Foreign aid as a national security strategy
John Quiggin posted on the opportunity cost of the Iraq war recently which stimulated a fair bit of discussion.
John Quiggin posted on the opportunity cost of the Iraq war recently which stimulated a fair bit of discussion.
According to a report in The Observer yesterday (US army was told to protect looted museum), Iraq’s national museum was identified last month by the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) (the institution set up to supervise the reconstruction of postwar Iraq) as a ‘prime target for looters’.
I’m not a huge Krugman fan, but his piece, Rejecting the World, in yesterday’s New York Times is a classic. Criticising the right for stymieing what was a pretty weak plan on global warming in the first place, Krugman concludes that …
Further to my post on this topic on 31 March, there is an interesting article in the Australian Financial Review this weekend by Julie Macken, entitled So much for American cultural imperialism. Unfortunately, you have to be a subscriber to the Fin to access the full electronic edition, but here are a couple of extracts …
Former Aussie, Rupert Murdoch, is reported to have told a conference in the US that it was important the world learned to ‘respect’ America. Apparently, Murdoch reckons that Americans are unduly concerned about world opinion and that Iraqis will eventually welcome US troops as liberators. “We worry about what people think about us too much in this country” declared Rupe, “We have an inferiority complex, it seems”.
There was a very amusing piece in Guardian Unlimited yesterday. While poking fun at the ‘Saddam double’ theory, the story, Would the real George Bush please stand down, also draws attention to the skills and capabilities (or lack thereof) of the most powerful man in the world. A far less amusing piece appears in the same publication on the same day entitled McCarthy’s ghost. This is very worrying and a sign that the neo-conservatives do, indeed, wield considerable influence within the US political economy.
The Economist published an article last week entitled Bubbling up that presents a pretty gloomy outlook for the world economy.