A Message for the New President – Stop Killing Afghanis

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Come January, President-elect Barack Obama will confront the most difficult foreign policy crisis of his administration with the region-wide-war developing in Afghanistan. If he is to succeed, the new president must immediately change the tone of U.S. engagement. He can do this by first establishing a revised set of rules by which the United States must play, stressing the rule of international law and respect for civil and human rights. The president must then initiate these rules by announcing that the first priority of U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan is the preservation of human life. In other words, stop killing Afghanis.

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A Moment that Revealed the Modern Strangeness of the Russian Conundrum

Why didn’t a new politic emerge towards Russia when the Soviet Union dissolved into individual capitalist nations at the end of the cold war?

On a trip to Moscow in 1986 under the auspices of Mark Gerzon’s Mediators Foundation, we got no further than Moscow’s Shermetyevo Airport terminal when we encountered Daniel Ellsberg, headed toward an outbound flight after consulting with the government of Mikhail Gorbachev. Attempting to reform the Soviet System, Gorbachev had invited Ellsberg and other advocates of nuclear disarmament to Moscow in the hopes of getting better ideas for dealing with the Reagan administration’s stand on the Strategic Defense Initiative and the deployment of Intermediate Nuclear Forces. In a conversation with Gerzon, Ellsberg related how he had advised his host to simply call Washington’s bluff and give them what they had asked for even though it was not in Moscow’s interest. Taking Ellsberg’s advice shortly thereafter, Gorbachev offered to remove all of Russia’s Euro missiles, exposing the American negotiating position as a fraud and infuriating Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger and Republican leaders Bob Dole and Jesse Helms. An exasperated Kissinger went so far as to condemn the Soviet disarmament move as unfair, complaining publicly that Gorbachev must have known the U.S. position was only a bluff.

For more information regarding Gorbachev’s bluff-calling see, The Power of Protest by Lawrence S. Wittner Sept. 16, 2004 on Znet

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