Dear CCI Friends,

Nicolai Petro is among the most knowledgable academics writing about Ukraine, where he has lived, off and on, for the past ten years. Nicolai is not given to taking the side of Russia, the U.S. or Ukraine, but believes intensely that a lasting peace will require a deep and persistent dialogue among all three countries.

Read and take in Nicolai’s points of view, ask your colleagues and friends what they think about this seemingly intractable situation. If anyone comes up with a great idea, share it with us!

Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives

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Hello CCI Friends,

A most unusual article has been written by one of America’s top PhD Academics, Stephen Kinzer of Brown University. It seems that our NATO partners are beginning to feel responsible for the malevolent abuse their countrymen have done to natives in many countries of the world.

Isn’t it time we in America started looking at ourselves with the same scrutiny, since no doubt we have been, and still are, the world leaders in these kinds of immoral and tragic behaviors. How long can we look at our own “woke” mentality in the U.S. without taking it outside of our borders to places of torture, mass murder, and disadvantaging whole populations for generations in order to get bananas, coffee and many other products for a nickel a pound. We’ve now overturned legitimate elections in some 80 countries. Have we ever said we are sorry to any of them?

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Dear CCI Friends,

On July 8 we received an article by David L. Phillips on “Confronting China and Russia.” Phillips is the Director of Peacebuilding and Human Rights at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University. I wrote him immediately and sent the piece to a select group of CCI professionals. They were as puzzled as I how anyone working in Peacebuilding and Human Rights could author this piece.

Our nationally-respected attorney, Sylvia Demarest, took the time to address the totality of this article. Below is her letter to Mr. Phillips including where the U.S. and Russia find themselves today. I asked Sylvia if CCI could send this piece to you… she allowed. You may send it to your networks if you wish.

Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives

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New York Times
June 11, 2021
By Andrew J. Bacevich

Mr. Bacevich is a veteran of the Vietnam War, a retired Army colonel, an emeritus professor at Boston University and the president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is the author of “After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed” and has written extensively on the misuse of American military power.

When The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers 50 years ago, I don’t recall giving the story much attention. As a young Army lieutenant serving in South Vietnam, I did not need a classified account of America’s reckless involvement in the war to tell me that I was participating in a misbegotten enterprise. Abundant evidence was in plain sight.

In the field, a dangerous and elusive enemy lurked. Hardly less dangerous were pathologies imported from a radicalized and bitterly divided home front: drug use, a poisonous racial climate and contempt for authority. Equally disturbing was the average G.I.’s palpably low regard for the Vietnamese people on whose behalf we were ostensibly fighting.

In the ensuing decades, my appreciation for the revelations of the Pentagon Papers has grown. The portrait of fallible policymakers at the highest levels of government rendering judgments based on little more than ill-informed conjecture, while concealing their ignorance behind a veil of secrecy, has lost little of its ability to shock.

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