One has to be pleased that the antiwar movement is taking shape. Finally the target isn’t just George. W. Bush and gang. Last night at a chic Manhattan fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, antiwar activists staked out the senator and vowed to do so until she changes her position on the war. Sen. Clinton released a …
Continue reading “Bird-Dogging Hillary Clinton”
On Saturday, Dec. 3, the Washington Post ran two stories about what’s happening on the ground in Iraq. The first was on the front page above the fold, "10 Marines Killed in Fallujah Blast." The second was on page A19, "Leaving Najaf, One Step at a Time." Together, they provide insight into the conundrum of …
Continue reading “A Tale of Two Cities”
Israeli politics is boiling. People rejoice: finally, it seems, the deadlock is collapsing. Amir Peretz, a young, Eastern, social-democratically oriented leader took over the petrified Labor Party from the opportunistic Shimon Peres – the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East, and later kidnapped the Israeli …
Continue reading “Democracy and Colonialism”
Typically, when faced with a problem, the first thing Bush administration officials do is reach for their dictionaries to pretzel and torture words into whatever shape best suits them. Then they declare themselves simply to be following precedent (which turns out, of course, to be whatever they’ve wanted to do all along). In this way, …
Continue reading “War Crimes Made Easy”
The 9/11 Commission, which still exists as a nonprofit foundation, recently graded the federal government’s implementation of their recommendations, and it’s a report card [.pdf] worthy of a juvenile delinquent: five Fs – and those Fs don’t mean "fine" or "fantastic." We’re talking capital-F failure, as in "massive intelligence failure," when it comes to five …
Continue reading “Putting America Last”
I listened to the president’s speech last week at the Naval Academy. It was pretty much what he has said all along. He believes that democracy can be implanted at the point of a gun and that, once implanted in Iraq, it will spread to the rest of the Middle East. He’s wrong, in my …
Continue reading “The Prospects for Democracy in Iraq”
Secretary of State Condi Rice is off to Europe to neither confirm nor to deny that the U.S. government in an operation known as rendition kidnaps people, often the wrong ones, and flies them to foreign countries to be tortured. "Trust me" is her line. According to Reuters, "Irish Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern said Rice …
Continue reading “Condi to Europe: ‘Trust Me’”
http://www.independent.org/tii/antiwar/e051206.html
The U.S. government is waging an air war in Iraq. "In recent months, the tempo of American bombing seems to have increased," Seymour Hersh reported in the Dec. 5 edition of The New Yorker. "Most of the targets appear to be in the hostile, predominantly Sunni provinces that surround Baghdad and along the Syrian border." …
Continue reading “Hidden in Plane Sight”
U.S. congressional leaders who have been touting Iraq’s new "free press" as a sign of progress in the troubled country are upset at the Pentagon’s admission last week that it has been paying for "good news" stories written by the military and placed in Iraqi media by a Washington-based public relations firm. In a briefing …
Continue reading “The Bad News Is That the Good News Is Fake” 
