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Tag Archives: needless wars
A New Map for Relationships: Chapter 1
My last blog post announced that my wife Dorothie and I will be using my half of the $1 million ACM Turing Award to further our work on building a more peaceful, sustainable world. Our initial thrust will be to bring attention to a new approach described in our forthcoming book, A New Map for Relationships: Creating True Love at Home and Peace on the Planet. That approach combines a concern for global issues with improving one’s marriage or other intimate relationship. It worked wonders for us, while nothing else had dented our cycle of seemingly endless fights. We also found that working on both the personal and global dimensions simultaneously accelerated our progress on each of them. We hope to have the book ready in time for the formal conferral of the ACM Turing Award in June, and in the meantime hope to excite interest by posting some chapters of the book here. Chapter 1 is immediately below, and watch here for additional installments. Continue reading
Five Things America Needs to Learn
Harvard Prof. Stephen Walt has an excellent article in Foreign Policy that I highly recommend you read in its entirety. Although its title is “The Top 5 Things the Next American President Needs to Know About Foreign Policy,” ordinary Americans need to learn these as well because, until enough of us do, the president will be unable to act on them out of fear of the political consequences. Here are Prof. Walt’s key points, excerpted from his article: Continue reading
Rouhani Cabinet Has More US PhD’s Than Obama’s!
Yesterday’s post, Empowering the Moderates in Iran, attracted a comment from SocialInform, which mentioned another blog’s post, Iran’s president has more cabinet members with Ph.D. degrees from U.S. universities than Barack Obama does. Be sure to check out the picture, showing who they are and where they studied. The post mentioned a December 2013 article in The Atlantic which gave more details and is summarized below my signature line. Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged critical thinking, iran, martin hellman, needless wars, nuclear risk, Rouhani, stanford, war and peace
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A Voice of Caution Not Heard in the West
My last three posts have been about the risk of the Ukrainian crisis escalating out of control, and the lack of coverage of that possibility in the West. Today, as I went through a slew of articles about Ukraine, a number echoed my concern, but none of them received coverage in our mainstream media. (I did web searches on The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post.) One article, “Arming Ukraine will put the West in danger,” on the Reuters web site stood out for its clarity of thought and fairness. It says in part: Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged critical thinking, international relations, martin hellman, needless wars, nuclear risk, nuclear war, russia, stanford, war and peace
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More Question Marks on Ukraine
As in all wars, the civil war in Ukraine has become a propaganda war, with each side striving to paint the other as solely at fault for atrocities and the war itself. The American media has done a good job of pointing out pro-Russian propaganda, but mostly has fallen flat on its face looking at the other side of the coin. Thus, even though both sides – and Russia and the US – bear some of the blame for the ongoing horror, I have focused primarily on exposing anti-Russian, pro-Ukrainian propaganda, of which most Americans are unaware. Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged critical thinking, martin hellman, Moon of Alabama, needless wars, propaganda, russia, stanford, tanks, ukraine, war and peace
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Avoiding Needless Wars, Part 9: Iraq
The two reasons given for invading Iraq in 2003 were wrong: Saddam Hussein’s WMDs were illusory, as were his connections to al Qaeda. While this needless war is often attributed to an intelligence failure, we all are really at fault. Our elected officials failed to ask the questions they should have before going to war. So did our media. And so did we, the citizens who hold the ultimate power of the ballot box. The drumbeat to war hypnotized the nation, overcame rationality, and led to disaster. Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Bill Moyers, Colin Powell, critical thinking, George W. Bush, iraq, Lukyanov, martin hellman, needless wars, nuclear risk, Phil Donahue, russia, stanford, Wilkerson
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Avoiding Needless Wars, Part 7: Afghanistan
Our October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, might seem like an unavoidable war because the Taliban had sheltered Osama bin Laden, and we could not afford to risk a repeat of that disaster. But a more careful analysis shows that our Afghan war, like the others examined in this series, could have been avoided. The trick is not to start the analysis in 2001, but in December 1979, when we started to arm jihadists who were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. One of them was Osama bin Laden. Continue reading
Avoiding Needless Wars, Part 6: North Korea
Over the last few months, North Korea has severely tested the world’s patience. It conducted its third nuclear test, canceled the armistice ending the Korean War, threatened the US with nuclear ruin, warned foreigners to leave the country because war was imminent, cut its hotline with South Korea, and readied a missile for firing. This shrill, irrational behavior seems to confirm the conventional wisdom that North Korea is a rogue nation, run by a nut job – end of story. In that perspective, there is little we can do other than hope that our military power deters them from following through on their hair-brained threats. While there is truth in that perspective, it pays to examine some other hypotheses which, if true, would give us more effective options for reducing the risk of a needless war. Continue reading
Avoiding Needless Wars, Part 5: Operation Northwoods
Operation Northwoods is a prime example of why we need to raise critical questions before going to war. Written seven months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, this formerly top secret proposal by the Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested ways to build public support for an American invasion of Cuba, including: “A ‘Remember the Maine’ incident could be arranged … We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba. … [Or] we could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. … [fostering] attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding.” Continue reading
Avoiding Needless Wars, Part 4: Nixon’s Madman Nuclear Alert
The first three installments in this series of posts drew on irrefutable evidence – formerly classified top secret documents and a recording of a presidential phone call – to show that the public needs to critically question government claims before going to war. Those posts showed that the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, which became the legal basis for the Vietnam War via Congress’ Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, were incorrectly portrayed by the Johnson Administration as unprovoked North Vietnamese aggression. The second incident never happened and the first incident was, in the words of CIA Director John McCone, a defensive reaction “to our attacks on their off-shore islands.” While the loss of over 58,000 Americans and approximately 2,000,000 Vietnamese is reason enough to avoid future such mistakes, the Vietnam War also added little-known nuclear risks. This post deals with the most bizarre of these, an event that has been dubbed Nixon’s “Madman Nuclear Alert.” In a 2003 paper, Stanford Prof. Scott Sagan and University of Wisconsin Prof. Jeremi Suri describe the origins and trajectory of this dangerous ploy: Continue reading
Defusing the Nuclear Threat 