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Through Diplomacy, Obama Finds a Pen Pal in Iran - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-finds-a-pen-pal-in-iran.html iran foreign policy diplomacy
shared by Javier E on 19 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • This time, Mr. Rouhani said in an NBC News interview broadcast on Wednesday, the tone of Mr. Obama’s letter was “positive and constructive.” He added, “It could be subtle and tiny steps for a very important future.”
  • The White House declined to discuss the contents of Mr. Obama’s letter to Mr. Rouhani. But a senior administration official said it reflected the president’s judgment that Mr. Rouhani should be taken “very seriously,” in part because he appeared to have a broad mandate within Iran.
  • Iran’s news media have reported that Mr. Obama’s letter included a plea to re-engage in diplomacy; a suggestion — depending on how any talks went — that the United States would be willing to ease sanctions; and a request to initiate direct discussions between Washington and Tehran, something diplomats say is critical to striking a nuclear deal.
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  • This is the first time that Mr. Obama has written directly to an Iranian president, and not the supreme leader. That suggests that the White House believes Ayatollah Khamenei has empowered Mr. Rouhani, at least for now, to seek an opening with the West.
  • Mr. Ross said the president’s reliance on letters to Iranian leaders made sense because in the absence of a formal relationship, “there are few other fully authoritative ways to convey a message we completely control.” The letters, his advisers say, also reflect the value that Mr. Obama attaches to direct diplomacy.
  • For now, though, Mr. Obama’s pen-pal diplomacy has accomplished the most basic goal of any letter. It got a reply.
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Pope Bluntly Faults Church's Focus on Gays and Abortion - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ocus-on-gays-and-abortion.html Pope Francis catholic
shared by Javier E on 19 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • In remarkably blunt language, Francis sought to set a new tone for the church, saying it should be a “home for all” and not a “small chapel” focused on doctrine, orthodoxy and a limited agenda of moral teachings.
  • “The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. “We have to find a new balance,” the pope continued, “otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.”
  • The new pope’s words are likely to have repercussions in a church whose bishops and priests in many countries, including the United States, often appeared to make combating abortion, gay marriage and contraception their top public policy priorities. These teachings are “clear” to him as “a son of the church,” he said, but they have to be taught in a larger context. “The proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives.”
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  • Francis has chosen to use the global spotlight to focus instead on the church’s mandate to serve the poor and marginalized.
  • The interview is the first time Francis has explained the reasoning behind both his actions and omissions.
  • “A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality,” he told Father Spadaro. “I replied with another question: ‘Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?’ We must always consider the person.”
  • The interview also serves to present the pope as a human being, who loves Mozart and Dostoevsky and his grandmother, and whose favorite film is Fellini’s “La Strada.”
  • the chameleon-like Francis bears little resemblance to those on the church’s theological or political right wing.
  • I have never been a right-winger,” he said. “It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.”
  • The pope said he has found it “amazing” to see complaints about “lack of orthodoxy” flowing into the Vatican offices in Rome from conservative Catholics around the world. They ask the Vatican to investigate or discipline their priests, bishops or nuns. Such complaints, he said, “are better dealt with locally,” or else the Vatican offices risk becoming “institutions of censorship.”
  • Asked what it means for him to “think with the church,” a phrase used by the Jesuit founder St. Ignatius, Francis said that it did not mean “thinking with the hierarchy of the church.” He said he thinks of the church “as the people of God, pastors and people together.”
  • “The church is the totality of God’s people,” he added, a notion popularized after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, which Francis praised for making the Gospel relevant to modern life, an approach he called “absolutely irreversible.”
  • In contrast to Benedict, who sometimes envisioned a smaller but purer church — a “faithful fragment” — Francis envisions the church as a big tent. “This church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people,” he said. “We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity.”
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Professor Says He Has Solved a Mystery Over a Slave's Novel - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 19 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • after years of research, he has discovered the novelist’s name: Hannah Bond, a slave on a North Carolina plantation owned by John Hill Wheeler, is the actual writer of “The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” the book signed by Hannah Crafts.
  • “Words cannot express how meaningful this is to African-American literary studies,” he said in an interview. “It revolutionizes our understanding of the canon of black women’s literature.”
  • After the novel was written, its manuscript was stored in an attic in New Jersey and was little noticed until Dorothy Porter Wesley, an African-American librarian, bought it from a New York City bookseller in 1948 for $85.
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Syria: The end of America's role as global cop? - The Week - 0 views

theweek.com/...of-americas-role-as-global-cop obama US history culture policy crisis economic politics syria police intervention isolation
shared by julia rhodes on 19 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • The U.S. has a chance now to conquer an old, compulsive claim to stand-tall world leadership that makes no fit with history, sound judgment, or (at this point) the facts in the morning’s papers, such as one can decipher them. T
  • Take this one and we will remove from our worldly relations an element of intrusive irrationality that has claimed millions of lives during our "American century" and proven time and again to be dangerous
  • There are, after all, like-minded nations showing an increased willingness to charge into places the U.S. would rather avoid.
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  • No matter what happens in Syria, though, there will be other crises that cry out for somebody to step in and restore order. The debate will continue, with anti-interventionists arguing that foreign meddling, like in Libya, often ends in instability that creates new dangers, while others counter that a muscular foreign policy is necessary to keep murderous dictators, some armed with nukes, in check.  
  • Hoyt Hilsman at The Huffington Post says it would be unwise for America to count on some other nation to keep order.
  • is that even if the U.S. has occasionally messed up overseas, things would be far worse if it stepped aside and let Russia or China, both serial human rights abusers, take over as the global cop.
  • The bottom line is there are goin
  • U.S. economy "depends on a stable and safe world where markets can operate freely and peacefully." So, he adds, "Whether or not we decide to be the world's cop, we still want to be part of the police force."
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Expecting the Best Yields Results in Massachusetts - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-results-in-massachusetts.html massachusetts education reform school testing
shared by Javier E on 18 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • If Massachusetts were a country, its eighth graders would rank second in the world in science, behind only Singapore, according to Timss
  • Massachusetts eighth graders also did well in mathematics, coming in sixth, behind Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan. The United States as a whole came in 10th in science and 9th in math
  • behind Massachusetts’ raw numbers are two decades of sustained efforts to lift science and mathematics education. Educators and officials chose a course and held to it, even when the early results were deeply disappointing.
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  • consistent in their hands-on approach, inviting students to explore and explain. “Much more hands-on than what we ever used to do,”
  • came ed reform,” Dr. Kendall said, “and now everybody had to learn math.”
  • “Ed reform” was the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, passed by a Democratic Legislature and signed by a Republican governor, William F. Weld.
  • The three core components were more money (mostly to the urban schools), ambitious academic standards and a high-stakes test that students had to pass before collecting their high school diplomas.
  • noteworthy was what the reforms did not include. Parents were not offered vouchers for private schools. The state did not close poorly performing schools, eliminate tenure for teachers or add merit pay. The reforms did allow for some charter schools, but not many.
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Does the Sense of American Exceptionalism Help the United States or Hurt It? - Room for... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...p-the-united-states-or-hurt-it exceptionalism US history politics ideology culture
shared by Javier E on 18 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • President Vladimir Putin of Russia criticized President Obama’s assertion of “American exceptionalism,” the idea that the U.S.’s heritage and policies make it uniquely able to do what it feels is right.
  • Some say the concept is crucial to America’s ability to protect national interests. Others say it has led the U.S. into military and diplomatic quagmires.
  • Does the sense of American exceptionalism help the U.S. or hurt it?
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LiveLeak.com - abkebab's Map of Europe 1000 AD to present with timeline - 0 views

www.liveleak.com/view
shared by Roth johnson on 16 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Roth johnson on 16 Sep 13
     
    Interesting graphic showing the evolution of Europe. Definitely interesting to see the German states and how many there were as well as Germany's expansions in the 20th Century
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Turkey's ailing sultan - Le Monde diplomatique - English edition - 0 views

mondediplo.com/06turkey economics US policy history culture politics crisis monde turkey sultan syria erdogan
shared by julia rhodes on 15 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • “Increasingly, democratisation and authoritarianism are going hand in hand, and not just in Turkey.”
  • Erdogan’s ambition to institute an enhanced presidency with himself as a new “sultan” now looks unlikely to succeed after his imperious response to the protests over the development of Gezi Park
  • For the first time, Erdogan, who had confidently steered Turkey through choppy waters, seemed at a loss
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  • His other recent attempts at social control (restrictions on the sale of alcohol or moves to end abortion, which he has described as murder) infuriated secular Turks, but were aimed at winning votes from Muslim conservatives in this still divided society.
  • Secular intellectuals regard Gezi as a turning point: in the first major political protests since the 1970s, an apolitical younger generation has become politicised — not by big ideas like democracy or nationalism, but for their rights. They were joined by activists for Kurdish, Alevi and gay rights — a coming together of separate causes that is new to Turkey.
  • As it built its own coalitions at home, it set out internationally to demonstrate that Islam was compatible with democracy. The policy worked. The AKP was re-elected on 22 July 2007, and won a triumphant third term in the 12 June 2011 elections
  • The AKP, though not democratic, became a democratising force, giving a new sense of belonging and empowerment to a majority of Turks, previously excluded by the old secular elites
  • His worsening authoritarianism escaped the world’s attention, although in Turkey, there were worries about unaccountability and crony capitalism, the penetration of Fethullah Gulen’s Islamist movement into the police and judiciary, the silencing of the media, and the arrest of many journalists and other critics of the government
  • It is clear the justice system is not free of politics and has failed to investigate evidence of wider involvement in criminal activity and human rights abuses, particularly in the southeast. Yet with the verdicts, Turkey’s demilitarisation has been underlined.
  • Much of the AKP success story was based on the economy, which it opened up, building on structural adjustment reforms by the former economy minister Kemal Derviş (2001-02).
  • . On Cyprus, there is a sense that the AKP government has done what it can, backing the UN peace plan proposed by Kofi Annan for a federal solution.
  • he AKP government’s biggest achievement so far — and greatest remaining challenge — is its attempt at a solution to the Kurdish question.
  • “We used to see self-determination as the only solution... Now our Kurds want to look west. Both for economic benefits and because of the regional conjunction, Kurds here see their future in a democratising Turkey that recognises their rights.” Those rights mean an end to ethnic discrimination, full recognition of Kurdish identity with the right to teach Kurdish at school and a decentralisation that will lead to a form of autonomy. For this, constitutional reform is needed.
  • Further diplomatic incidents led to Turkey’s suspension of military, though not economic, ties with Israel that October. This made Erdogan the darling of the Arab world and played well with the Turkish public. Washington under Obama was not dissatisfied. Then came the Mavi Mamari affair, when a Turkish flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza was attacked in international waters on 31 May 2010 and nine Turkish activists killed. This year, after a very public row, the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu apologised.
  • There were miscalculations on Syria. After Turkey’s close alliance with President Bashar al-Assad was swiftly reversed at the start of the uprising, Turkey facilitated the rebels, set up refugee camps along the shared border and allowed the opposition Syrian National Council to set up its headquarters in Istanbul. Ordinary Turks welcomed Syria’s refugees but there was no enthusiasm for military involvement, with the risks of unrest among the country’s own Alevi minority (3) and concern at the porous borders that allow infiltration of Al-Qaida-linked jihadists into Turkey.
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Obama Demands 'Concrete' Acts by Syria on Chemical Weapons - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...syria-talks.html obama foreign policy russia syria
shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • If President Bashar al-Assad of Syria fails to comply with the agreement, the issue will be referred to the United Nations Security Council. Mr. Kerry said that any violations would then be taken up under Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, which authorizes punitive action. But Mr. Lavrov made clear that Russia, which wields a veto in the Security Council, had not withdrawn its objections to the use of force.
  • A significant sign of movement came Friday when the Obama administration effectively took force off the table in discussions over the shape of a Security Council resolution governing any deal with Syria
  • Mr. Lavrov said that he had not spoken with Syrian officials while he was negotiating in Geneva. Obama administration officials have argued that the Russia’s role was essential since it has been a major backer of the Assad government.
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  • that statement simply acknowledged the reality on the Security Council, where Russia wields a veto and has vowed to block any military action against Syria, its ally. But Mr. Obama’s decision to concede the point early in talks underscored his desire to forge a workable diplomatic compromise and avoid a strike that would be deeply unpopular at home.
  • Mr. Ban, in comments that he thought were private but that were inadvertently broadcast over an in-house United Nations television channel, said that Mr. Assad had “committed many crimes against humanity” during more than two years of civil war and that there would be a “process of accountability when everything is over.” Mr. Ban said he was “troubled” that the Security Council had not adopted any response, calling it “failure by the United Nations.”
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The Great Stagnation of American Education - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...agnation-of-american-education education US history
shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • For most of American history, parents could expect that their children would, on average, be much better educated than they were. But that is no longer true.
  • From 1891 to 2007, real economic output per person grew at an average rate of 2 percent per year — enough to double every 35 years. The average American was twice as well off in 2007 as in 1972, four times as well off as in 1937, and eight times as well off as in 1902. It’s no coincidence that for eight decades, from 1890 to 1970, educational attainment grew swiftly. But since 1990, that improvement has slowed to a crawl.
  • The surge in high school graduation rates — from less than 10 percent of youth in 1900 to 80 percent by 1970 — was a central driver of 20th-century economic growth. But the percentage of 18-year-olds receiving bona fide high school diplomas fell to 74 percent in 2000
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  • Growth in annual average economic output per capita has slowed from the century-long average of 2 percent, to 1.3 percent over the past 25 years, to a mere 0.7 percent over the past decade.
  • The gains in income since the 2007-9 Great Recession have flowed overwhelmingly to those at the top, as has been widely noted. Real median family income was lower last year than in 1998.
  • There are numerous causes of the less-than-satisfying economic growth in America: the retirement of the baby boomers, the withdrawal of working-age men from the labor force, the relentless rise in the inequality of the income distribution and, as I have written about elsewhere, a slowdown in technological innovation.
  • Education deserves particular focus because its effects are so long-lasting. Every high school dropout becomes a worker who likely won’t earn much more than minimum wage, at best, for the rest of his or her life.
  • The premium that employers pay to a college graduate compared with that to a high school graduate has soared since 1970, because of higher demand for technical and communication skills at the top of the scale and a collapse in demand for unskilled and semiskilled workers at the bottom.
  • research has shown that high-discipline, “no-excuses” charter schools, like those run by the Knowledge Is Power Program and the Harlem Children’s Zone, have erased racial achievement gaps. This model suggests that a complete departure from the traditional public school model, rather than pouring in more money per se, is needed.
  • For most of the postwar period, the G.I. Bill, public and land-grant universities and junior colleges made a low-cost education more accessible in the United States than anywhere in the world. But after leading the world in college completion, America has dropped to 16th.
  • The cost of a university education has risen faster than the rate of inflation for decades. Between 2008 and 2012 state financing for higher education declined by 28 percent
  • Two-year community colleges enroll 42 percent of American undergraduates. The Center on International Education Benchmarking reports that only 13 percent of students in two-year colleges graduate in two years; that figure rises to a still-dismal 28 percent after four year
  • Compared with other nations where students learn several languages and have math homework in elementary school, the American system expects too little. Parental expectations also matter: homework should be emphasized more, and sports less.
  • family breakdown is now biracial.” Among lower-income whites, the proportion of children living with both parents has plummeted over the past half-century
  • the holders of G.E.D.’s performed no better economically than high school dropouts and that the rising share of young people who are in prison rather than in school plays a small but important role in the drop in graduation rates.
  • Lacking in the American system is a well-organized funnel between community colleges and potential blue-collar employers, as in the renowned apprenticeship system in Germany.
  • In Canada, each province manages and finances education at the elementary, secondary and college levels, thus avoiding the inequality inherent in America’s system of local property-tax financing for public schools. Tuition at the University of Toronto was a mere $5,695 for Canadian arts and science undergraduates last year, compared with $37,576 at Harvard. It should not be surprising that the Canadian college completion rate is about 15 percentage points above the American rate.
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Coalition Governing Could Be Britain's New Normal Despite Liberal Democrats' Troubles -... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...iberal-democrats-troubles.html coalition UK politics government
shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Britain’s first formal coalition since World War II has functioned surprisingly well, navigating policy differences, putting in place austerity measures and now presiding over modest economic growth.
  • With rigid party allegiances breaking down, voters seem relaxed about the idea of a coalition, even if they tell pollsters they do not much like the current one. “Most people appear to accept that it could become the new normal,”
  • “If this coalition has worked — and I think the British people think that it has — I think it will make other coalitions more likely,” Mr. Ashdown said. “I can think of no greater constitutional change than to move Britain permanently away from single-party electoral dictatorship in government.”
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Of Baguettes And Black Families - Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...279678 African-American family history historiography
shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • how do you make the claim that racism is linked to the destruction of the black family when the black family was in fact strongest during time periods when racism was substantially more prevalent than today?
  • let's look at some historiography courtesy of University of Minnesota professor Steven Ruggles and his article "The Origins of the African-American Family Structure."
  • while it's true that you see a dramatic increase in single-family homes in 1960, the gap is about as old as our data. Ruggles was able to get ahold of census micro-data and basically concluded as much. If you look at the report you can see on Table 2 that as early as 1880 there were roughly double the percentage of black children born to single mothers as to whites (13.1 to 5.9.)
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  • From 1880 through 1960, the percentage of black children with at least one absent parent was fairly stable and about two-and-one-half times greater than the percentage among whites. Recently, the percentages of both black children and white children with absent parents have risen dramatically
  • What is the source of this distinctive African-American pattern of single parenthood? Recent economic changes can be invoked to explain the growing differential between black family structure and white family structure, but they cannot explain why blacks started from a higher base.
  • The change in marriage is not a "black" problem, and I am not even convinced that it is a "problem."
  • It is not simply a question of "Is marriage good for kids?" It's "Are shotgun marriages good for kids?" "Should marriage be valued at all costs, including enduring abuse or ill-treatment?"
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What Putin Has to Say to Americans About Syria - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tion-from-russia-on-syria.html putin foreign policy exceptionalism UN League of Nations diplomacy military intervention syria
shared by Javier E on 13 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • No one wants the United Nations to suffer the fate of the League of Nations, which collapsed because it lacked real leverage. This is possible if influential countries bypass the United Nations and take military action without Security Council authorization.
  • Under current international law, force is permitted only in self-defense or by the decision of the Security Council. Anything else is unacceptable under the United Nations Charter and would constitute an act of aggression.
  • It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States.
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  • Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force,
  • But force has proved ineffective and pointless. Afghanistan is reeling, and no one can say what will happen after international forces withdraw. Libya is divided into tribes and clans. In Iraq the civil war continues, with dozens killed each day. In the United States, many draw an analogy between Iraq and Syria, and ask why their government would want to repeat recent mistakes.
  • I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.
  • We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.
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Vladimir Putin, Meet Niccolo Machiavelli « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...dimir-meet-niccolo-machiavelli russia machiavelli syria mideast foreign policy diplomacy
shared by Javier E on 13 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • If the end-result is that Putin effectively gains responsibility and control over the civil war in Syria, then we should be willing to praise him to the skies. Praise him, just as the far right praises him, for his mastery of power politics – compared with that ninny weakling Obama.
  • All this apparent national humiliation is worth it. The price Russia will pay for this triumph is ownership of the problem. At some point, it may dawn on him that he hasn’t played Obama. Obama has played him.
  • Most pundits use the term “Machiavellian” to mean whoever in the arena seems more successful at scheming, plotting, double-crossing, intimidating, and maneuvering. But Machiavelli himself had a different idea of what a true Machiavellian looks like: a kind, simple, virtuous naif.
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  • the individual who seems the least Machiavellian is often the most. What you need to do is get past appearances and look coldly at the result of any course of action, and whose interests it really advances.
  • My view is that the US’s core interest is in not owning the Syria conflict, while making sure its chemical stockpiles are secure or destroyed.
  • The core question is: Are we seeking responsibility for resolving this ghastly sectarian bloodbath? I believe we have to have the steely resolve to act on our core interests – after bankrupting ourselves fiscally and morally next door in Iraq – to say no.
  • the moments when Obama has risked owning this conflict have always been his low points. From that early high-minded and unnecessary statement on Assad to his impulsive declaration of intent to use force in August, he deeply worried the American people and <img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-191564" alt="Portrait_of_Niccolò_Machiavelli_by_Santi_di_Tito" src="http://sullydish.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/portrait_of_niccolocc80_machiavelli_by_santi_di_tito.jpg?w=233&h=300" width="233" height="300" />the world that the US could be getting into more responsibility for yet another Middle East sectarian bloodbath. But he has nimbly pivoted back from these positions – finding his way back to a more GHW Bush posture rather than a GW Bush one.
  • It is Putin who is on the hook now – and the more Putin brags about his diplomatic achievement the more entrenched his responsibility for its success will become.
  • that is perfectly in line with Russia’s core interests: Putin is much closer to Syria than we are; he must be scared shitless of Sunni Jihadists who now loathe him and Russia more than even the Great Satan getting control of WMDs. Those chemical weapons could show up in Dagestan or Chechnya or the Moscow subway.
  • this argument only makes sense if you don’t believe the US is best served by being responsible for the entire Middle East, and by being the only major power seriously invested there. If your goal is US global hegemony, this was a very bad week.
  • But if your goal is to avoid the catastrophe that occurred in Iraq, to focus on the much more important foreign policy area, Asia, and to execute vital domestic goals such as immigration reform and entrenching universal healthcare … then the result looks pretty damn good. Or at least perfectly good enough.
  • So when the inevitable cries of “Who lost the Middle East?” are raised by the neocon chorus, one obvious retort remains. Of all the regions in the world, wouldn’t the Middle East be a wonderful one to lose?
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A Rare Public View of Obama's Pivots on Policy in Syria Confrontation - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ts-on-Syria-Confrontation.html obama foreign policy decision-making mideast syria
shared by Javier E on 12 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Mr. Obama represents a stark contrast in style to George W. Bush. The former president valued decisiveness and once he made a decision rarely revisited it. While he, too, changed course from time to time, Mr. Bush regularly told aides that a president should not reveal doubts because it would send a debilitating signal to his own administration, troops in the field and the country at large.
  • Mr. Obama came to office as the anti-Bush, his candidacy set in motion by his opposition to the Iraq war, and promising to be more open to contrary advice, more pragmatic in his policies and more contemplative in his decisions.
  • Afghanistan in 2009, he presided over three months of study and debate that even aides found excruciating at times but were presented as a more thoughtful process.
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  • Known as a disciplined candidate and personality, Mr. Obama earned a reputation for decisiveness
  • Despite his penchant for process, he decided to ask Congress for authorization without consulting his secretaries of state or defense and over the objections of his staff.
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A Plea for Caution From Russia - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tion-from-russia-on-syria.html russia nytimes US history politics crisis economic policy economics obama putin syria intervention america
shared by julia rhodes on 12 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • By VLADIMIR V. PUTIN
  • The universal international organization — the United Nations — was then established to prevent such devastation from ever happening again.
  • The United Nations’ founders understood that decisions affecting war and peace should happen only by consensus, and with America’s consent the veto by Security Council permanent members was enshrined in the United Nations Charter. The profound wisdom of this has underpinned the stability of international relations for decades.
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  • ential strike by the United States against Syria, despite strong opposition from many countries and major political and religious leaders, including the pope, will result in more innocent victims and escalation, potentially spreading the conflict far beyond Syria’s borders. A strike would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism. It could undermine multilateral efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further destabilize the Middle East and North Africa. It could throw the entire system of international law and order out of balance.
  • A strike would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism. It could undermine multilateral efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further destabilize the Middle East and North Africa. It could throw the entire system of international law and order out of balance.
  • Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict between government and opposition in a multireligious country.
  • We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.
  • From the outset, Russia has advocated peaceful dialogue enabling Syrians to develop a compromise plan for their own future. We are not protecting the Syrian government, but international law.
  • Might they not return to our countries with experience acquired in Syria? After all, after fighting in Libya, extremists moved on to Mali. This threatens us all.
  • No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists.
  • But force has proved ineffective and pointless. Afghanistan is reeling, and no one can say what will happen after international forces withdraw. Libya is divided into tribes and clans. In Iraq the civil war continues, with dozens killed each day. In the United States, many draw an analogy between Iraq and Syria, and ask why their government would want to repeat recent mistakes.
  • The law is still the law, and we must follow it whether we like it or not.
  • I welcome the president’s interest in continuing the dialogue with Russia on Syria.
  • If we can avoid force against Syria, this will improve the atmosphere in international affairs and strengthen mutual trust. It will be our shared success and open the door to cooperation on other critical issues.
  • And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.”
  • t is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptiona
  • julia rhodes on 12 Sep 13
     
    Written by Vladimir Putin
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Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail ... - 0 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...lobal-warming-predictions.html
shared by James Flanagan on 11 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Record return of Arctic ice cap as it grows by 60% in a year
  • A chilly Arctic summer has left nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 60 per cent.
  • the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.
  • eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century
  • The disclosure comes 11 months after The Mail on Sunday triggered intense political and scientific debate by revealing that global warming has ‘paused’ since the beginning of 1997 – an event that the computer models used by climate experts failed to predict.
  • The continuing furore caused by The Mail on Sunday’s revelations – which will now be amplified by the return of the Arctic ice sheet – has forced the UN’s climate change body to hold a crisis meeting.
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An extraordinary turn against military intervention - 0 views

america.aljazeera.com/...ainstmilitaryintervention.html US history politics crisis policy syria war 20th century liberal realism
shared by julia rhodes on 10 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • julia rhodes on 10 Sep 13
     
    An extraordinary turn against military intervention | Al Jazeera America The negative reaction in Congress and among the American people to President Obama's proposal of military intervention has been sharp U.S. receptiveness to Russia's proposal to sequester Syria's chemical weapons shows how eager Washington is to avoid a military response. It would, however, be something extraordinary - even historic. It would suggest that a substantial percentage of Americans believe that a proposed war is a bad idea. In the context of American history, this is almost unthinkable. War is woven into the fabric of American life, and Americans usually embrace it. "All the great masterful races have been fighting races," Roosevelt declared Advances in the technology of destruction and killing made it difficult to sustain belief in war's beauty or nobility. Because the U.S. possesses such overwhelming military force, it naturally seeks to use that force. This has led inexorably to the militarization of U.S. foreign policy. American leaders have always acted on the assumption that in the end, they have recourse to all the coercive power they need to achieve any geopolitical goal. They assumed, however, that whatever problems arose, the power of the United States was so overwhelming that it would be able to resolve them. This conviction now seems to be slipping away. Public opinion surveys show scant support for bombing. Never in modern history have Americans been so doubtful about the wisdom of bombing, invading or occupying another country. American reluctance to intervene in a faraway land suggests a retreat from hubris toward reality - a creeping fear that the United States, powerful as it is, may not be able to control the effects of its foreign adventures. Generations of Americans once grew up believing not only that their country was omnipotent, but that it was an essential force for good in the world. This is an e
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Scott Anderson's 'Lawrence in Arabia' Revisits Legends - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-arabia-revisits-legends.html arabs saudi WWI ottoman arabia
shared by Javier E on 09 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • This was a time when the seed was planted for the Arab world “to define itself less by what it aspires to become than what it is opposed to: colonialism, Zionism, Western imperialism in its many forms.”
  • Clarity was hard to find, and so, after such wanton loss of life, were victors. But heroes were needed, and here was a shoo-in.
  • Mr. Anderson’s thoughtful, big-picture version only enriches the story it tells. “Lawrence in Arabia” emphasizes the Gordian difficulties facing any strategist
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  • He illustrates how difficult it was to have any foresight at all, let along to see clearly, and he reserves his greatest interest for players whose imaginations were most fertile. Lawrence was the best and most eloquent of these manipulators, but he was by no means alone.
  • Mr. Anderson is especially illuminating about Lawrence’s purely political gifts: his way of anticipating the fallout from strategic or military maneuvers, his “peculiar skill at polite belligerence,” his no-nonsense powers of description.
  • Yes, it was history à la Hollywood, with moments of clear exaggeration. But its effort to depict Lawrence, his military raids, the tribal leaders with whom he dealt, the inept British military effort and the sly French diplomatic one are all shown by this book to be unusually faithful to the facts. It’s high praise for both the visually grand film and this grandly ambitious book to say that they do have a lot in common.
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A Weapon Seen as Too Horrible, Even in War - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-too-horrible-even-in-war.html
shared by Ellie McGinnis on 09 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • “If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.”
  • Germany is recognized as the first to use chemical weapons on a mass scale, on April 22, 1915, at Ypres, Belgium, where 6,000 British and French troops succumbed
  • once again emerged as an issue after the massacre in Syria last month, in which the United States says nearly 1,500 people, men, women and children, were killed, many as they slept.
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  • Why, it is fair to ask, does the killing of 100,000 or more with conventional weapons elicit little more than a concerned shrug, while the killing of a relative few from poison gas is enough to trigger an intervention
  • 16 million people died and 20 million were wounded during World War I
  • 2 percent of the casualties and fewer than 1 percent of the deaths are estimated to have resulted from chemical warfare
  • 1925 Geneva Protocol, which banned the use, though not the possession, of chemical and biological weapons
  • almost universally accepted and become an international norm. Syria, too, is a signatory
  • No Western army used gas on the battlefield during the global slaughter of World War II
  • Nazis were to gas noncombatant Jews, Gypsies and others.
  • chemical weapons have been categorized as “weapons of mass destruction,”
  • general revulsion against the use of poisons against human beings in warfare, going back to the Greeks,”
  • 1675, when France and the Holy Roman Empire agreed in Strasbourg not to use poisoned bullets
  • 1899 not to use “projectiles the sole objective of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases,
  • few known instances of poison gas being used since 1925
  • first two cases, gas was used by authoritarian regimes against those they considered lesser races.
  • 1935-36, Mussolini used several hundred tons of mustard gas in Abyssinia, now Ethiopia
  • 1940-41, the Japanese used chemical and biological weapons widely in China
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt stepped in and, in quiet diplomacy, “told the Japanese that we knew of the use and that there would be consequences.”
  • American use of Agent Orange in Vietnam was widely criticized
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