Month: June 2006

This may seem a bit quaint, perhaps even obsolete, but it used to be standard procedure to require intelligence before deciding to make war. Unless you have been asleep these past several months, you know that this sequence was reversed in 2002 when the White House ordered intelligence “fixed” to justify a prior decision for … Continue reading “Next Victim: Iran
or North Korea?”

In 1938, the year of Anschluss and Munich, a perceptive British Catholic looked beyond the continent over which war clouds hung and saw another cloud forming. “It has always seemed to me … probable,” wrote Hilaire Belloc, “that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the … Continue reading “An Idea Whose Time Has Come?”

The partisan war dance over Iraq began with the GOP’s "stay the course" resolution [.pdf], and now the Senate has debated – and rejected – two Democratic alternatives: one saying we ought to "redeploy" the troops to the nearest convenient location by next summer, and another committing to a "phased withdrawal" that says nothing about … Continue reading “A Plague on Both Their Houses”

[The person who runs TomDispatch is not usually the focus of this space, but I decided to make an exception and run this Nick Turse interview with me. It’s my way of announcing some TomDispatch news: All the interviews I’ve done so far for the site are to be collected into a paperback that Nation … Continue reading “The Imperial Press and Me”

Why I Won’t Renew With Amnesty InternationalWhen Mr. Henderson wrote this – “When government intervenes, the particular government officials making the decisions have very little of their own wealth on the line. They don’t get spectacularly rich if they make a good decision or spectacularly poor if they make a bad one. Therefore, they have … Continue reading “Backtalk, June 23, 2006”

At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention David Rieff Simon & Schuster 270 pp. It appears to be the season for second thoughts about American intervention in Iraq. William F. Buckley says the war was a mistake. National Review‘s John Derbyshire confesses the same error. Even Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) finally … Continue reading “Readings in the Age of Empire”

The Baghdad bureau chief of the New York Times could not have been any clearer. "The story really takes us back into the 8th century, a truly barbaric world," John Burns said. He was speaking Tuesday night on the PBS NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, describing what happened to two U.S. soldiers whose bodies had just … Continue reading “Their Barbarism, and Ours”

In a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Peter Beinart – former editor of The New Republic, who has declared that only liberals can win the war on terror (the self-proclaimed subtitle of his new book) – offers up a weak mea culpa for “mistakenly” backing the Iraq war but lauds President Clinton’s “multilateral … Continue reading “Why Liberals Can’t Win the War on Terror”

It started with a kiss. Finishing a bout of lovemaking in the back seat of Omar’s car, Adil kissed him in the moment before their bodies parted – and that’s when he heard it: a tapping on the windshield. The car was flooded with light and a veritable army of Moroccan policemen appeared to be … Continue reading “Odyssey to America”

RUWEISHID REFUGEE CAMP – A small stretch of desert, sandwiched between the borders of Jordan and Iraq, is a "no-man’s land," created by the Iraqi government’s decision to cede part of its western frontier to Jordan. It has become a place where refugees from the war in Iraq bide their time, desperate for resettlement. For … Continue reading “Kurds Stuck in No-Man’s Land”