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Its Role in Conflict and Peace
Series: USIP Special Reports
This paper addresses the potentially positive role of religion in peacemaking and conflict resolution, commenting on the United States Institute of Peace’s (USIP) field work experiences. It examines the link between religion and conflict, reviews the experiences with religious activism, mediation and facilitation and discusses the importance of interfaith dialogue. Subsequently, the paper points to the US government’s neglect of the religious dimension of conflicts. The author argues that the nature of the religious dimension of international conflict is sometimes neglected, often misunderstood and frequently exaggerated. Continue reading Religion in World Affairs
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Lew Rockwell Archives
Commentators across the spectrum have finally clued in to neo-conservatism as the intellectual framework of the Bush administration. We are suddenly faced with long think pieces on the role of political philosopher Leo Strauss in influencing the architects of the Iraq war and Bush’s governance in general. We are also learning about the ideological path taken by former college Trotskyites into the Republican Party of the 1970s. It’s an instructive example of tenacity and dedication in translating ideas into practice.
Along with the political victory of the neocons (by victory I mean the reality that they now control many levers of power) has come shock and alarm of those who disagree with their policies. Their critics left and right regard their use of domestic police powers as contrary to constitutional guarantees, and their foreign policy as nothing but untrammeled aggression that violates human rights and makes us ever more vulnerable. Continue reading Neo-Conservatism Explained
Tom Barry
The International Relations Center
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was established in 1997 by a number of leading neoconservative writers and pundits to advocate aggressive U.S. foreign policies and “rally support for American global leadership.” One of the group’s founding documents claimed, “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.”1
PNAC, which phased out most operations by 2006 and let its website expire temporarily in May 2008,2 was perhaps best known for its ability to attract divergent political factions behind its foreign policy agenda, which the group repeatedly demonstrated with its numerous sign-on letters and public statements. PNAC forged an influential coalition of rightist political actors in support of its calls for an aggressive “war on terror” aimed largely at the Middle East, including the invasion of Iraq. Although some observers have exaggerated its impact—two scholars, for instance, argued in the Sociological Quarterly that PNAC almost single-handedly “developed, sold, enacted, and justified a war with Iraq” 3 —the group was arguably the most effective proponent of neoconservative ideas during the period between the beginning of President Bill Clinton’s second term and President George W. Bush’s 2003 decision to invade Iraq.4 Continue reading Project for the New American Century
Why the “vast right-wing conspiracy” is working.
By: Charles Krauthammer
From the issue of July 05, 2005, Commentary magazine
The post-cold-war era has seen a remarkable ideological experiment: over the last fifteen years, each of the three major American schools of foreign policy—realism, liberal internationalism, and neoconservatism—has taken its turn at running things. (A fourth school, isolationism, has a long pedigree, but has yet to recover from Pearl Harbor and probably never will; it remains a minor source of dissidence with no chance of becoming a governing ideology.) There is much to be learned from this unusual and unplanned experiment. Continue reading The Neoconservative Convergence
Fiction
by: Hichem Karoui 
-1-
Now that everything is over or nearly over, I can say that it was not bad at all. If I had to put it back from the start, I will certainly do it again, without great changes. On the whole, I am almost satisfied. With the days, the weeks, the months and the years going by, I am growing older and wiser as it seems to me. As I take the seventy-three turn and look backward, I have the impression – perhaps a deceiving one- that I have not entirely missed my life, after all. The ways of the providence are really unfathomable. When I was a youngster, I craved to be an artist – a painter or a sculptor, perhaps even an architect. I would have given anything to enter the Beaux-arts in Paris. I was completely fascinated by the lives and works of my great contemporaries, not to speak of the titans of the previous centuries. I wanted to be an artist and wished nothing more than to obtain a scholarship for the Beaux Arts; but fate intended it otherwise. A scholarship was accorded to me, but to study artillery…far from Paris. Thus, I was put on the way that led me, after a long plight, to the post I was occupying before I arrived here, which is considered to be the highest not only in my country, but anywhere in the world, since I was actually President of the Republic.
I have ruled my country during twenty years. When I think about it now, I find that it was a very short period. I did not even feel it elapsing. It was like a dream or a wink. And today, sitting in my long-chair on the balcony of this nice villa overlooking the river, I am able to see my life unfolding before my eyes like a movie, wherein I have been alternately the hero and the walker-on, the hangman and the victim, the film maker manipulating the strings, directing, advising, ordering, and supervising the comedians and the technicians, and the great star playing the paramount role before the cameras. Continue reading EXILE (1)
Defining American Interests in Afghanistan Foreign Affairs – July/August 2009 Steven Simon STEVEN SIMON is Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 1994 to 1999, he served on the National Security Council in various positions, including Senior Director for Transnational Threats. The Obama administration recently completed its 60-day review of [...] [...]
Edited and translated by Norman Calder, Jawid Mojaddedi and Andrew Rippin Preface The genesis of this book lies with Norman Calder, from shortly before he died in 1998. In 1997 Norman had been approached by a publisher to put together a book of readings on Islam. While neither a full prospectus nor a contract for the work had [...] [...]
Husain Haqqani & Hillel Fradkin Journal of Democracy How should we understand the emergence and the nature of Islamist parties? Can they reasonably be expected not just to participate in democratic politics but even to respect the norms of liberal democracy? These questions lie at the heart of the issues that we have been asked to address. In [...] [...]
Author: Barry Rubin This book provides a history and analysis of political events in the Persian Gulf since the Iranian revolution as well as an analysis of U.S. policy. The purpose of this book was to provide an explanation of how the Persian Gulf area had developed into an area of such importance and turmoil. [...] [...]
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