Month: September 2006

In its miniseries about the missteps that led to 9/11, ABC spared not only Bill Clinton but also George W. Bush. Our hawkish War President had almost nine months to respond to the USS Cole attack and did nothing, even as his security staff fired off memo after memo fingering Osama bin Laden and urging … Continue reading “Who Blew Off Bin Laden?”

NEW DELHI – The three bomb explosions, which ripped through a mosque and an adjoining graveyard, killing 30 people in Malegaon in India’s western state of Maharashtra on Sept. 8, have outraged the Indian public. They have also set some tough challenges before the Manmohan Singh government. Unlike most recent cases of terrorist violence in … Continue reading “Blasts Test India’s Counter-Terror Strategy”

For the War Party, deception isn’t just a tactic, or even a strategy – it’s a lifestyle. That’s why they’re indifferent to getting caught. Like a hardened criminal arrested for his umpteenth felony, the neocons see brazen lying as just a routine procedure. Caught red-handed, they just move on to their next subterfuge, one invariably … Continue reading “The Hoekstra-Harman Hoax”

During World War II, one of the Fuhrer’s favorite sayings was, “All generals lie.” Today, Washington prefers the word “spin” to lie, although the difference is often difficult to parse. As an 18th-century man, I prefer an 18th century word: puffery. If we consider some of the statements coming from our military leaders regarding the … Continue reading “General Puff”

Recently, the Washington Post, and then the New York Times, reported a top-secret assessment by the Marines’ chief of intelligence that focused on the catastrophic situation of his undermanned Corps in the heartlands of Iraq’s Sunni insurgency. He concluded, according to the Post‘s Tom Ricks, that “the prospects for securing that country’s western Anbar province … Continue reading “12 Steps to a Misfit Military”

Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton Alfred A. Knopf, 2006 370 pp. By every measure, Sept. 11 was a disaster. The most obvious victims were the nearly 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., along with their … Continue reading “Readings in the Age of Empire”

In a recent speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared that, “The enemy is so much better at communicating. I wish we were better at countering that because the constant drumbeat of things they say – all of which are not true – is harmful.” Later, during a question-and-answer … Continue reading “Is It the PR, or the Policy?”

The Bush administration is objecting to a groundbreaking treaty that set up a nuclear weapon-free zone in Central Asia. Under the treaty signed Friday, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan committed themselves not to produce, buy, or allow the deployment of nuclear weapons on their soil. But the United States, along with Britain and France, … Continue reading “Former Soviet Republics Give Up Nukes; US Objects”

Empire Runs Into a Wall It has been five years since hijacked airliners slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and much has changed since. The supposedly swift campaign of vengeance to root out Osama bin Laden from the caves of Afghanistan failed. The 2003 invasion of Iraq brought a quick victory to … Continue reading “Belgrade Says ‘No’”

Two years before the 2008 presidential election, Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, is trying desperately to grab the national spotlight by declaring he’d be a lot tougher than George W. Bush in prosecuting what he calls "World War III." In the latest in a series of recent presentations and … Continue reading “Gingrich Off His Meds Again?”