Month: July 2002

If, twelve years ago, someone had written a book about the Balkans wars that contained even a tenth of what has actually happened since, they’d have been laughed right out of every publishing house in the world. Truth, as Mark Twain remarked, really is stranger than fiction. That, alas, does not prevent so many events … Continue reading “Pulp Reality”

The controversy over the fourth of July gunman at LAX, Hashem Mohamed Hadayet, known as "Ali," is typical of any issue involving Israel. Since it advances Israel’s interests to maintain that Hadayet was part of a larger terrorist operation, a footsoldier in a worldwide Islamofascist network, then it must be true. Which is why Israeli … Continue reading “A MATTER OF FACT”

The night is rounding down and my friend downs the rest of his beer, takes a slow look around the emptying club and announces: “I’m gonna get me a xiaojie!” (little sister/one-night lover) He whispers and chuckles the finer points of xiaojie hunting to me as we exit the club along with similarly conspiring well-dressed … Continue reading “Protection”

As the Afghan campaign devolves into what University of California political science professor emeritus Chalmers Johnson told me is something of a “phony war” in which the U.S. blunders without a plan and gets drawn in deeper, the imminent war against Iraq is starting to draw some mild second thoughts. This is all to the … Continue reading “Iraqi Warmonger Complications”

You would think that a spy scandal such as was reported by FBI wiretap translator Sibel Edmonds would rate mile-high headlines. So far, however, the coverage of this story has been limited to the Washington Post and … here. Edmonds claims that one of her fellow translators met with a government official of a foreign … Continue reading “9/11 – REVISED EDITION”

Last week found me standing on a Sussex beach, lost in my own thoughts, staring out towards the channel and (presumably) France beyond. I had come, on a whim, onto the small village of Rottingdean, sometime home to Max Boot’s hero, so as to be beside the sea after a trip to Lewes. Like all … Continue reading “My Day at the Seaside”

I do not mean, by the odd title I have chosen, to suggest there are no war powers, plural, to be found in this fair land of freedom. Far from it. “There’s a lot of it about,” as the Brits were saying a decade ago, even if no one quite knew what that phrase meant. … Continue reading “Show Us the ‘War Power’!”

The retiring and the designated Israeli Chiefs-of-Staff sound like twins: both Shaul Mofaz and Moshe Yaalon insist that the next war is inevitable. – Yet another war? Yes: the re-occupation of the West Bank has not satiated the junta’s desires at all. In fact, the on-going war on the Palestinians, with its clear genocidal features, … Continue reading “The New World Order and the Stone Age”

The neocons are up in arms – one of their own has been fired from his position as a "journalist" at the Voice of America and may be on his way to becoming the Mumia Abu Jamal of the War Party. The cause of Stephen Schwartz, a writer formerly known as "Comrade Sandalio," has been … Continue reading “THE VOA FOLLIES”

It may have slipped in under the radar by now that the United States vetoed an extension of the UN mission in Bosnia this weekend, since the UN could not be blackmailed into granting US troops immunity from the new International Criminal Court. Since the Security Council refused to compromise, and the threat of veto … Continue reading “Bosnia As Chump Change”