Month: September 2006

Are the Sunni leaders in Iraq’s Anbar province finally coming around to joining the U.S. counterinsurgency war? That’s how the New York Times portrayed the situation last week. In an article published Sept. 18, Times reporters quoted a Sunni tribal leader in Anbar as saying that 25 of 31 tribes in the province had banded … Continue reading “US Writes Sunni Resistance Out of Anbar Story”

The author of the 2,300-year-old treatise The Art of War, Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, warned, "If you know yourself but not your enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat." To be sure, we have had victories in the war on terrorism: Mohammed Atef, believed to have been al-Qaeda’s military commander, was … Continue reading “Know Thine Enemy”

The Bush administration’s international lawlessness did not come from nowhere. Its intellectual foundations were laid long before 9/11 by neoconservative intellectuals such as United Nations Ambassador John Bolton. Now, with his Senate renomination hanging by a thread, he should be outed as a primary architect of the neocon nest at American Enterprise Institute. At the … Continue reading “John Bolton and
US Lawlessness”

MOSCOW – A year after elections, little promise is in sight for the development of free and independent media in the autonomous republic of Chechnya. The republic under President Alu Alkhanov continues to suppress the few remaining opposition media, while any new ones are prevented from coming up. "The media are severely hampered, not only … Continue reading “Press Freedom Another Casualty in Chechnya”

With the U.S. intelligence community agreed that the invasion and occupation of Iraq have made this country less safe from terrorist threats, President George W. Bush appears now to be facing a growing revolt among top military commanders who say U.S. ground forces are stretched close to the breaking point. According to Monday’s Los Angeles … Continue reading “Iraq, Overstretched Army Bring Bush New Grief”

LONDON – There have been critics enough of the U.S.-led military actions under way in Afghanistan, but now military commanders too have begun to question just what they are doing in Afghanistan. Most prominently, an officer who was an aide to the British forces in Helmand, the southern district of Afghanistan that has witnessed the … Continue reading “UK Officer: Afghanistan Policy ‘Barking Mad’”

John D. Negroponte, President Bush’s director of national intelligence, is now busy undermining a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that the U.S. invasion of Iraq has worsened radical Islamic terrorism around the world. He previously had approved the document. According to the New York Times, the highly classified estimate, a consensus view of the 16 … Continue reading “Negroponte Tries to Cloud Terror Report”

The neoconservative Bush administration will attack Iran with tactical nuclear weapons, because it is the only way the neocons believe they can rescue their goal of U.S. (and Israeli) hegemony in the Middle East. The U.S. has lost the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Generals in both war theaters are stating their need for … Continue reading “Why Bush Will Nuke Iran”

“To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.” So Winston Churchill is widely quoted. Those words, however, were spoken in 1954, decades after Churchill’s voice had been the most bellicose for war in 1914 and 1939, the wars that bled and broke his beloved empire. Yet Churchill’s quote frames well the main question on the … Continue reading “Consult America – Before the Next War”

By September 2002 every would-be mover and shaker in our nation’s capital knew that Gulf War II would begin shortly after President Bush could claim, however implausibly, that international “diplomacy” had failed to get Saddam Hussein to give up his pursuit of nuclear weapons. Many of them knew that Saddam had given up his pursuit … Continue reading “Coming Soon: Gulf War III”