On-air this Sunday evening (12/6) at KRON 4 following President Obama's Oval Office speech. Good to get a chance to discuss president's assurances and strategies. Good crew at the TV station, great questions, and enough time for dialogue.
View the video below...
Boots on the ground are the only means by which Islamic State will be ultimately denied its safe havens inside Syria and Iraq. Both feared and favored, boots means young men grinding out military victories and suffering unexpected defeats house by house, street by street in a foreign land far away.
Military planners agree that air campaigns can help contain Islamic State and that intelligence can tip off the world to planned attacks. But there is no cheap, easy or effective way to kill the culprits who are plotting the strategic collapse of civilized society. Boots on the ground are necessary for defeating them where they now freely organize and operate.
The question becomes: Whose boots?
A police officer organizes a throng queuing to get registered at a refugee center in the southern Serbian town of Presevo. Middle East refugees should be invited to join a new military force and given the training, resources and support needed to defeat Islamic State and liberate their homelands. Darko Vojinovic The Associated Press
Recent experience shows American boots should be the very last ones to hit the ground in the current fight. France and Russia have just suffered horrendous tragedies, but they should keep their troops off the battlefield, too. A big part of Islamic State’s strategy is to hit the civilized world with high-visibility, horrifying attacks as in Paris and lure foreign fighting forces onto their territory and into their trap. Read more
President Franklin D. Roosevelt is attributed as saying that Nicaraguan dictator “(Anastasio) Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” In a world of fair-weather friends and intensifying adversaries, the United States’ political leaders must make unsavory trade-offs about the quality of global relationships.
In many cases, an American president has to choose to ally himself with the devil he knows rather than an unknown and untested one. If known devils are democratically elected, it makes the choice easier but still distasteful.
A supporter of the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, holds a portrait of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as people celebrate outside AKP headquarters in Istanbul, Turkey, on Nov. 1, 2015. Turkey’s ruling party secured a stunning victory in last Sunday’s snap parliamentary election, sweeping back into single-party rule only five months after losing it. Emrah Gurel The Associated Press
At the start of November, one of America’s SOBs got another electoral win in Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, known as AKP, ran a nasty campaign where domestic political opponents were characterized as terrorists and fear was the musical score of the nationally orchestrated vote. AKP’s ruling majority assures Erdogan will be Turkey’s unchallenged ruler and an all-powerful regional force.
Erdogan goes out of his way to jail journalists, kill Kurds, injure Israel and bolster Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Read More
Gloria Steinem’s new book, “My Life on the Road,” recounts her life’s journeys and travels. Early reviews and profiles reveal incredible detail of Steinem’s barrier-breaking feminist role, liberalism, romances and style.
What is often missed, or mischaracterized, is the work she did as a CIA agent: Steinem was a spook.
Often missed in her body of work is Gloria Steinem’s time as an agent with the CIA in the 1950s and ’60s. Seth Wenig The Associated Press
CIA agents are tight-lipped, but Steinem spoke openly about her relationship to The Agency in the 1950s and ’60s after a magazine revealed her employment by a CIA front organization, the Independent Research Service.
While popularly pilloried because of her paymaster, Steinem defended the CIA relationship, saying: “In my experience, The Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable.” Read more
New York was buzzing last week with global deal making and policy baking at the United Nations General Assembly. UNGA is what wonks call the meetings that mark the annual start of the intensive foreign policy season for world leaders, bringing together under one domed roof bullies and brainiacs. This annual U.N. conclave provides a time and space for allies and adversaries to try to play nice and make peace.
The U.N. gets a bad rap from many American policymakers and pundits, though Donald Trump is willing to renovate the place and save it a billion dollars. There are plenty of things wrong with an unwieldy body that weights democratic and dictatorial voices equally and gives disproportionate heft to blocs and beneficiaries, sinners and supplicants.
But every once in a while, the U.N. brings about solutions to seemingly intractable international problems. It is currently on the verge of solving the 41-year-old division of Cyprus.
Cyprus was a united country until 1974 when it was invaded by Turkish forces. Since then, it has been a bifurcated state with a poor Turkish-Cypriot north and a surviving and relatively thriving Greek-Cypriot south.
UNGA watchers focused on the pronouncements, popularity or posturing of leaders from China, India, Russia, Cuba and Washington, D.C., while in the shadows, dedicated diplomats hashed away at ending a multigenerational U.N. peacekeeping mission. For the first time in years, it appears that peace may actually be at hand for the Mediterranean island nation. Read more.
The popular concept that journalism is a moderating check on an aggressive state – one that operates in a world dictated by Realism’s demands for power and survival – is solace both for society and individual journalists who believe in the peaceful calling of the profession and the power of the Fourth Estate. But what happens when data and a discursive analysis of news organizations indicates that rather than favoring diplomatic solutions and peaceful resolutions, journalism is both fueling the flames of fear and fostering aggressive military postures that may favor confrontational nationalist rather that peaceful internationalist outcomes? This paper analyzes news and opinion production in both the Chinese and American press to conclude that in the case of the on-going conflict in Syria, the states themselves, while in conflict on the promotion of policies that reflect either the “Responsibility to Protect” (United States) or that of “Sovereignty” (China), are more aligned with diplomatic resolution than the press.
Click here to go to download this research paper.
Terror strikes at the heart of anyone who faces a wall of fast-moving fire. Last week’s Northern California Butte and Valley fires remind everyone of the fear and destruction that follows any raging blaze, regardless of how it starts.
The Department of Homeland Security published an unclassified report titled “Terrorist Interest in Using Fire as a Weapon,” at about the same time as the mysterious Waldo Canyon fire, one of the most destructive fires in Colorado history.
The cause for these fires kindled around Sept. 11 appears to be a bad combination of accidental factors and not arson. But the devastating inferno on this terrorism anniversary raises quiet, yet uncomfortable questions regarding past and future criminal intent – and perhaps international terrorist activity – in wildfires.
While arson was not involved in the Butte and Valley fires, it remains the overall stated goal of radical extremists and organizations like al-Qaida to burn down our house.
The U.S. government actively does more than we know to prevent random acts of terrorism, but a lone-wolf arsonist is a real threat and as tough to stop as a rampaging fire is hard to tamp. Read more.
Cultural touchstones hold a special place in the human heart. War and death that take place in far off regions often go unnoticed until the publicized destruction of iconic structures or famed antiquities finally bring the war home.
Yugoslavia’s civil war was widely unnoticed until 1993 when centuries-old Mostar stone bridge crumpled under sustained bombing. The depravity of the Taliban’s widespread violence hit many policymakers’ radar screens in 2001 only after the giant sixth century Afghan Buddhas of Bamiyan were dynamited.
This photo released Tuesday on a social media site used by Islamic State militants, which has been verified and is consistent with other Associated Press reporting, shows smoke from the detonation of the 2,000-year-old temple in Syria’s ancient city of Palmyra. Uncredited The Associated Press.
Last week’s leveling of Palmyra’s famed temples at a protected UNESCO World Heritage site in Syria remind the world that a new culprit, the Islamic State, is fighting to wipe out large numbers of people and nearly all history. The world has taken note.
While struggling refugees stream out of the region, racing to Europe for survival, immobile sites and artifacts also need to survive. If there is hope for reconstructing what is left behind, destroyed, lost or stolen, however, it is in the virtual digital world developed in Silicon Valley. Read more
China has a long and storied relationship with Sacramento. After all, the first all-Chinese rural settlement in the United States was in nearby Locke.
Better known today for “Al the Wop’s” biker bar, Locke was once a river town made up entirely of Chinese Gold Rush-era immigrants. Racism and restriction forced the local “coolies” to move from panning and mining to laying rails and building the levees that still service and save Sacramento.
Sacramento now offers Chinese immigrants new opportunities, freedom and the solitude promised by a secure and increasingly multicultural American society.
Ling Wancheng, a wealthy and politically connected businessman who fled to the U.S., was living in this $2.5 million home in Loomis. China is demanding that the Obama administration return Ling, according to several American officials familiar with the case. Should he seek political asylum, he could become one of the most damaging defectors in the history of the People’s Republic of China. Max Whittaker The New York Times
That promise might be empty, however, for some rich, powerful and possibly dodgy new arrivals from the People’s Republic of China who threaten to hide and speak state secrets to U.S. authorities and journalists. For them, a Sacramento safe haven may not be beyond the increasingly global reach of China’s long arm.
One recent arrival, Ling Wancheng, spent much of last year living up the road in Loomis, sporting an alias, but hiding in plain sight from Chinese agents reported to be operating covertly inside U.S. borders. Who is Ling Wancheng, a man with a decent golf handicap and, according to neighbors, a fine and friendly demeanor? Read more.
Drive around drought-devastated Northern California and you will invariably see cars with “Stop the Tunnels” bumper stickers. “Stop the tunnels” has also become a rallying cry in the United Kingdom, where politicians in London are scrambling to halt the sudden free-flow of immigrants using the Channel Tunnel to pour into England from Calais, France.
Migrants outside the Eurotunnel area, in Calais, northern France, last week. More than 3,000 migrants have tried to storm the area surrounding the Eurotunnel in an attempt to enter Britain.
Two very different challenges related to age-old subterranean engineering solutions meant to transport resources from one place to another. Whether those resources are water, goods or people, tunnels are back in the news. Read more
Greece needs up to 60 billion euros over the next three years to stabilize its finances, according to the International Monetary Fund. The analysis comes in advance of Sunday's referendum, when Greek citizens will vote on whether to accept the latest terms of the European Union's bailout. We'll get an update on the referendum and the threat the Greek debt crisis poses to the Eurozone and to the U.S. economy.
ATHENS, Greece -- The audacity of no hope creates strange and interesting political behaviors and a willingness to take on unimaginable risks. Today, Greece seems to be surrendering to a debt agreement that will stop the drama, but not entirely end the country’s seemingly hopeless economic situation and debtors’ prison. A few days ago, the unanswerable question was if Greece would leave the euro and the European Union.
Pensioners wave ticket numbers as they try to get inside a National Bank of Greece branch in Athens last week. Elderly pensioners were stuck without monthly stipends as Greece deals with its financial crisis. | Simon Dawson Bloomberg News
Political analysts are now asking: What kind of existential game was Greece playing during the six-month standoff with the EU? As of late last week, it was not at all clear that it would end this way. Why? Game theory gives us some insight.
Game theory is a formal study of strategic decision-making. It is how mathematicians, political scientists, defense specialists, economists and others try to predict or create desired outcomes. The recently deceased John Nash was a master game theoretician who, as depicted in the movie “A Beautiful Mind,” showed that “every man for himself” was not the way a group of guys could pick up women in a bar. How was this relevant to Athens’ predicament? Game theory shows a way. Read more
ATHENS, Greece
Greece faces one of the most difficult decisions in its modern history today as it heads to the ballot box to vote in a referendum few voters truly understand. Regardless of which way the vote goes, the country will be voting on an assuredly painful future.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has called on Greek voters to reject foreign creditors’ demands for more economic austerity in return for rescue loans. | Thanassis Stavrakis The Associated Press
The real unstated question on today’s ballot, however, is: Do the people want to put their future in the hands of their feckless, lying and entirely unreliable radical-left government, led by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his ruthless, heartless henchmen?
Calling him a liar is a serious charge. I watched, however, as he was interviewed critically by Antenna TV and promised the impossible – to reopen the banks within 48 hours of a “no” vote. I am not an economist, but I do hold an ATM card that is being rejected by machines for lack of euro currency. Stocking an ATM requires currency, euro or otherwise. A bankrupt state cannot fill the machines with empty promises. Read more
Spetses, Greece -- This familiar country has suddenly turned unfamiliar. I spent time here in the mid-1970s during college and played semi-pro basketball in Athens. My parents come from Crete and I speak the language.
But I’m feeling lost after an 11th hour political move by radical leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to call a snap referendum, shut the banks and campaign for rejecting a multinational lending program calling for more painful economic austerity.
Those urging a "no" vote in the upcoming euro referendum rally at Syntagma Square in Athens on Monday. Petros Karadjias - Associated Press
“What are we voting for? I don’t really know,” said housekeeper Maria Moriati, voicing a common sentiment.
The opposition parties say the referendum scheduled for Sunday is simple: Should Greece keep the euro as its currency or not? The answer could ultimately decide whether Greece remains in the European Union.
The country is wracked by uncertainty and fear, but not panic. It has endured the humiliation of economic depression and cycled through governments as a result of financial crises. The bank closures are the final indignity and have raised the level of uncertainty to new levels. Read more
Athens, Greece -- Anxiety is a constant presence for people living in Athens as they ride the seven-year see-saw of economic survival and revival.
The signs of economic depression are never far from the surface in a state where the sun shines and the most prominent reminder of democracy and peace sits prominently atop the Acropolis, its marble visage visible from every corner of this city.
A mother who approaches and apologizes profusely while begging for a few cents to feed her family; a proud man who carries a worn briefcase to a job he no longer gets paid to do.
A man works at the Parthenon on Acropolis Hill in Athens, Greece, on Wednesday. | Daniel Ochoa de Olza Associated Press
In response, European institutions have bailed out and chewed out Greece for its profligacy and dysfunction, but in the process, Europe fails to deal with its own survival and identity. As a result, the world is witnessing the slow death of the European project and the ongoing dissolution of the European Union. READ MORE