Month: January 2006

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 by the high-ranking national security officials who brought us the … Continue reading “Cooking the Books:
A Requirement for Aggressive War”

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 the north together in government. "We struggled together against dictatorship, … Continue reading “Quarrels Overshadow Talk of Iraq Consensus”

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 military-industrial complex. It reached its constraint-less apogee with Richard … Continue reading “A Cult of Presidential Power”

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. soldiers in March (the current force size is about 138,000). But (with apologies to … Continue reading “Troop Reduction Legerdemain”

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) has been all over the media, but less noted is … Continue reading “‘Good News’ From Iraq”

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 Monday by the Military Times. The survey, the third in an annual series, found that approval … Continue reading “Military Confidence in Bush Hits New Low”

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 bases for air strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites. Over the … Continue reading “Time to Talk to Tehran”

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). So let me put my credibility … Continue reading “US Headed for Confrontation With Iran”

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 play out in Iraq. Two … Continue reading “The New Iraq War Strategy”

[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 appreciate it (and to catch the parties … Continue reading “The Political Folly Awards of 2005”