Bringing Russian and American citizens together in Peace since 1983.
Dear CCI Friends,
I want to make a new site available to you. I’ve been watching it for several months now and find that much of their articles and researchers are quite good. They write toward the younger crowd but essentially give basic facts dressed up in today’s language and morality.
Let me know if The Conversation seems valuable to you. If so, subscribe yourself.
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
Dear CCI Readers,
How is it that you and I watch over our personal expenditures and assets like hawks while our government spends outrageously on major equipment that piles up in country after country. Thousands of tanks, jeeps, etc., are left behind when our kids can’t get proper educations and many Americans now go to bed hungry at night in tents or under freeway overpasses.
This is happening in Democrat and Republican administrations alike. Our Congress members vote in these outrageous sums of money. At the root is the Military Industrial Complex, supported by Congress, and our high-end media (New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, MSNBC). They all build the case for ever-more military spending.
Is it too late? Do we let this current situation take our country down? Or do we revolt and demand totally different politics from our Congress? It’s up to you and me … and a number of risk-taking NGOs and the new Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Please support these institutions and pass their honest articles to your friends and colleagues!
Dear CCI friends,
We all have watched the fury-set-in-motion in Afghanistan over the past few days. So, so tragic!
Thursday’s scores of deaths at the airport are absolutely deplorable … At the same time, we read that an estimated quarter of a million Afghan deaths have been ignored during the past 20 years. Could this be so?
John Pilger gives a remarkable picture of what Kabul looked like before our forces destabilized the changes in Afghan life during the Soviet era. Were there downsides to the life the Soviets offered? No doubt, yes. They were outlawing the tribal religions, educating young women, etc. Afghans were joining the rest of the world it seems from Pilger’s photos. It is hard to believe that Afghanistan wasn’t always a country of clerics wrapped in desert cloth with women in burkas.
Read and weep over what might have been possible in Afghanistan …
Strategic Culture
August 23, 2021
By Alastair Crooke
China is more determined to shape the region than many analysts realise, Alastair Crooke writes.
A huge geo-political event has just occurred in Afghanistan: The implosion of a key western strategy for managing what Mackinder, in the 19th century, called the Asian heartland. That it was accomplished, without fighting, and in few days, is almost unprecedented.
It has been a shock. Not just one of those ephemeral shocks that is soon forgotten, but a deeply traumatic one. Unlike the psychological impact of 9/11, the western world is treating the experience as mourning for the loss of ‘a loved one’. There have been ministerial tears, chest beating and an entry into the first three stages of grief simultaneously: Firstly, shock and denial (a state of disbelief and numbed feelings); then, pain and guilt (for those allies of ours huddled at Kabul airport), and finally, anger. The fourth stage is already in sight in the U.S.: Depression – as the polls show America already swinging towards deep pessimism about the pandemic, economic and prospects, as well as the course on which the American Republic is set.
Here we have a clear statement from the editors of The New York Times of who that ‘loved one’ was:
[The Afghan debacle is] “tragic because the American Dream of being the ‘indispensable nation’ in a world where the values of civil rights, women’s empowerment and religious tolerance rule – proved to be just a dream”.
Michael Rubin representing the hawkish AEI pronounced an eulogy over ‘the corpse’:
Biden, Blinken, and Jake Sullivan might craft statements about the mistakes of earlier NATO overreach, “and the need for Washington to focus on its core interests further West. And Pentagon officials and diplomats might contest any lessening of America’s commitment with indignation, yet the reality is NATO is a Dead Man Walking”.
By James Carden
August 18, 2021
A decade ago, John Lamberton Harper, a professor of US Foreign Policy and European Studies at Johns Hopkins in Bologna, Italy published an indispensable history of the first cold war (The Cold War, Oxford University Press, 2011) in which he described the origins of what became known as ‘the Carter doctrine.’
The Carter Doctrine pledged US military action against any state that attempted to gain control of the Persian Gulf. As Quincy Institute president Andrew Bacevich has pointed out it “implied the conversion of the Persian Gulf into an informal American protectorate” and set the stage for repeated (and disastrous) interventions over the coming decades. Among other things, the Carter Doctrine, the brainchild of Carter’s Polish-born national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, caused the US to ally with primitive Saudi Arabia at the expense of manageable relations with civilized Persia.
It is also a story of miscalculation and hubris, one which resonates rather profoundly this week as American soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officials and many thousands of Afghans flee the Taliban’s assault on Kabul.
How did we get here?