Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

If you were to ask Israel’s pugnacious Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, off the record, what policy he thought Washington should pursue in the Middle East, he might very well tell you that it should be whatever he tells Washington it should be. If he did actually say that out loud, rather than just thinking it, it would be hard for him to get anyone else to agree, least of all representatives of the out-going administration of US President Barack Obama. Benjamin Netanyahu The last few weeks of President Obama’s final term in office have carried the mood of bilateral relations between the US and Israel to a new low. The latest rift is over passage of UN Security Council Resolution 2334 by a vote of 14 to zero. This resolution concerns occupation by Israel since 1967 of Palestinian territories including East Jerusalem. It specifically underscores Israel’s definition under the terms of the Fourth Geneva Convention as “an occupying power” in the disputed Palestinian lands and af...

In a tweet I posted earlier this year when Washington was still on the fence as to whether or not Barack Obama should be the first sitting president to visit the site of the first of two US nuclear bombings of Japan at the end of World War II, I suggested he should not only go, but that he should also carry a heartfelt American apology with him. In the end, Mr. Obama indeed went, but he did not—and this, unfortunately, comes as no surprise, considering standing US policy on the subject—make any apology for what many, including myself, consider one of the worst war crimes in human history. US President Obama with Japan's Prime Minister Abe at the  Hiroshima Memorial. Last Friday, Obama became the first US president in the seven decades since to end of World War II to pay an official visit to the Hiroshima Memorial, a 30-acre park at the ground-zero epicenter of the nuclear blast that instantaneously laid waste to the Japanese city killing tens of thousands in the blink ...

“The Donald” Trump is now, to the chagrin of much of that party, the virtual Republican (GOP) candidate for president of the United States of America. Many people on both sides of the political aisle in the US and, to an even greater extent, around the world, are scratching their heads and asking themselves how on earth someone like Trump could end up even being an independent presidential candidate, let alone the GOP pick. Perhaps the most often used term to describe “The Donald” to date is “loose cannon”. Being the virtual GOP nominee has done nothing to change that. And loose cannon is a graphic and accurate term. In the days of sailing ships, cannon were carefully placed and meticulously fastened in position to ensure maximum firepower and safety. But in rough seas or in battle, one of these heavy iron or bronze guns could break loose from its moorings and wreak havoc, acting as a free-wheeling and unpredictable battering ram capable of crushing crewmen and bashing holes in th...

Buenos Aires, March 24, 2016 Yesterday I asked myself a rhetorical question on Twitter: “Wonder what motivated an American president, any American president to come to Argentina on the 40 th anniversary of the 1976 coup d’état?” I think it was a fair question. Surely, sufficient evidence has come to light over the last four decades of both early and later US complicity with the bloody military regime that came to power in 1976 and ruled Argentina until 1983—first, under the administration of US President Gerald Ford and, later, under that of President Ronald Reagan, with the conspicuous exception to this policy of tacit support being the four years of the Jimmy Carter administration, which openly confronted the military junta over its human rights abuses. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one to ask myself that question, although others asked it less rhetorically. One was Obama’s fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, who was reported to have contacted the US p...

A deadline came and went without incident last Tuesday, in talks being held in Vienna between Iran and the so-called P5+1―the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the US, the UK, China, France and Russia) plus Germany―regarding the Arab nation’s atomic energy program. The fact that all parties involved decided to remain at the negotiating table for another week should bring a sigh of relief to everyone but hardline warmongers everywhere in the world, because it is of vital importance to world peace that a workable nuclear agreement be reached between the leading military powers and Iran. Failure of this to happen and an ultimate walkout by the US and/or Iran might very likely lead to new and even more expansive conflicts in the Middle East in the future, and to the ghost of nuclear war in an area of the world fraught with multilateral hostilities and rivalries. US President Barack Obama has twice this week warned that the United States will “walk away” if the fin...

Last Monday marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the start of World War I, one of the two bloodiest and most horrendous conflicts in recorded history. It was known also as The Great War and more popularly as “the war to end all wars”. But it didn’t, of course. Barely more than two decades after it ended, the world would witness the start of World War II on September 1, 1939. That war would prove to be even more horrific and far more costly in human life than its predecessor, and with its end, the world would once more say, “Never again,” and give birth to multilateral institutions and worldwide treaties aimed at ensuring peace. And yet, peace has not come. Although the “advancement” of war technology (to the detriment, one might argue, of environmental and life sciences which must vie for funds, materials and human resources with the gnashing golden teeth of the First World’s war machine) has—until now, at least—kept the major powers from again engaging in battle directly, i...