In 2002, President Bush indicted Iran as a member of an "axis of evil." What I found in Iran during my ten-day visit with a Global Exchange delegation in April makes this pronouncement sound ridiculously foolish as well as just plain false. I confess that I...
‘Realists’ Press for Bush to Engage Iran, North Korea
Hawks in the administration of President George W. Bush may think that they are tough, but their dreams of "regime change" in Iran and North Korea are increasingly deluded, not to say dangerous, according to their hard-edged realist rivals who have become...
Murder of Lebanese Journalist Points to Rising Crisis
BEIRUT - The prominent anti-Syrian journalist Samir Kassir was killed in a car explosion in a Christian residential neighborhood of Beirut Thursday morning, in an attack that drew widespread condemnation. The bomb was placed under the driver's seat of Kassir's car...
War Made Easy: From Vietnam to Iraq
On February 27, 1968, I sat in a small room on Capitol Hill. Around a long table, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was in session, taking testimony from an administration official. Most of all, I remember a man with a push-broom moustache and a voice like...
Nancy Pelosi as ‘Winged Victory’
The news that war is good for your mental health should confirm, once and for all, that we are truly living in Bizarro World – a universe of inverted values and the upside-down laws of a very unnatural nature. This explains why the U.S. government has engaged in...
Bush: Still Hazy After All These Years
Memo to: Andrew Card, White House chief of staff Re: Briefing your boss Just for the record, Andrew, as much as I have disagreed with the administration's foreign policy these past four years, I have never accused the president of telling lies to the American people....
World Cannot Afford Failure on the Nuclear Front
With the seventh Review Conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) ending in abysmal failure late last week at the United Nations, the worst fears about a tiny number of influential states holding the rest of the world hostage to their narrow interests...
The Dragon and the Chrysanthemum
At first glance, the growing tension between China and Japan seems almost inexplicable. Massive anti-Japanese demonstrations in China over events that took place more than half a century ago? A heated exchange filled with mutual threats over an offshore petroleum...
Civilized Nations Respect the Dead
Many historians consider Mesopotamia to be the cradle of civilization. Writing was invented here. The great Hammurabi's Code of Laws was first engraved here. This was the birthplace of Abraham, father of the Jews and the Arabs. The territory now called Iraq was the...
Bases, Bases Everywhere
The last few weeks have been base-heavy ones in the news. The Pentagon's provisional Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) list, the first in a decade, was published to domestic screams of pain. It represents, according to the Washington Post, "a sweeping plan to close...