Search: Intelligence,Covert activity,Foreign Affairs,War (12 materials)

 

American Jihadi: Why Westerners Fight with the Islamic State

... tolerant, the open, the just and go fight for a group that represents the antithesis of such principles? Unfortunately for all those horrified by the images of beheadings and immolation, understanding this process (and more importantly the failure of the intelligence community and state department to make inroads against it) requires one to accept something most Americans cannot: that the American Dream for too many seems more myth than reality. Reality in America, if you are not able to hook into upward mobility and access privileged success, is a fairly dull and even depressing situation: studies show a disturbing percentage of Americans are born, live, and die within an incredibly small 50-mile radius. They also show that the classic parental ...

18.04.2015

America's National Security Schizophrenia

There is no stronger example of the schizophrenic nature of American foreign policy toward Russia than comparing statements written in the formal National Security Strategy (NSS) of President Obama with actual testimony given by the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. In 2010 the NSS asserted that the U.S. would endeavor to ‘build a stable, substantive, multidimensional relationship with Russia, based on mutual interests.’ What’s more, the NSS called Russia a 21st century ...

23.02.2015

U.S.-Russia Relations: The Problem of Intellectual Insincerity

... but rather as base and simple logic: America would never strive to copy another country and it most certainly does not endorse another country trying to force-influence its foreign policy. So why should Russia? It is this very simple and straightforward question that seems to never be asked by what are otherwise august media institutions and impressive political think tanks in the West. Sometimes this tendency can reach near farcical levels. When Alexei Pushkov, chairman of the Russian parliament’s ...

03.02.2015

Twisting in Our Own Tortured Noose: American Verbal Duplicity and Torture

... ‘abhorrent’ techniques used on terrorist targets after 9/11 to glean greater intelligence and information. Since that release there has been an orgy of oscillating... ... dementedly odd Americans can be about their own people, country, government, and its foreign affairs. Let's just break this down in simple terms: we are talking... ... comes to this period that is supposedly now over, the one we used to call the Global War on Terror. So the 'shock' must be to learn that the US did, you...

15.12.2014

Prisoners of Preconception: The Problems of Bias in American Intelligence

Anyone who has worked through post-mortems on the Iraq war is familiar with the pitfalls associated with ‘groupthink’ and preconceptions. Indeed, it is perhaps one of the ... ... administration not interested in counter-arguments and alternative information. Others pointed to embedded preconceptions within the Intelligence Community itself, making it impossible to jump off the analytical train once it started rolling down the track. Both ...

08.12.2014

Bears and Byzantium: How America Misreads Russian Strategic Thinking

Common complaints within Intelligence Studies about the examination of foreign intelligence communities, especially those not residing in the west, run ... ... functionality. Russian Federation Despite every effort by officials within the Russian Federation since the end of the Cold War to decry a new foreign policy strategy and to instigate new relations based on ideas of multipolarity and balanced global ...

26.11.2014

Targeted Killings Coming Back to Haunt America

While most international organizations and foreign states have made attempts to explicitly fuse drones and targeted killing to already established norms, ethics, and rules of war, the United States has focused more on drones being something of a semi-covert tool of political means. In other words, drone war is not necessarily the exact same thing as conventional war. Once you blur the line on this basic fundamental categorization ...

16.09.2014

Yemen's Special Interests, or, Horton Hears a Houthi

... happening in the north of that country since 2004, meaning there has basically been war in Yemen as long as there has been war in Iraq. Most of the world actually didn’t... ... black-and-white scenarios and ‘good guy hats’ and ‘bad guy hats’ into foreign affairs: BOTH sides were right in their descriptions. The Houthi movement was... ... almost all Americans. But given these strikes are actually being done by the American Intelligence Community, namely the CIA, in an arena where the US has not officially...

23.07.2014

Saving Lives or Saving Face? Sanctions, Russia, and the West

... single thing: NO RUSSIAN TROOPS HAVE MOVED INTO UKRAINE OR LAUNCHED ANY OFFENSIVES. Given this indisputable evidence that even intelligence and diplomatic agencies in the West admit, it seems that Russia was punished today for, well, for having its soldiers ... ... show pro-Russian rebel forces weakening, the concern in the West is that they will try to hunker down for ‘extended urban warfare.’ The irony of course is that the force in Eastern Ukraine so far responsible for hitting civilian buildings, incurring ...

17.07.2014

Washington's Perceptions about Russian and Chinese Cyber Power

... effectively against the United States in a conventional military confrontation. Indeed, many Chinese and Russian actors suggest cyber warfare is considered an obvious asymmetric instrument for balancing overwhelming US power. This latter argument is more compelling ... ... Russia? This is likely to be considerable. The United States invests heavily in cyber security and several members of the Intelligence Community work to create cyber weapons meant to preserve US military predominance. However, there are still missed ...

01.06.2014
 

Poll conducted

  1. In your opinion, what are the US long-term goals for Russia?
    U.S. wants to establish partnership relations with Russia on condition that it meets the U.S. requirements  
     33 (31%)
    U.S. wants to deter Russia’s military and political activity  
     30 (28%)
    U.S. wants to dissolve Russia  
     24 (22%)
    U.S. wants to establish alliance relations with Russia under the US conditions to rival China  
     21 (19%)
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