Post blogger Mitch Mulhall to reckless G in comment #15: "You point out movement restrictions imposed by Israelis impede Palestinian womens' rights...but you ignore all restrictions brought on by cultural and religious traditions of the Middle East."
In comment #14, Post blogger reckless G writes that "ending the occupation of Palestine is but one step in the process of restoring justice to U.S. foreign policy."
The Con Man gets a searching email asking: "My question is, we the people of the USA voted in a majority of Democrats," a woman writes. "They were voted into office by citizens believing they could, and would stop Bush from his tyranny, and his invasions on ‘other’ countries. Read 'other' as Muslim. But alas, nothing, read that as NOTHING has been done! No expectations have been met. We are still entangled in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and now Iran, there is still no health care changes. Need I go on?"
Posts filed under 'Foreign Policy'
The Con Man responds:
The power to intervene in other nations overtly and surreptitiously has also been growing in this environment where the laws don't seem to apply. Under cover of "the war on terror," the Bush-Cheney Administration intervenes wherever they see fit. Before the Church Committe, the Allende assasination in Chile and attempted assasination of Castro were historical examples of the same impulse. You use the example of Iran, but did you know we were in effect supplying weapons through Egypt to Fatah to fight Hamas, even though Hamas was democratically elected?
These interventions in Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere have unintended consequences that indicate we should keep out of these internal deliberations. Perhaps the best example is "Charlie Wilson's War." We armed the mujahideen to the teeth to fight the Russians, and in so doing we literally made an obscure character known as Osama bin Ladin into a hero in the Muslim world, and set the stage for the rise of the Taliban.
Continue Reading September 5th, 2008
How do terrorist groups end? The evidence since 1968 indicates that terrorist groups rarely cease to exist as a result of winning or losing a military campaign. Rather, most groups end because of operations carried out by local police or intelligence agencies or because they join the political process. This suggests that the United States should pursue a counterterrorism strategy against al Qa'ida that emphasizes policing and intelligence gathering rather than a “war on terrorism” approach that relies heavily on military force.
Continue Reading September 3rd, 2008
Galia Golan in her Aspen Institute lecture on Monday 8/25 confirmed everything I have been saying and writing about Israel for the last six years. Dr. Golan is a Jewish woman who has lived in Israel since 1966 and has been on the faculty of the Hebrew University since 1967. She has been active in Peace Now, an Israeli organization dedicated to ending Israel’s occupation of Palestine and was the director of Bat Shalom, a Jewish women’s peace organization.
Continue Reading August 27th, 2008
With the fighting in Georgia, the Con Man makes the intellectual journey from the Cold War to what he calls the Carbon Wars beginning with Gulf War I. Also: A visit from Charlie Firestone, head of the Aspen Institute's Communications and Society program.
Click here for the complete Con Games with Michael Conniff July 14, 2008.
August 20th, 2008
Christopher Hitchens underwent waterboarding last February. He puts a lie to the notion that waterboarding “simulates drowning.” After undergoing this act, he claims waterboarding is no mere simulation. It’s drowning. “It would be bad enough if they did have something—suppose they wanted to know the where a relative of yours was, or a lover, say, ‘well, I’m going to betray them now, because this has to come to an end; I can’t take this anymore.’” Hitchens then goes on to pose the unthinkable: what if they got the wrong guy? Then, he posits, such a person would be in real danger of losing his or her mind...
Continue Reading July 15th, 2008
The Con Man welcomes Judith Cross from Aspen Death Camp and Rob Leventhal from the Double-Diamond Camp. Then he moves the discussion to energy policy and the Iraqi government's insistence that the United States get the puck out of Iraq.
Click here for "Con Games with Michael Conniff" for Tuesday July 8, 2008.
July 8th, 2008
Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist of The New York Times, was officially christened as king of the world over the weekend in Aspen—and why the hell not?
He wore the mantle lightly at the Aspen Ideas Festival, in part because he married into the gazillionaire Buxbaum family, who have so far given tens of millions of dollars to the town, with the latest dollop a $25 million downpayment for a spanky campus at the Aspen Music Festival and School. But Friedman’s wallop at the podium has all but nothing to do with Bucksbaum bucks, and everything to do with his prescient ability to package the zeitgeist with the tidiness of a juice box—the kind that comes with its own self-piercing straw.
Continue Reading July 7th, 2008
The Con Man sets the table for the terrorists as they re-group in the Middle East, then welcomes filmaker Bob Compton and his "2 Million Minutes," about eduction in China, India and the United States.
Also: jewelry designer Ariane Zurcher, the grandaughter of Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke, the founders of modern Aspen.
Click here for the complete "Con Games with Michael Conniff" for Tuesday July 1, 2008.
July 1st, 2008
Aspen, CO, June 12, 2008 –– The 2008 Aspen Institute McCloskey Speaker Series opens with a lecture by American historian Martin J. Sherwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Knopf). Sherwin will discuss “Hiroshima’s Shadow: The First Nuclear World and Ours.”
Continue Reading June 19th, 2008
Highlights of Ideas Festival sessions open to the public (tickets required) include:
· US Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff in conversation with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg
· Alice Waters in conversation with The Atlantic’s Corby Kummer, with dessert served from her cookbook
· Award-winning National Geographic photographer James Balog exploring ice on the run in his “Extreme Ice Survey”
· A global perspective on the US elections from Der Tagesspiegel’s Christoph von Marschall, Ha'aretz’s Ari Shavit, Edward Luce of the Financial Times, and others
· A talk with four young, resilient survivors of genocide, war, and gang violence, moderated by playwright and actor Anna Deavere Smith.
Continue Reading June 17th, 2008
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