The Big Picture Archives - Page 21 of 33

July 18, 2014

MH17 is the third plane this week shot down over Ukraine under mysterious circumstances – Vox

From Max Fisher:

…at first, people were wondering if rebels even had the capability to shoot down a high-flying commercial airliner like MH17. But there was another incident just on Monday, July 14, that did not get very much attention at the time. That day, over eastern Ukraine, an Antonov AN-26 Ukrainian military transport plane was hit by a missile while flying over eastern Ukraine — at 21,000 feet altitude. That’s far beyond the range of a shoulder-fired system like the MANPADS.

July 16, 2014

Netherlands Held Liable for 300 Deaths in Srebrenica Massacre – NYTimes.com

From DAN BILEFSKY and MARLISE SIMONS at the New York Times:

The Dutch Supreme Court, which was upholding a 2011 decision by an appellate court, said that even though United Nations commanders were in charge of the peace mission at Srebrenica, in the days after the Bosnian Serb takeover, Dutch authorities had “effective control” over the troops and therefore shared liability.

Srecko Latal, a political analyst who until recently worked with the nonprofit International Crisis Group in Sarajevo, Bosnia, said by phone that the verdict was important for showing that peacekeepers had both a moral and a legal responsibility to protect civilians….

The Srebrenica tragedy highlights two important issues:

Why are lightly armed UN peace-keeping forces being sent into conflict areas where they are incapable of offering effective protection from heavily-armed protagonists? You don’t have a strong negotiating position when your opponent has tanks and artillery.
Who is responsible if troops under UN command obey orders?

July 6, 2014

238 Years After The First Revolution, Is It Time For A Second?

From Jerry Bowyer:

To determine whether the framers [of the Declaration of Independence] and their principles would cause us once again to break from a central political authority one must first get into the head space of the founders. Their way of thinking, though alien to modern political philosophy and so much the worse for modern political philosophy, is clear and cogent:

There are certain ideas which are self-evidently true. One of those ideas is that we are created without legal primacy or inferiority with regard to one another. Another idea, which is just obviously true to people whose rational faculties are operating properly, is that the rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of a prosperous life which is what the word ‘happiness’ meant in 1776 are not alienable, that is they cannot have a lien placed on them by any other persons, not even representatives of the state.

Not only is government denied the authority to put a lien on and repossess those rights, but it is further required to protect those rights. And in fact, the protecting of those rights is the only reason that government should exist in the first place! And not only is it necessary for government to protect these rights, but its use of power to do so is still only just if it also involves the consent of the people whose freedom and property are being protected. Further and this is shocking, even to modern ears, when governments move from protecting those rights to injuring those rights, the people are allowed to erase the authority of the government.

….No amount of banning or inciting can change the facts. 238 years ago the principles of the Declaration found that the central government had lost the right to rule and called on the people to withdraw allegiance to it. Is that the case now?

July 2, 2014

America’s Ukraine-Policy Disaster | The National Interest

From James W. Carden:

….A second unintended consequence of our involvement with Ukraine is the emergence of Russian hypernationalism. Little attention seems to be given to the effects that our facilitating an anti-Russian regime in Kiev has had on the political landscape in Russia; Russians now, more so than at any other point in the last quarter century, are under the spell of one man. According to the widely respected Levada Center, Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings stand at 80 percent. While respected analysts like the Carnegie Endowment’s Lilia Shevtsova seem to believe that this level of support is unsustainable, the numbers may point to a new and troubling phenomenon: that a rather prosaic Russian nationalism is in the process of transmogrifying into Russian hypernationalism. If this is so, a war in East-Central Europe becomes all the more likely, because as the University of Chicago’s John J. Mearsheimer has noted, “hypernationalism …is the belief that other nations are not just inferior, but dangerous as well, and must be dealt with harshly, if not brutally…[it] creates powerful incentives to use violence to eliminate the threat.”

July 1, 2014

Ukraine should sell its gas pipeline to stabilize the region

From OilPrice.com

Gas supply, and the threat to that supply for Europe, is what has forced Russia to move aggressively on multiple fronts to defeat Ukraine in its efforts to modernize and westernize its economy, its future, and its way of life.

So, how to start the liberalization process? Ukraine has argued that its gas transportation system is a strategic asset. Business-minded people take issue with this interpretation, which ignores the commercial potential of the pipeline system. Now that we have come full circle in a long-brewing Ukraine-Russia gas war, perhaps the pipeline should be considered “strategic” — if not in the way the Ukrainian authorities have long understood. The pipeline system, worth $20 to $30 billion, can indeed play a strategic and tactical role in resolving Ukraine’s crisis with Russia, but only if it’s sold off.

Ukraine should sell 50 to 75 percent of it for cash to a consortium involving the EU, U.S. and Russia and operated by a U.S. business enterprise, preferably based in Houston. This can only happen if Russia agrees to remove troops and other proxies in eastern Ukraine and then works with Ukraine to secure the border and cease all low-intensity conflict efforts, including on the ground, and in cyberspace and the trade arena….

June 28, 2014

Asymmetrical warfare: Russia’s little green men are here to stay [podcast]

It’s been called hybrid warfare, asymmetrical warfare, and ambiguous warfare. But warfare it is, and Russia appears to have perfected using it to achieve its geopolitical aims.

The Little Green Men are probably here to stay. Is there any way to counter them?

http://www.rferl.org/audio/Audio/1166373.html

June 28, 2014

Desperately seeking moderate Syrian rebels | Threat Matrix

By Lisa Lundquist:

Following the news that the Obama administration, in a sudden about-face, is asking Congress for $500 million to train and equip “vetted” members of the “moderate” Syrian opposition, The Associated Press yesterday published a list, headlined “Syrian rebels likely to receive US aid.” The list raises more questions than it answers — two of the listed groups have been designated by the US as terrorist organizations….

June 26, 2014

The tragic record of American policy in the Middle East | BillMoyers.com

Investigative journalist Charles Lewis, author of 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity tells Bill Moyer:

An outrageous thing happened. We lost $2 trillion. More than 100,000 people died. Folks are going to be maimed for life in the tens of thousands… And no one has ever acknowledged that this [Iraq] was a war on a lark. It was a complete war of choice, because a certain little faction wanted to do it and they orchestrated it… Did they make statements that weren’t true? The answer is yes…

A complicit partner, he says, is a media “intent on preserving the status quo …and never offending the ruling elite”.

Washington Post’s Walter Pincus:

More and more the media become, I think, common carriers of administration statements and critics of the administration….We’ve sort of given up being independent on our own.

June 23, 2014

Andrew Bacevich: The End of American Exceptionalism | BillMoyers.com

Extended Interview: Andrew Bacevich
June 20, 2014

After the broadcast interview, Bill continued his conversation with military historian Andrew Bacevich about what America should do in the Middle East.

Bacevich draws parallels between the current Iraqi crisis and the Vietnam War, discusses our evolving relationship with Iran and challenges neoconservatives for their take on US foreign policy.

“My reading [of history] is of course there is evil in the world that needs to be taken into account and some time must be confronted,” Bacevich tells Moyers. “But let’s not kid ourselves: In somehow imagining that the United States represents all that is good and virtuous, we, ourselves, have committed many sins. And we ought to be cognizant of those sins before we go pronouncing about how the world ought to be run.”

Producer: Gina Kim. Segment Producer: Robert Booth. Editor: Sikay Tang.

June 22, 2014

Why US hard power failed in Iraq and elsewhere | Bill Moyers

Outstanding. Military historian Andrew Bacevich sums up the stupidity of US foreign policy and how repeated failures could be rectified. He exposes the “duplicity of ideologues” on calls for intervention in Iraq and discusses the moral responsibility to the people of Iraq. What can be done to alleviate the suffering of the people in Iraq? “There is remarkably little discussion as to cost if you want to bomb someone, but we suddenly become acutely cost-conscious if there is a proposal to assist them.”

Dick Cheney [at 06:00] in 1993, answering a question on the first Gulf war, predicted what would happen if Iraq was invaded: “…Once you take down Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq, then what are you going to put in its place? If you take down the central government in Iraq, you could easily see pieces of Iraq fly off…..it’s a quagmire.”

Projection of hard power by the US has not solved global problems over the last 50 years. In fact it has exacerbated problems in the Middle East. Soft power is far more effective. But it needs a change of mind-set on the part of the US. Don’t get me wrong. You still need Teddy Roosevelt’s “big stick” as a deterrent, but soft power — engineers, doctors and school teachers — are far more effective at winning people over to your world-view than B52s and unmanned drones.