Retired General Visits Cincinnati, Talks ISIS Huy Nguyen April 8, 2014 | The News Record As the global ISIS threat continues, Retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton arrived in Cincinnati April 1 to address how exactly ISIS began and what America can do to stop it. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh, continues to rampage through the Middle East, dismantling families and government institutions. Within four months after its rise in June of 2014, ISIS had murdered over 5,500 people, according to Newsweek. Just this Tuesday, it was discovered that a mass grave in Tikrit exceeded 3,000 victims, Newsweek reported. Eaton attended a dinner in Xavier University’s Conaton Board Room led by the Foreign Policy Leadership Council in… Read More ›

Misunderstanding Wars in Yemen, Vietnam, and Yemen Once Again By J. Dana Stuster, NSN Policy Analyst April 6, 2015 | Foreign Policy There’s an moment in the 2003 documentary The Fog of War in which former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara lays out what he got wrong in Vietnam. “We saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War,” he says. “Not what they [the Vietnamese] saw it as: a civil war.” I thought of that the other day as I listened to Adam Baron, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, talking about the Saudi intervention in Yemen. “This is treated as a sectarian battle between Iran-backed Shia and Saudi Arabia-backed Sunnis, but really when you look at the essence of Yemen’s… Read More ›

Sen. Corker’s Iran Legislation: A Bad Bill Beyond Repair April 13, 2015 Tomorrow, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is expected to mark up the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, a bill proposed by Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ). The bill has been percolating in Congress for months and has been described as a reasonable alternative to sanctions legislation that would derail the P5+1 Iranian nuclear negotiations. However, Sen. Corker’s legislation contains a litany of provisions that would move the goalposts on an agreement and make any deal – even a good deal – almost impossible to implement. Some senators are expected to propose several amendments tomorrow to try to rectify some of these concerns, while Republican members plan on… Read More ›

Dr. Bruce Jentleson, NSN board member and Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University, had this to say about the Corker-Menendez bill working its way through the Senate: But in the name of preventing a bad deal, the Corker-Menendez bill weaves a procedural spider web for congressional review and includes a poison pill provision that hinders, rather than helps, getting a good deal. The procedural web starts with a five-day initial reporting requirement for the June comprehensive agreement, including full analysis of its components and a verification assessment. Even for less complex international agreements, it usually takes at least a month for all elements to be analyzed and the reliability of verification to be assessed by State Department, intelligence community and other… Read More ›

The National Security Network (NSN) is pleased to announce that NSN Founder Rand Beers has rejoined the organization as a member of the Advisory Board. Rand founded NSN in 2006 and was most recently the Deputy Assistant to the President for Homeland Security after previously having served as acting Secretary of Homeland Security in 2013. Rand brings decades of government leadership and expertise in counter-terrorism issues to his new role as an NSN Advisory Board Member.     Read More ›