« The Arabs "Get" New Orleans......Come On America | Home | Gaza, Lebanon: Two Entirely Different Wars »
This Week On America Abroad
This week on TPMCafe's America Abroad, the bloggers are talking about...
War In The Middle East
Hopes for peace in the Middle East seemed shattered this week as Hezbollah attacked Israel, prompting a military counterstrike. Today, Israel extended airstrikes further into Lebanon, targeting suspected Hezbollah outposts. America Abroad's Rachel Kleinfeld was with Rep. Jane Harman discussing national security when she learned of Lebanese rockets hitting Tel Aviv, prompting Kleinfeld to wish Harman, and national security leaders of both parties, success in finding solutions for what has become "a very frightening" world. Later that day, Kleinfeld called President Bush's decision to disengage from peace negotiations in the Middle East, "a disastrous choice" and declared, "At this point, options are few. They must be found, creatively, to preserve Israel, and to restore peace."
The Government's Post-Hamdan Powers
Juliette Kayyem offered her take on the first post-Hamdan hearings, held this week, and asking why the list of witnesses does not represent the internal debate among the military as to what protections detainees should receive. Kayyem also discussed the government's reply to Senator Schumer's letter inquiring how the Hamdan decisions affected the government's view of its own powers under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force. "The Government argues that the AUMF rejection by the Court in Hamdan does not apply to their NSA defense because, basically, warrantless survillance is more clearly an "incident" of warfighting than, well, military commissions. Um. Really. Because one would think that, actually, detaining and adjudicating the guys you find on a battlefield is more incidental to engaging in war than powers that would permit domestic surveillance not on the battleground. If everything is the battleground (as the Administration has argued), why isn't locking up and doing something with the guys we find anywhere more incidental to war than just listening in on their phone conversations."
In Other News On America Abroad
* Nearly two hundred people were killed in India this week as bombs exploded on crowded trains in Mumbai. The main suspects in the attacks are Pakistani terrorists, prompting Rachel Kleinfeld to the relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan, writing, "We need a better path than just supporting Musharraf."
* Ivo Daalder answered Josh Marshall's question: "Is our North Korea policy a fraud?" by outlining the key assumptions, both wrong, that determine U.S. policy, namely that the U.S. must not negotiate with Kim Jong-Il and that isolation could prompt his regime to collapse.
* Ernest Wilson analyzed China's move to design a "more sophisticated global strategy," as the PRC dedicates 2006 as "The Year of Africa."
* Rachel Kleinfeld weighed in on Iraq this week, offering her thoughts on the idea of permanent U.S. military bases in the region and sharing a picture worth a thousand words.
* Ivo Daalder debunked the myth that President Bush has evolved into a committed multilateralist, writing, "It’s not so much a shift from unilateralism to multilateralism as it is a shift from relying on the use of force to doing nothing."
Advertisement
July 14, 2006 9:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
Cut and paste, cut and paste. It's how things are done on the Net.
I don't even know why they are bother with these "This Week" recaps - pretty much nobody reads it because it's just a recap of the rest of the articles anybody can see on the page. Hardly anybody ever comments on it because it's pointless.
I suggest getting rid of it and leaving room for more articles.
July 14, 2006 4:56 PM | Reply | Permalink