Peter Crowley

If a hegemonic power wants to purportedly build a democracy and "liberate" a people, it would do well to listen to what the people say. On January 4th, the Iraqi Parliament voted for US troops to leave the country. The State Department has already rejected this request; instead, seeking to reestablish the US’s strategic partnership … Continue reading “Iranian Influence in Iraq May Not Be a Bad Thing”

After 40 years of mutual mistrust and failed efforts to achieve a lasting détente, regime change advocates, AIPAC and neoconservatives may finally get what they want: a U.S. war with Iran. Currently Iran is one of the most educated nations in the Middle East, where 60% percent of college students are women, of whom 68% … Continue reading “No War With Iran”

Jamal Khashoggi’s death has captured the American news cycle for nearly two months. During this time, we have seen Saudi Arabia try to unsuccessfully try to bury the story, conduct their own "investigation" and, ultimately, determine that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) had nothing to do with it. President Donald Trump buys the Saudi … Continue reading “Khashoggi Media Sensation, MBS, and Yemen Silence”

The excuse is Iran’s alleged support for the Houthis. The rationalizer is Saudi Arabia. The internal threat is both real and perceived socioeconomic change in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi regime’s survival mechanism has been to transmute social anxiety into heightened hostility and project it onto Iran. The result has been the mass bombing and starvation … Continue reading “Saudis Destroying Yemen To Distract Oppressed Population”

Hopefully we will never reap what we sow. The state violence that the U.S. has incurred on other nations has been unparalleled since World War II. The Vietnam War caused two million-plus civilian deaths to prevent a Soviet ally from burgeoning in Southeast Asia. Latin American interventions during the 1980s on behalf of right-wing dictators … Continue reading “On Reaping What We Sow, Civilian Deaths and the Syrian Airstrikes”

Stand at attention! The flag and its song now chime amidst the sky’s red glare. Hats to our chest, we stand in ‘democratic’ subordination to the king and its symbols… Is it just simply the Defense Department’s dollars and the human proclivity toward the adoration of power – when an entity representing a certain group … Continue reading “American Military Worship: Beyond the Pentagon’s Pervasive Advertising”

It is hard to underestimate the paucity of objective information coming from Syria. Wars always have their propaganda machine feeding media sources, from the Israeli Army’s largely false assertions that Hamas used human shields during the 2014 Gaza War to Robert McNamara’s claim that American campaigns were leading to success in Vietnam. But rarely has … Continue reading “The Verifiable Information Vacuum From Syria”

Many of us look back on the 2015-2016 election season as a surreal time of sun-glint nightmare, in which the public was stupefied that such liars, hacks and backwardness could emerge into the top rung of American political space. Perhaps, if we think of Baudrillard’s perspective on democratic politics, the American public was well-served – … Continue reading “2016 Election and Post-Imperial America”