Matt Carr
Stop the War Coalition
The two frontrunners for next year's US presidential election are both committed to the same war policies that have been so disastrous for America and the world.
If you take seriously the premise that US military power is a force for international stability and global good, then a number of events over the last two weeks ought to give pause for thought.
In Kosovo, nearly 16 years after NATO bombed Yugoslavia, UNCHR reported that 10,000 people had filed for asylum in Hungary in a single month, and as many as 20,000 Kosovars are leaving the country each month to escape poverty, corruption and unemployment.
In Libya, the executions of Coptic Christians carried out by ISIL raise the prospect of the disintegration of Libya into a ‘Somalia on the Mediterranean’.
In Afghanistan the United Nations Assistance Mission (UNAMA) announced that civilian casualties last year reached a new record. That’s on top of the still ongoing implosion of Iraq, and Syria, and Ukraine, where the US has pursued less visible ‘regime change’ policies with no less catastrophic results.
In a sane and healthy democracy this legacy of civil war, state collapse, chaos and violence ought at the very least to raise an urgent debate about the strategic viability of militarism as a foreign policy instrument.
But there is little evidence of any such criticism and self-analysis in the two frontrunners for next year’s presidential elections. Astonishingly – and depressingly – America is facing the prospect of a contest between members of the two families that governed America from 1989 to 2009, and which also presided over some of the disasters we are now witnessing.
Read more
Stop the War Coalition
The two frontrunners for next year's US presidential election are both committed to the same war policies that have been so disastrous for America and the world.
If you take seriously the premise that US military power is a force for international stability and global good, then a number of events over the last two weeks ought to give pause for thought.
In Kosovo, nearly 16 years after NATO bombed Yugoslavia, UNCHR reported that 10,000 people had filed for asylum in Hungary in a single month, and as many as 20,000 Kosovars are leaving the country each month to escape poverty, corruption and unemployment.
In Libya, the executions of Coptic Christians carried out by ISIL raise the prospect of the disintegration of Libya into a ‘Somalia on the Mediterranean’.
In Afghanistan the United Nations Assistance Mission (UNAMA) announced that civilian casualties last year reached a new record. That’s on top of the still ongoing implosion of Iraq, and Syria, and Ukraine, where the US has pursued less visible ‘regime change’ policies with no less catastrophic results.
In a sane and healthy democracy this legacy of civil war, state collapse, chaos and violence ought at the very least to raise an urgent debate about the strategic viability of militarism as a foreign policy instrument.
But there is little evidence of any such criticism and self-analysis in the two frontrunners for next year’s presidential elections. Astonishingly – and depressingly – America is facing the prospect of a contest between members of the two families that governed America from 1989 to 2009, and which also presided over some of the disasters we are now witnessing.
Read more
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