Month: March 2004

I suppose you could make a case, and in fact not a bad one, that the bombings of hotels and attacks on hotels and patrols in Basra, Baghdad, Falluja and Baquba should be viewed in some context. Even if things were going reasonably well, we could have expected opposition forces to be able to muster … Continue reading “A Year On: Time to Change Course”

Amnesty International is expressing “serious concerns” about reports that least 20 people have been killed and hundreds of Syrian Kurds arrested by security forces since clashes broke out at a football match in the largely Kurdish town of Qamishli last Friday. Unrest spread to several other northeastern cities where Kurdish demonstrators clashed with security forces … Continue reading “Syria’s Treatment of Kurds Sparks Concern”

Pakistan is grappling with local resistance as it presses tribesmen along the Afghan border to hand over people accused of harboring foreign militants, in an effort that coincides with a major U.S. offensive aimed at nabbing al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Afghanistan. The deaths in a firefight Tuesday that left 40 people dead, including 16 … Continue reading “Pakistan Courts Resentment as it Seeks Tribal Militants”

A group representing reporters and editors at Spain’s state-run news agency, EFE, says the agency knew about evidence pointing to involvement by Islamic terrorists in the Mar. 11 train bombings in Madrid that very morning, but kept it under wraps due to pressure from the government of Prime Minister José María Aznar. “EFE knew, from … Continue reading “Silencing the Truth About the Attacks in Spain”

During the five-hour debate on this resolution, Congressman Paul was not given an opportunity to speak, even though he is a fairly senior member of the House International Affairs Committee. Much more junior member of the committee, Kathryn Harris of Florida, was given two opportunities to speak on the issue. Clearly, the GOP leadership did … Continue reading “Praise the Troops, Not the War”

For neo-conservative and other right-wing US hawks, Madrid has suddenly become Munich in 1938 and Spain’s Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. In an extraordinarily unanimous campaign, newspaper columnists and television commentators are flooding the media with cries of “appeasement,” the dreaded epithet with which Chamberlain was permanently … Continue reading “Madrid 2004 = Munich 1938? Not Even Close”

On March 9, the all-but-official Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry told a group of supporters after a speech in Illinois that he had never had to deal with such "lying and crookedness." He did not specify about whom he was speaking, but outraged Republican leaders assumed, probably correctly, that he was referring to the Bush … Continue reading “Untruth And Consequences”

One of the clichés one hears incessantly from the mouths of politicians is that we have the "best-trained, best-equipped Army" in the world. No we don’t. We have a military that is overstretched and underequipped because it has more missions than resources. We have a military that is suffering from a leadership crisis. We have … Continue reading “This Cliché Is A Lie”

The terrorist attacks in Spain and the resulting meltdown of the pro-Bush regime in Madrid, along with the ongoing implosion of the occupation in Iraq, are currently the stuff of headlines. Little attention is paid to developments in the Balkans, which continue to challenge policy assumptions and ideological trappings of both the “humanitarian hegemony” of … Continue reading “Notes on the Margin”

The neocons wanted a new world war – and now they have it. That is the meaning of the Madrid attacks, in which 201 people were killed and over a thousand wounded, for which Al Qaeda has taken responsibility. In the run-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the neoconservative network – which had … Continue reading “The Meaning of Madrid”