World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

Members of the Sunni Islamist group, the Islamic Army of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have now taken control of 4 Iraqi cities.  In a further blow to the Iraqi government, it appears as if the Iraqi military surrendered the cities without much of a fight.   Reports indicate that ISIS now has control of huge caches of military equipment, including state-of-the-art US Blackhawk and Apache helicopters (although it is not clear that ISIS knows how to fly them).  Additionally, ISIS forces took control of large amounts of money from government offices and banks.  ISIS now ranks as a formidable military and political force in the region.  It is a perverse turn of events, all precipitated by the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 for the explicit purpose of denying militants access to Iraqi resources.

In response to the armed attack on the Karachi airport, the US used drones to kill presumed militants in the Iraqi area of North Waziristan.   Apparently, the Pakistani military is planning an offensive in the region which is a stronghold for the Pakistani Taliban.  It is not clear how the drone stikes are an effective response since the attack on the Karachi airport was hailed by the Pakistan militants as a response to an earlier drone strike that killed its leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, last November.

One of the most indefensible assumptions of world politics is the distinction between domestic and foreign politics.  That distinction is virtually meaningless in economic terms, as it is now impossible to identify the national identity of most large multinational corporations (or where they store their money).  But the distinction is also becoming blurred in the area of security as local police forces take on a lot of the equipment usually associated with national armies.  The New York Times has a very troubling story on how police forces across the US are arming themselves in ways that give local forces overwhelming firepower, leading to a strong separation of security capabilities with the security threats mostly associated with local populations.