Many see the global economic crisis as proof that we live in one world. But as countries stumble to right the wrongs of the corporate masters of the universe, they are driving us right back to a future that looks like nothing more than a new Middle Ages, that centuries-long period of amorphous conflict from the fifth to the 15th century when city-states mattered as much as countries.
Since taking office, President Obama has made great efforts to address the "Muslim world." In his first formal international television interview, with the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya, he announced, "My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that Americans are not your enemy." Then, speaking to Turkey's parliament, he declared, "The United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam."
It has been obvious some time that the Pakistani Army has lost control over more than just the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the Swat Valley. The army has now been stripped of the main pillar of its credibility: It is no longer the only institution capable of holding the country together, despite that view being a longstanding axiom in Pakistani politics. Indeed, while some Pakistanis fret about a C.I.A., MI-6 and Afghan and Indian conspiracy to dismember Pakistan, the… more
Declaring Mexico a "failed state" has become the new mantra in Washington and among the media. Over the last two years, the country's drug wars have claimed 10,000 lives, many in grisly beheadings reminiscent of Iraq or the Afghan-Pakistan border regions. But we have been bad neighbors, too: American narco-dollars have made Mexico the main conduit for Colombian cocaine, and an estimated 90 percent of the weapons used by Mexican drug cartels come from the United States.
There is still no better theory of human motivation than Abraham
Maslow's "hierarchy of human needs." Maslow, an American psychologist
writing in the 1940s and '50s, argued that man's primary or basic needs are physiological:
food, water, sleep, shelter. Only with these needs satisfied could one move up
the pyramid toward security and employment, friendship and family, toward
self-actualization and morality. No matter what your religion, you are human
first and faithful second.
