The controversy over "cooking the books" on Iraq intelligence to promote an aggressive war might make one think that Dick Cheney and his minions were somehow breaking new ground. But the precedent for fabricating a threat to justify the use of military force was set...
Cooking the Books:
Quarrels Overshadow Talk of Iraq Consensus
ARBIL - Clasping his hands together in a sign of unity, a cheerful Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Shia-dominated United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), entered the hall in this Kurdish city amid applause. Al-Hakim was here to bring Shia groups from the south and Kurds from...
A Cult of Presidential Power
As 2006 begins, we seem to be at a not completely unfamiliar crossroads in the long history of the American imperial presidency. It grew up, shedding presidential constraints, in the post-World War II years as part of the rise of the national security state and the...
Troop Reduction Legerdemain
Just before Christmas, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld signaled the possible beginning of U.S. troop reductions in Iraq when he announced that two brigades scheduled for combat tours would not be deployed and that troop levels might fall below 130,000 U.S....
‘Good News’ From Iraq
The news that the Lincoln Group, a heretofore obscure public relations firm owned and operated by GOP hacks, has been planting "good news from Iraq" stories in the Iraqi media (and now even paying Sunni Muslim clerics to get on board the "democracy" choo-choo train)...
Military Confidence in Bush Hits New Low
Although morale among members of the professional corps of the U.S. military remains generally high, the military's confidence in President George W. Bush and other civilian government leaders slipped substantially during 2005, according to a major new survey released...
Time to Talk to Tehran
Does President Bush intend a preventive war, early this year, to effect the nuclear castration of Iran? Or are we rattling sabers? What makes the question urgent are German reports that CIA Director Porter Goss has been in Ankara, Turkey, negotiating for U.S. use of...
US Headed for Confrontation With Iran
I've been embarrassed a few times in the past with my predictions (for example, that it was going to be U.S. President John Kerry in 2004), but I've also been right on a few occasions (for example, my book, Quagmire: America in the Middle East, was published in 1992)....
The New Iraq War Strategy
Seymour Hersh's latest article in the New Yorker is over a month old by now, and therefore would seem a little like old news. But like so much of his reporting, Hersh's article contains at least a few nuggets that ripen with time and take on more importance as events...
The Political Folly Awards of 2005
[Note to readers: TomDispatch returns in the New Year full of hope and with as complete an account as possible of the Political Folly Awards of 2005, sponsored, of course, by the full TomDispatch team. It was a resplendent event – you had to be there to fully...