Tag Archives: refugees

The United States of…France

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

While we have been totally focused, for the past two months, on the amount of time it takes a webpage to load on healthcare.gov, the rest of the globe appears to be continuing to spin.

And it appears to be spinning away from us.

After more than a decade of what is known as kinetic action in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, Americans are tired of being the alpha dog in the global pack. According to a poll released by the Pew organization, the public thinks that the nation does too much to solve world problems, and increasing percentages want the U.S. to “mind its own business internationally” and pay more attention to problems here at home. Continue reading →

Chemical Weapons & the Human Experience

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

The United States cannot be the policeman of the world.

We cannot hope to solve what President Barack Obama calls “sectarian complex problems.” Iraq and Afghanistan have proven that.

The United States will never fully understand or be able to orient itself to thousands of years of multi-faceted conflict in a region of the world where conflict is in the DNA.

We will never win an international war against Islamist extremism. Continue reading →

Out of Touch

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

People who travel overseas with any regularity know how difficult it is to keep up with news from the states. CNN International runs Anderson Cooper and other domestic programs, but the news inserts are for, as the name suggests, an international audience – not for traveling Americans.

One of the issues about getting domestic news outside the U.S. is the issue of internet connectivity. I am on the shores of Lake Malawi in Monkey Bay about which Wikipedia says glowingly, “there is a supermarket and a market in Monkey Bay.” There is a new ATM nearby but the internet connection is approximately dial-up speed.

Some stories came through anyway.

The increasingly dangerous civil war in Syria moved into a new phase over the weekend when two car bombs killed 46 people in Turkey in a town along the Syrian border. Continue reading →