It’s quite common to see western foreign policy labelled as “mistaken” or a “failure”. A recent article by the respected writer and professor of economics Rodrigue Tremblay, for example, was titled “US Policy of Isolating Russia and Expanding NATO Is a Dismal Failure,” and the equally respected historian Mark Curtis wrote this:
Since the US-sponsored peace negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel recommenced last summer, Israeli forces have: authorised the approval of several thousand illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories; launched the construction of twice as many illegal housing units as in the previous year;
Geo-politically important Sri Lanka is among several countries, including Syria, under scrutiny at the 25th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva (March 3-28).
Have you ever been caught tapping a friend’s phone calls? Called out for the exploitative maltreatment your employees? Are you a multi-billionaire prone to going through the pockets of black youth in the hopes of finding marijuana?
Consider talking about your concern for the environment, particularly the effects of climate change. Leading governments, corporations, and political figures under fire for civil and human rights violations are giving it a whirl.
Greening Injustice
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is still one of the most powerful lobby organizations in the country, but fortunately, it is starting to lose its iron-clad grip on our policymakers. AIPAC lost the fight to stop Chuck Hagel from being confirmed as Secretary of Defense; it lost the push for the US military to attack Syria, and it is losing its effort to derail nuclear talks with Iran.
On February 29, 2004 the US, France, and Canada overthrew Haiti’s elected government.
As my first two articles in this series outlined,1 Ottawa helped plan the coup and was heavily implicated in the human rights disaster that followed.
The recent two-day first official visit in forty years by an Egyptian defense minister to Russia of Egypt’s strongman Field Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, accompanied by Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy, was indeed an historic breakthrough in bilateral relations, but it is still premature to deal with or build on it as a strategic shift away from the country’s more than three-decade strategic alliance with the United States.
Bill Keller, editorialist for the NY Times and former executive editor of the paper, has recently penned a strong attack on Vladimir Putin arguing that Putin’s leadership “deliberately distances Russia from the socially and culturally liberal West”, describing the Kremlin’s policies as “laws giving official sanction to the terrorizing of gays and lesbians, the jailing of members of a punk protest group for offenses against the Russian Orthodox Church, the demonizing of Western-backed pro-democracy organizat
