Family Security Matters Briefings - Week of 6/23/08

Fighting Near the Shores of Tripoli: Lebanon's, Not Libya's
By W. Thomas Smith, Jr.

Over the weekend, we received word that fighting was taking place in-and-around the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, not far from where last year's fighting took place between the Lebanese Army and the Al-Qaeda affiliate group Fatah Al Islam in the bloody battle of Nahr al-Bared. The current fighting, which is now being widely reported throughout the Western media, is between pro-democracy Sunnis and pro-Syrian Alawites (allied to Hezbollah). [more...]


Justice Scalia on Gitmo Terror Ruling: It Endangers American Lives
By Joel Himelfarb

Justice Antonin Scalia offered a chilling observation about last week's 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that terror suspects currently being held at Guantanamo Bay have a constitutional right to challenge their detention in federal court. The decision, which is based on a fundamental misreading of the Constitution and existing case law, "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed," Scalia wrote in a blistering dissent, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. [more...]


Iraq War - Don't Snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory
By KT McFarland

Isn't it extraordinary how quickly the Iraq War has faded from the headlines? Nowadays, the only thing the media covers on Iraq is what happened several years ago - claiming it was a mistake to invade in 2003, that the Bush administration misstated the case for going to war, that the Rumsfeld civilian and military team badly mismanaged the occupation.

Those charges may or may not be true, but we won't know for sure until the historians have taken over from the journalists and politicians in analyzing the early years of the war. The crucial question with Iraq is not what happened five years ago, but what should we do next? What are our options in Iraq going forward? [more...]


More Discouraging News from Around the Troubled African Horn
By J.Peter Pham, PhD

Even by the much-reduced expectations of the subregion, the news emanating from the geopolitically-sensitive, but ever-volatile Horn of Africa has not been at all good these last few weeks. Last week, the United Nations special envoy for Darfur, Swedish diplomat Jan Eliasson, and his African Union counterpart, Tanzanian diplomat Salim Ahmed Salim, admitted that their efforts to resolve what the UN itself has termed "the world's worst humanitarian crisis" were on the verge of collapse. [more...]