In 1215, disgruntled English barons unwittingly won a great victory for Western liberty. After King John waged several unsuccessful, senseless wars, the barons, sick of financing wars in which they had no interest, temporarily ended John's despotism by forcing him to...
Vast (but Empty) Hide-Out of Iraqi Rebels Found Thanks to Antiwar.com for the parenthetical "empty" inserted into the N.Y. Times' hyped headline regarding the "vast" (well, ok, a quarter of a skyscraper's worth, anyway) underground insurgent hideaway. Such a facility...
You wouldn't know it from the media focus on Deep Throat last week, but the lies that Richard Nixon told about the Watergate break-in were part of his standard duplicity for the Vietnam War. It wasn't just that the Nixon administration engaged in secret illegal...
The discovery of a labyrinth of underground bunkers used by the insurgency – complete with air-conditioning, shower facilities, and furnished living space – in western Iraq yielded a rich arsenal of sophisticated weaponry, including: "Mortars, rockets,...
Even if Undersecretary of State John Bolton isn't our next ambassador to the United Nations, he already has a legacy. At the recently concluded Review Conference for the Treaty on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, his underlings managed to seriously undermine both...
While Israel's new chief of staff, Air Force General Dan Halutz, was assuming his new job, I stood with a group of demonstrators at the gate of the General Staff building to protest against his appointment. Our slogan was: "You have blood on your wings!" – a...
Afghanistan: An Imperial DilemmaI am reassured by Alan Bock's response. Perhaps he would understand my sharp reaction if he were to consider the following:Back in the 1950s, my father was Afghan ambassador to the United States. Therefore, I spent seven years of my...
Slowly, it seems, all my sources are dying. The latest death is in the northern oil rich city of Kirkuk, where there have been a number of attacks on non-Kurdish members of the City Council. I get a terrible sickening feeling when I read about the assassination...
Less than a year ago John Kerry declared that if elected president, his first priority would be preventing nuclear weapons proliferation. George Bush immediately rejoined that preventing the proliferation of "weapons of mass destruction" was high on his priority list,...
In my non-Tomdispatch life as a book editor, I used to have a modest dream. Every season, editors like me send the galleys of books they're publishing off, en masse, to likely blurbees, who will, if all goes well, reach for their thesauruses, gather their adjectives...
