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Lessons From Qaddafi's Last Defeat
The spirited assortment of mostly inexperienced fighters who make up the Libyan resistance have a lot to learn before they can defeat the regime in Tripoli. Even with all the Western training they’re getting, they’ve yet to become anywhere near a credible fighting force. What they could use are a few lessons from their African…
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The Surge Didn't Work
The outcomes of wars are intimately connected to the decisions about whether to fight them in the fist place. And the Bush administration’s determination in 2003 to march into Baghdad was based on costly hallucinations. The goals of the invasion were to destroy the Iraqi army, destroy the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein, rid Iraq…
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U.S. Culture Wars Matter in the Middle East, Too
Americans often fail to understand the ways in which domestic debates about Islam resonate beyond borders. In the Middle East, U.S. cultural quarrels can at times appear to be needlessly confusing. On other occasions they threaten to provoke real confrontation. The behavior of Terry Jones — the pastor of Florida’s Dove Church, who is planning…
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Obama Must Review Our Afghanistan Strategy
The recent release of more than 90,000 documents by Wikileaks gives the strong impression that President Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan is in disarray. The body count of U.S. soldiers is rising. Last month represented the highest number of monthly U.S. casualties to date in Afghanistan, and this month’s casualty figures may be worse. Meanwhile, the…
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Naomi Campbell, Nelson Mandela and War Criminals
Naomi Campbell’s testimony at the Special Court for Sierra Leone was the culmination of a decade-long exercise in vulgarity. How the British supermodel ended up in the trial of Charles Taylor, a warlord accused of 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, troubles me for a plethora of reasons. This is not about…
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Somalia: Obama's Next Big Headache
The Obama administration has to get serious about dealing with Somalia and the Somali Islamist jihadist group Harakat Al-Shabaab. The July 11 bombings in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, which killed 76 people, should have sent the administration a clear warning signal. The messages are both blunt and subtle, and the administration needs to get…
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Obama Shouldn't Stop at Firing McChrystal
President Barack Obama has a terrible dilemma in Afghanistan. The surge isn’t working. His ostensible partner in Afghan president Hamid Karzai is sickeningly corrupt. His team on the ground is bickering. His top general, Stanley McChrystal, has been fired for the vulgar rant that he and his staff issued on the record for Rolling Stone…
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Israel Blunders Into Another PR Disaster
As the Gaza flotilla fiasco unfolds, world leaders find themselves singularly impressed by Israeli government’s ability to shoot itself in the foot. In less than a day, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has done more to damage Israel’s image than anyone previously believed imaginable. This was inept tactics and inept diplomacy resulting in…
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President Obama's War Wizardry
Sometimes I wonder if President Obama reads too many Ben Okri novels. As we transform from a U.S.-dominated, unipolar international order to a non-polar world, virtually everything about his Middle East policy as outlined in the latest National Security Strategy seems to have been infected by a kind of magical thinking. From Afghanistan to Israel/Palestine…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
