The urge to expand wars in the Middle East, rather than find pragmatic ways to tamp them down, is even more absurd when set against the potential for peaceful cooperation in the region and the desperate need for the world to address existential…
The post-Cold War boredom among Air Force personnel assigned the task of endlessly waiting for the order to launch nuclear weapons has become a new destabilizing element in the risk of an accidental Armageddon, one that can only be addressed…
A bitter irony of modern Israel is that the Jewish people have historically been at the forefront of tolerance, reason and egalitarianism but now have leaders who demand a Jewish religious state accompanied by the repression of Palestinian Muslims, a dilemma…
New thinking about the universe asserts that there may be many planets with the potential for life but only one that is known to have overcome the extraordinary odds of life actually developing and humans are threatening to destroy that,…
Politics and propaganda continue to color how the world views the existential issue of nuclear weapons. Some nations are treated as if they are entitled to have nukes while others aren’t. Yet, the risks from use in an accident or in…
On Sept. 18, 1961, a plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold crashed in Africa as he was negotiating to stop a war in Congo. Hammarskjold’s death removed one of the great advocates for international peace, as Roger Lipsey explains in…
Rather than making serious efforts at peace settlements, President Obama is skating toward possible U.S. involvement in two more Middle Eastern wars, with Syria and Iran. And ex-Vice President Cheney has no regrets about the Iraq War. Such attitudes ignore a core…
From the Archive: Two Oscar favorites “Argo” and “Zero Dark Thirty” purport to tell real-life stories about America’s troubles in the Middle East, one an escape-from-Iran thriller and the other a get-bin-Laden film. But neither confronts some hard realities, wrote…
Oscar buzz is humming about two movies recounting real-life chapters of U.S. policy in the Middle East the get-bin-Laden film “Zero Dark Thirty” and the escape-Iran drama “Argo.” But neither provides an in-depth examination of the reality behind the events,…
As the American Right loses credibility from the Tea Party to the neocons there’s a chance for the reassertion of rationality, a new respect for empirical evidence and disdain for propaganda. Perhaps most importantly is the recognition of the grave threat from climate…