Month: June 2005

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 felt some anxiety flying into Tehran alone at 4 … Continue reading “Along An Imaginary Axis: Iran from the Inside”

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 increasingly outspoken in recent weeks. Their latest broadside comes in the form of … Continue reading “‘Realists’ Press for Bush to Engage Iran, North Korea”

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 parked outside his house, and was likely to have been detonated by remote control. … Continue reading “Murder of Lebanese Journalist Points to Rising Crisis”

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 sandpaper, raspy and urgent. Wayne Morse did not resort … Continue reading “War Made Easy: From Vietnam to Iraq”

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 a campaign of unprovoked assaults and unprecedented … Continue reading “Nancy Pelosi as ‘Winged Victory’”

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. I could fill a book with the untruths he … Continue reading “Bush: Still Hazy After All These Years”

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 have materialized. The conference, the second review since the NPT was indefinitely … Continue reading “World Cannot Afford Failure on the Nuclear Front”

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 field that Western oil companies think is not worth exploiting? Have a Shinto shrine and … Continue reading “The Dragon and the Chrysanthemum”

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 center of the greatest powers of the day. At different times, … Continue reading “Civilized Nations Respect the Dead”

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 or reduce forces at 62 major bases and nearly 800 minor … Continue reading “Bases, Bases Everywhere”