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Corina Machado — two of the public leaders behind the violent protests that started in February — have long histories as collaborators, grantees and agents of Washington. The National Endowment for Democracy “NED” and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have channeled multi-million dollar funding to...

According to Lisa Monaco, Barack Obama’s Security and Counter-terrorism adviser, parents have a duty to monitor the attitudes and enthusiasms of their children, and report them to law enforcement if they display symptoms of incipient extremism. In an address to Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Monaco suggested that “sudden personality changes” in children, including a “confrontational” attitude, might betoken terrorist tendencies. Monaco lamented that “The government...

On 21 February, the day the Yanukovich government collapsed, cocktail hour at the U.S. State Department must have been one rip roaring, hours-long, high-five fiesta. The many billions the US had invested in a string of attempts to undermine an elected government in a former Soviet republic had finally paid off. Since the targeted government was Ukraine’s, the possibility of new NATO bases and the eviction of the Russians from the Black Sea naval base in Crimea were back in play. So too was...