Richard Clarke was right. So was Paul O'Neill. During the six months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration paid little attention to the threat from al-Qaeda and instead set the stage for a war with Iraq. Two weeks before the 9/11 terrorist...
Phase II of the Anti-Occupation Revolt Begins
The always tense relationship between the Sadrist movement among Iraqi Shiites and the US and its Coalition partners has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Perhaps a third of Iraqi Shiites are sympathetic to the radical, Khomeini-like ideology of Sadrism, and some...
Chinese Generalizations
In my last column, I made some broad generalizations about Chinese and China. One of the points of the column was to show that Chinese businessmen make decisions based on guanxi. Any businessman – or any foreigner for that matter – has a collection of...
Does the US Have the Will to Win?
Would that mob in Fallujah have dared treat the security men of Saddam the way they treated those Americans? Would they have danced and shouted, "Death to Saddam," as they did "Death to Bush"? No way. For every one in those TV pictures and photos would now be in an...
Israel's Isolation – and America's Bush can't see the connections between the US and Israel because he doesn't want to see the connections or just doesn't care and it certainly doesn't help that Sharon has the US Congress in his pocket too. How many years have we...
Thought Control for Middle East Studies
A band of neoconservative pundits with close ties to Israel have mounted a campaign against American scholars who study the Middle East. Martin Kramer, an Israeli-American and former director of the Dayan Center for Middle East Studies at Tel-Aviv University, has led...
Revering the Big Men
Many Chinese revere Hitler. This may seem unfathomably irrational to Europeans, especially when coupled with the intense dislike most Chinese have for all things Japanese, but it fits in with the Revere the Big Man Effect that dominates vast aspects of Chinese...
Remembering Afghanistan
The hype surrounding the 9/11 Commission and Richard Clarke’s testimony is mostly superficial and overly partisan. Americans argue whether George W. Bush or Bill Clinton was the stronger president against terrorism, when in fact neither did anything to stop al...
Long Live NATO
The cold war is long over, but with the support of U.S. supremacists in both parties NATO lives on as America's global cop. Seven more nations are joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and three more Central European nations have their applications...
Rummy’s Rules for War
WASHINGTON – Just before Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified before the 9-11 Commission last week, reporters were handed his prepared statement. Unlike statements by other witnesses during the hearings, his came with an attachment – a stack of papers...