Browsed by
Category: War

Are there communities that are good at being good when things get bad?

Are there communities that are good at being good when things get bad?

Comments 0 Comment

Margaret Paxson writes: Let’s just say that suddenly you are a social scientist and you want to study peace. That is, you want to understand what makes for a peaceful society. Let’s say that, for years in your work in various parts of the world, you’ve been surrounded by evidence of violence and war. From individual people, you’ve heard about beatings and arrests and murders and rapes; you’ve heard about deportations and black-masked men demanding your food or your life….

Read More Read More

The U.S. has helped nurture a new generation of Mideast dictators

The U.S. has helped nurture a new generation of Mideast dictators

Comments 0 Comment

Evan Hill writes: On Oct. 2, prominent Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi walked into his country’s consulate in Istanbul and never walked out again. The government adviser turned critic, who entered self-exile last year and lived outside D.C., was there to finalize paperwork for his upcoming marriage to his Turkish fiancée. Once inside, according to Turkish authorities, a Saudi team lying in wait killed him and took his body away. Khashoggi’s disappearance and possible killing is a fork in the road…

Read More Read More

Social media is revolutionizing warfare

Social media is revolutionizing warfare

Comments 0 Comment

P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking write: “The exponential explosion of publicly available information is changing the global intelligence system … It’s changing how we tool, how we organize, how we institutionalize—everything we do.” This is what a former high-level intelligence official told us back in the summer of 2016, explaining how the people who collect secrets—professional spies—were adjusting to a world increasingly without secrets. We were asking him about one of the most important changes in technology and…

Read More Read More

Russia accused of cyber-attack on chemical weapons watchdog

Russia accused of cyber-attack on chemical weapons watchdog

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: A Russian cyber-attack on the headquarters of the international chemical weapons watchdog was disrupted by Dutch military intelligence just weeks after the Salisbury novichok attack, it emerged on Thursday, amid fresh revelations of spying that escalated the diplomatic war between the west and Vladimir Putin. The incident, which was thwarted with the help of British intelligence officials, came after the Sandworm cybercrime unit of the Russian military intelligence agency GRU had attempted unsuccessfully to hack the UK…

Read More Read More

How the UN has saved Lebanon

How the UN has saved Lebanon

Comments 0 Comment

Max Boot writes: Imagine 125 million refugees flooding into the United States (population: 328 million). That is what Lebanon has experienced on a per capita basis. Since 2011, this nation of 4 million people has seen an influx of some 1.5 million refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war next door. “I find it a miracle this country hasn’t exploded,” a Western diplomat told me last week. “Most countries would never have allowed this to happen.” This is the dog that…

Read More Read More

As midterms approach, proposed U.S. Navy show of force would escalate tensions with China

As midterms approach, proposed U.S. Navy show of force would escalate tensions with China

Comments 0 Comment

CNN reports: The US Navy’s Pacific Fleet has drawn up a classified proposal to carry out a global show of force as a warning to China and to demonstrate the US is prepared to deter and counter their military actions, according to several US defense officials. The draft proposal from the Navy is recommending the US Pacific Fleet conduct a series of operations during a single week in November. The goal is to carry out a highly focused and concentrated…

Read More Read More

Armageddon postponed: Syria’s Idlib province gets new lease on life

Armageddon postponed: Syria’s Idlib province gets new lease on life

Comments 0 Comment

Christoph Reuter reports: Two weeks before the sudden cease-fire, Abdul Aziz Ajini’s neighbors thought he had gone crazy. While others in the village of Kurin, located in Idlib province, trembled with fear ahead of the major offensive on the immediate horizon, Ajini, a former professor of English literature at a local college, began to rebuild his home, which had been bombed to rubble years ago. As the people of Idlib were trying to sell their homes, property and furniture to…

Read More Read More

Yemen’s three wars

Yemen’s three wars

Comments 0 Comment

Gregory D. Johnsen writes: Last month, over the course of a few days in Yemen, one governor survived a roadside bomb while a second was denied entry through a checkpoint ostensibly run by his own government. At a military college in Aden, the government’s temporary capital, pro-secessionist soldiers opened fire on a graduation ceremony in response to the raising of the national flag. Three small security events—barely blips in Yemen’s daily catalogue of strikes that have already disappeared from the…

Read More Read More

‘Killing a generation’ — one million more children at risk from famine in Yemen

‘Killing a generation’ — one million more children at risk from famine in Yemen

Comments 0 Comment

AFP reports: More than five million children are at risk of famine in Yemen as the ongoing war causes food and fuel prices to soar across the country, charity Save the Children has warned. Disruption to supplies coming through the embattled Red Sea port of Hodeida could “cause starvation on an unprecedented scale”, the British-based NGO said in a new report. Save the Children said an extra one million children now risk falling into famine as prices of food and…

Read More Read More

North and South Korea take important steps to demilitarize the Korean peninsula

North and South Korea take important steps to demilitarize the Korean peninsula

Comments 0 Comment

Richard Sokolsky writes: At yesterday’s summit meeting in Pyongyang between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, the defense ministers of the two countries signed an important agreement to reduce military tensions along the two sides’ heavily militarized border. As of November 1, no-fly zones will be established along the border and both sides will halt artillery and other military drills close to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating the two countries. The North and South…

Read More Read More

Only a fool takes Putin at his word in Syria

Only a fool takes Putin at his word in Syria

Comments 0 Comment

Nic Robertson writes: Trusting Russia to keep its word in Syria is rather like believing in good faith that its intelligence agents only visited the UK to see Salisbury Cathedral. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s new peace plan — forged with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan — to protect the three million civilians crowded in camps in Idlib is staggeringly hard to take at face value for a multitude of reasons — not least, because of Putin’s history of denying…

Read More Read More

New revelations about the Sabra and Shatila massacre

New revelations about the Sabra and Shatila massacre

Comments 0 Comment

Seth Anziska writes: Historians try not to audibly gasp in the reading rooms of official archives, but there are times when the written record retains a capacity to shock. In 2012, while working at the Israel State Archives in Jerusalem, I came across highly classified material from Israel’s 1982 War in Lebanon that had just been opened to researchers. This access was in line with the thirty-year rule of declassification governing the release of documents in Israel. Sifting through Foreign…

Read More Read More

France’s Macron admits to military’s systematic use of torture in Algeria war

France’s Macron admits to military’s systematic use of torture in Algeria war

Comments 0 Comment

The Washington Post reports: France will formally acknowledge the French military’s systemic use of torture in the Algerian War in the 1950s and 1960s, an unprecedented step forward in grappling with its long-suppressed legacy of colonial crimes. President Emmanuel Macron announced his watershed decision in the context of a call for clarity on the fate of Maurice Audin, a Communist mathematician and anti-colonial activist who was tortured by the French army and forcibly disappeared in 1957, during Algeria’s bloody struggle…

Read More Read More

3 million people with nowhere to go as Assad’s forces are about to attack

3 million people with nowhere to go as Assad’s forces are about to attack

Comments 0 Comment

Kareem Shaheen writes: The first thing that struck me when I saw Idlib, the rebel-held province in northwestern Syria, in April last year was how green the country was. Olive and cherry trees lined the pockmarked roads leading from the Turkish border down to the province’s towns. Smoke rose in the distance in the aftermath of an airstrike or an exploding shell, and the buildings in most towns were scarred by blows from the sky. I had traveled to Idlib…

Read More Read More

How the U.S. government misleads the public on Afghanistan

How the U.S. government misleads the public on Afghanistan

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: Seventeen years into the war in Afghanistan, American officials routinely issue inflated assessments of progress that contradict what is actually happening there. More than 2,200 Americans have been killed in the Afghan conflict, and the United States has spent more than $840 billion fighting the Taliban insurgency and paying for relief and reconstruction. The war has become more expensive, in current dollars, than the Marshall Plan, which helped to rebuild Europe after World War II….

Read More Read More

How Assad made truth a casualty of war

How Assad made truth a casualty of war

Comments 0 Comment

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: On February 22, 2012, when the British photojournalist Paul Conroy survived the artillery barrage that killed Marie Colvin, he was rushed to a place of greater danger. Bashar al-Assad’s war of repression has killed civilians indiscriminately, but its targeting of medical facilities has been systematic. Hospitals are the most endangered spaces in opposition-held areas. Of the 492 medical facilities destroyed in the war, Physicians for Human Rights attributes the destruction of 446 to Assad and his…

Read More Read More