Dear Mr. Obama

January 3, 2012

I am writing to share with you my great concern about the Defense Authorization Act, just passed by Congress and signed by you, which permits indefinite detention of American citizens.

The Central Role of Saudi Arabia to U.S. Middle East Interests

November 6, 2011

This year will long be remembered and analyzed by scholars and students for the so-called “Arab Spring” sweeping the Arab world from North Africa across to the Arabian Peninsula. Simmering tensions in a dozen countries boiled over in protests and revolts toppling several regimes – Tunisia, Egypt and Libya – and pushing others to the brink. In the Persian Gulf Iran is playing an outsized role, threatening the neighborhood: sponsoring terrorism, building nuclear weapons, and dominating the scene in Iraq as America is shown the door by Baghdad. Meanwhile, 44 years of conflict and occupation in Israel-Palestine shows no signs of a solution. Indeed the threat of an American veto to a Palestinian statehood bid in the United Nations illuminates Washington’s dilemma of balancing interests versus America’s principles.

She Opened Our Window to the World

April 16, 2011

WOW is right! The 12th Window on the World, Tennessee Tech’s annual global awareness festival that celebrates, at once, international unity and diversity was center stage on campus this weekend. The Roaden University Center, festooned with scores of country flags that symbolize the origins of many Tech students and faculty, was filled with hundreds of people working and thousands of people visiting the music and dance performances, art displays, shopping kiosks, food courts, children’s activities, and country table displays. The atmosphere, as always, was electric as people moved about to take it all in – to enjoy it all and to learn something about every corner of the world.

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Tennessee Pride Runs Deep

April 10, 2011

As a land-locked state, Tennessee doesn’t strike most people as having a deep Navy tradition. But they would be wrong. Many men and women from the Volunteer State have served as American Bluejackets and many ships have carried the names of Tennessee cities, counties, and the State itself. It was the third ship named USS Tennessee that survived the devastating blow at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 to be repaired and serve with great distinction through to the end of the war, participating in most of the greatest naval battles fought.

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Foreign Policy and War On The Fly

March 26, 2011

The tide of revolt that has swept the Arab World in the last two months has been stunning in scope, intensity and importance. From the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf autocratic regimes have been shaken and some have fallen in an historic reformation of how Arab countries will manage their affairs. This transformation, dubbed an “Arab Spring,” has also stunned foreign policy making institutions in the United States as America’s values and interests are increasingly at odds with each other.

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At the Tipping Point in the Arab World

January 29, 2011

The throngs of Egyptians who have taken to the streets in the Arab world’s most populous country are shaking the foundations of regimes across North Africa and the Middle East with scant hope America will emerge from this new crisis with a winning hand, much less breaking even.

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Images of Humanity and a Night of Triumph

January 15, 2011

The images are from another place and time, grainy, black and white photos among an archive of American experiences from “back in the day” and they appear in my mind when I think about the word “polio.” One of these ancient photos is of a warehouse-sized room filled with row after row of capsules each containing a person, like some strange 1950s era sci-fi movie. Dozens of nurses in old-style uniforms and caps are buzzing around the tubes. The capsules have viewing windows, access ports, gauges and dials and at one end a pressurized seal where each patient’s head extends outside the tube. The scores of tubes in the image are iron-lungs, the much feared last resort treatment for the thousands and thousands of Americans afflicted with polio who, because of paralysis, were unable to breath on their own. Their lives were extended through the pumps that provided negative air pressure, taking over the function of their ineffective diaphragms.

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America’s Global Indifference and Looming Challenges

January 8, 2011

Indifference to global developments is not a new phenomenon in America’s public life. In recounting the story of the Council on Foreign Relations, Colorado College political scientist David Hendrickson, writing in “Foreign Affairs,” noted the relative ignorance among officials and the public about the world. Of the former he said the U.S. State Department, in the wake of World War I, lacked the “detailed knowledge of European conditions that would be required for redrawing, as fairly as could be done, the map of the world.” Of the citizenry of the day, he said “American domestic opinion was returning with a vengeance, to the insular habits that had long characterized it,” citing as evidence the “Philadelphia Record’s” comment in 1928 that, “The American people don’t give a hoot in a rainbarrel who controls north China.”

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Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things

October 26, 2010

Four minutes, fifteen seconds well spent.

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Coffee and Steel

October 10, 2010

I did go to Brooklyn Technical High School but it didn’t stick.  In other words I am not a rocket scientist although I am able to operate our K-Cup coffee machine.  However, when Fareed Zakaria, on his tremendous show GPS on CNN, talks about the Nobel Prize in Physics (Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov “for [...]

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