Biden should address, not further normalize, recent airstrikes abroad
Unfortunately it’s no surprise the White House hasn’t even remarked, much less justified recent actions in Afghanistan and Somalia.
Mark Kukis is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute and Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the Minerva Schools, where he teaches government. Kukis spent a decade as a journalist before joining academia, including three years covering the American occupation of Iraq for Time magazine from 2006 to 2009. Kukis also covered the early phase of the American intervention in Afghanistan as a freelance journalist and served as a White House correspondent for United Press International. His writings have also appeared in The New Republic and Aeon, among other places. He is the author of Voices from Iraq: A People’s History, 2003-2009 (2011), an oral history of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq as told entirely by Iraqis. Kukis grew up in the Dallas area and attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied journalism and government as an undergraduate. Kukis did his doctoral work at Boston University, where he studied U.S. foreign policy and political history under Prof. Andrew Bacevich. Kukis has been an invited speaker at RAND, Princeton University and Boston University and done numerous television and radio interviews discussing the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy. He currently lives in the Boston area with his wife and daughter.
Unfortunately it’s no surprise the White House hasn’t even remarked, much less justified recent actions in Afghanistan and Somalia.
President Carter’s 4-decade-old pledge to safeguard Persian Gulf oil has bogged the US down in the Middle East.
The idea of letting Iraq veer toward mayhem without a forceful U.S. effort to stop it would be considered unethical by many. But Washington should be ready to refrain from further interventionism in Iraq nonetheless.
Concerted efforts to systematically weaken nations can no longer be considered responsible governance by national leaders.