The news of the killing of Chris Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, in an attack at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi is bitter. It was Benghazi, after all, that was the heart of the Libyan revolution last year. Libyan leader …
Foreign Policy
Still No Luck for the V-22 in Japan
TOKYO – If it wasn’t for bad luck, the Marines’ V-22 would have no luck at all – at least not in Japan.
More than 100,000 people turned out on Okinawa on Sunday to protest the planned deployment of the Marines’ new …
The U.S.: Arms Merchant to the Developing World
The Congressional Research Service’s latest annual compendium of global arms sales shows the U.S. to be the behemoth when it comes to such commerce. Some highlights:
— Per the pie chart, the U.S. accounted for 79% of the
…
Mitt-Picking
Jim Kitfield, the intrepid military correspondent at National Journal for many years, turns his eyes on Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, for a keen but nuanced look at his national-security chops. The …
Meanwhile, Back in Baghdad…
It has been a rough few months in Iraq. Killings in June and July are higher (though nowhere near the 2006 and 2007 highs) and Sunday’s New York Times publishes the not-so-shocking revelation that the Iraqis and Iranians trade …
Betting Against a Drone Arms Race
Bold predictions of a coming drones arms race are all the rage since the uptake in their deployment under the Obama Administration. Noel Sharkey, for example, argues in an August 3 op-ed for the Guardian that rapidly developing …
Grounded…for Now
The Empire Strikes Back
The latest chilling dispatch from a reporter known only as “A Time Reporter in Syria”:
“Is it real? Is it really almost over?” asked a young FSA fighter who took up arms a year ago. “I’m so sick of guns, bullets,
…
NoKo’s L’il Kim Outmaneuvers His Military
Time’s ace Asia hand Bill Powell dissects this week’s surprising uncoup by Kim Jong Un in North Korea:
Far from being deposed or assassinated, Kim Jong Un had been promoted by the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) from the rank of general to marshal in the North Korean military. Prior to this announcement, there had been six vice …
Washington: Time To Dump Bashar, Moscow
The U.S. and Russia have been sparring all week over competing United Nations Security Council resolutions on Syria. The U.S. would like a mandate under Chapter 7 of UN law to intervene more robustly in what the Red Cross and …
The Rebels: We Need Intel More Than Arms
It took Twitter five years to hire a Washington lobbyist. That was quick compared to Apple, which took 25 years to begin paying someone to represent its interests in the capital.
Violence had been raging in Syria for 14 months …
The Soviet Troops Who Stayed Behind
Remember those long-ago black-and-white films of Japanese World War II soldiers blinking their way into daylight a decade or more after the war was over? They’d emerge from a cave on some Pacific atoll promising to fight on for the Emperor…
Something similar has happened in Afghanistan, among Soviet troops who decided to stay …
Scare-Trigger Alert
Hard to believe the notion of “de-alerting” the nation’s nuclear weapons – removing them from their current hair-trigger status – remains controversial 20 years after the end of the Cold War. It simply shows how the national-security bureaucracy can metastasize into the national-sclerotic bureaucracy when it finds that …