- A Secret CIA Drone Base, a Blowback World, and Why Washington Has No Learning Curve
- A Conspiracy of Stupidity
- An Empire If You Can Keep It: Power and Principle in American Foreign Policy
Tom Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch
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February 12, 2013 | You could, of course, sit there, slack-jawed, thinking about how mindlessly repetitive American foreign and military policy is these days. Or you could wield all sorts of fancy analytic words to explain it. Or you could just settle for a few simple, all-American ones. Like dumb. Stupid. Dimwitted. Thick-headed. Or you could speak about the second administration in a row that wanted to leave no child behind, but was itself incapable of learning, or reasonably assessing its situation in the world.
Or you could simply wonder what’s in Washington’s water supply. Last week, after all, there was a perfect drone storm of a story, only a year or so late -- and no, it wasn’t that leaked “white paper” justifying the White House-directed assassination of an American citizen; and no, it wasn’t the two secret Justice Department “legal” memos on the same subject that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were allowed to “view,” but in such secrecy that they couldn’t even ask John O. Brennan, the president’s counterterrorism tsar and choice for CIA director, questions about them at his public nomination hearings; and no, it wasn’t anything that Brennan, the man who oversaw the White House “kill list” and those presidentially chosen drone strikes, said at the hearings. And here’s the most striking thing: it should have set everyone’s teeth on edge, yet next to nobody even noticed.
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Related:
An Empire If You Can Keep It: Power and Principle in American Foreign Policy ~ Thomas M. Magstadt, Described in CQ Press
- An Empire If You Can Keep It avoids polemics but does not shy away from the controversy raging in intellectual and policy circles over the Bush Doctrine.
- Read a sample chapter
- Five Signs 'Liberals' in Congress are Faking It
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Jan 29, 2013 | What does it mean to be “Third World” in 2013? If we are to take the traditional definition of the term, then “Third World” refers to those (non-white) countries that struggle to attain high levels of economic development and which, for the most part, are reduced to the periphery of the global economy. However, since the onset of the economic crisis beginning in 2007-2008, many of the economic problems of those traditionally poor countries have become ever more apparent in the so-called developed world. Socio-economic maladies such as extreme poverty, hunger, and unemployment have skyrocketed in advanced capitalist countries like the United States, while politicians and the media continue to trumpet the mirage of an economic recovery. Naturally, one must ask for whom this is a recovery…for the poor or for Wall St? Moreover, it has forced the world to examine what progress looks like. One way of doing so is to analyze what the statistics tell us about the United States versus Venezuela. In so doing, one begins to get a much clearer picture, free from the distortions of media and politicians alike, of just how much progress has been made in the Bolivarian Revolution while the situation of the poor and working classes in the US continues to deteriorate.
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If you want to get your students to really read the American foreign policy book you assign—to fully digest and assimilate its content—select a book that is compelling, thought provoking, and relevant. Drawing on the Bush administration’s foreign policy maneuvering and the realities of a post–9/11 world, Thomas M. Magstadt goes beyond a mere recitation of events in U.S. diplomatic history. He instead paints a vivid portrayal of the tension between the pursuit of power and the adherence to principle deeply embedded in the nation’s political culture.
