How do you convince military planners to prepare detailed plans for a nuclear attack against a non-nuclear nation, without having them think you are a madman? Use the dachshund principle, as illustrated by this old story: A small boy asked his father how wireless...
A Feast of Scandal
I'm thankful for so many things this Thanksgiving that it's going to take me an entire column just to adequately describe them. Indeed, I'm already so loaded down with gifts that I don't need Christmas. My cup runneth over! For an old libertarian "isolationist" like...
American Ziggurats
Bertolt Brecht wrote this of empire long ago: "Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books are filled with names of kings. Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? And Babylon, so many times destroyed. Who built the city up each time? … In the...
Beginning of the End
This Thanksgiving, those of us who look forward to the possibility of a future in which war is more often averted than anticipated with relish, enhancing the chances for peace and the freedom that flourishes best in an atmosphere of peace, have a great deal to be...
Backtalk, November 25, 2005
'A Conspiracy So Vast…'Great article at Antiwar.com!I was wondering if you have read about the Judy Miller 9/11 attack warnings that were never published (except indirectly as shown below).In July of 2001 Judy Miller had top secret intelligence that a major...
Beyond That Memo: Bush Wanted al-Jazeera Gone
On Nov. 22, Britain's Daily Mirror published a startling allegation: In an April 2004 White House meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush proposed bombing the Arab TV network al-Jazeera's international headquarters in Qatar. The report was based...
Life Goes On in Fallujah’s Rubble
A year after the U.S.-led "Operation Phantom Fury" damaged or destroyed 36,000 homes, 60 schools, and 65 mosques in Fallujah, Iraq, residents inside the city continue to suffer from lack of compensation, slow reconstruction, and high rates of illness. The...
From Cairo, Hope
The surprising degree of consensus reached by the main Iraqi factions at the Arab League-orchestrated Reconciliation Conference in Cairo last weekend sharply undercuts the unilateral, guns-and-puppets approach of the Bush administration to the deteriorating situation...
The Zarqawi Dilemma
This week, there was a brief glimmer of hope that U.S. forces might have killed the most wanted man in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. For many, Zarqawi has come to represent the Iraqi insurgency. Indeed, his stature in the eyes of the Bush administration is equal to...
Bush: The Lord North of Today
Since I've been spending so much time in recent months reading and writing about President George W. Bush, his neoconservative advisers, and the mess in Iraq, I decided to take some time off these current topics and read a very well-written and well-researched life...