World Policy Journal articles from September 2007

World Policy Journal archives from September 2007

A war without end.(Viewpoint essay)
September 22, 2007... There is an inexorability about war. It is a little unbridled for the realist's rather nice sense of purposive social control.... For the inexorable abolishes choices, and it is the essence of the realist's creed to have, in every situation,...

Why Are We in Iraq? A Realpolitik Perspective.
September 22, 2007... In 1917, Woodrow Wilson told the United States Senate that "American principles are the principles of mankind and they must prevail." Democracy was a moral template to be imposed on a diverse and heterogeneous world. Its inevitable triumph was...

The Iraqi refugee disaster.(Report)
September 22, 2007... Some 30 years ago, a massive wave of refugees followed another U.S. military intervention overseas. Between the fall of Cambodia to Khmer Rouge insurgents and the subsequent collapse of the South Vietnamese government in 1975-79, 230,000 people...

How to close Guantanamo.(Report)
September 22, 2007... On March 29, 2007, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told the House Appropriations Committee that there was a "taint" to Guantanamo and that the prison should be closed. (1) More than six months later, several dozen prisoners have been moved...

Who lost Iraq and why it matters: the case for offshore balancing.(Report)
September 22, 2007... Even as the George W. Bush administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress are locked in a bitter fight about the future direction of Iraq, a potentially more portentous debate about who lost Iraq and why is gathering force. Its impetus...

America's oil market power the unused weapon against Iran.(Report)
September 22, 2007... If an American president could rub a magic lamp and get three foreign policy wishes, one of them might be for Iran's clerics to vanish. Iran's mercurial mullahs have been a thorn in America's side since the 1979 Iranian revolution, through the...

Deciphering Turkey's elections: the making of a revolution.(Report)
September 22, 2007... Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) scored and impressive victory in July of historic consequence. Despite concerted pressure from the military and its hard-line allies, the AKP substantially increased its share of the vote and...

War, peace, and American politics: talking with Zbigniew Brzezinski.(CONVERSATION)(Interview)
September 22, 2007... Zbigniew Brzezinski remains at 79 the same feisty, acerbic intellectual he has always been, giving little quarter to his opponents. Admired rather than loved, he was, as President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, the antithesis of the...

From Stalin to Putin, an insider's view: talking with Georgi Arbatov.(Interview)
September 22, 2007... Georgi Arbatov, the eminent grise of the Soviet foreign policy apparatus, was waiting for me at the bus stop an hour out of Moscow. A little bowed at 84, he grabbed me by one arm and leaned on his homemade walking stick cut from a nearby birch...

"The Graham Greene Argument": A Vietnam Parallel that Escaped George W. Bush.(REFLECTIONS)(Report)
September 22, 2007... In a speech this August to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, President George W. Bush boasted of success in Iraq and invoked memories of Vietnam to attack his critics and justify his decisions. He recalled that the U.S. withdrawal from Indochina...

JFK and Oswald: the inconvenient truth.(Report)
September 22, 2007... After decades of speculation about a grassy knoll, the Zapruder film, and an acoustical tape, the man behind it all is too often overlooked. Lee Oswald was not a cardboard figure but a human being, and although he had barely turned 24 at the...

Perry and Pearl: the unintended consequence.(RECONSIDERATIONS)(Report)
September 22, 2007... The Japanese did not seek, they abjured our company. It was only the terror [italics added] of our fleets which thrust our society upon them against their will. --A lonesome British warning about Western intrusion If civil war rends...

More on defining terror.(CORRESPONDENCE)(Letter to the editor)
September 22, 2007... To the Editor: I was truly flattered by the fact that my brief article on terrorism (World Policy Journal, spring 2007) was published with a string of high-caliber comments, all of them helpful and to the point. I feel the need, however,...

Ghosts along the Bosphorus.(CODA)(Turkish history)(Report)
September 22, 2007... Not too long ago a great Muslim capital was invaded and occupied by a coalition of Western armies. The occupation was meant to end quickly. It persisted instead for almost five years. Within months, a resistance army mobilized in the...