Month: June 2007

"Rest has come to the tired Repose to the toiler A pale night covers The fields of the Jezreel Valley Dew below and moon above From Kibbutz Bet-Alfa to Moshav Nahalal." This is what we sang when we were young. Now it is a TV nostalgia show, youngsters of the ’50s singing pioneer songs. The … Continue reading “The Rot of Occupation”

A media campaign portraying Iran as supplying arms to the Taliban guerrillas fighting U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, orchestrated by advocates of a more confrontational stance toward Iran in the George W. Bush administration, appears to have backfired last week when Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. … Continue reading “Cheney’s Iran-Arms-to-Taliban Gambit Rebuffed”

Three years have passed since most Americans came to the conclusion that the Iraq war was a "mistake." Reporting the results of a Gallup poll in June 2004, USA Today declared: "It is the first time since Vietnam that a majority of Americans has called a major deployment of U.S. forces a mistake." And public … Continue reading “The Silence of the Bombs”

Updated at 12:55 a.m. EDT, June 12, 2007Britain’s next prime minister, George Brown, visited Baghdad on a day of light violence. Throughout the country, 35 Iraqis were killed or found dead and 23 were wounded during attacks. Coalition forces did not fare so well. Four Americans were killed and six were wounded during a bridge … Continue reading “Monday: 4 GIs, 35 Iraqis Killed; 23 Iraqis Wounded”

At times it seems as though we’ve gone back in a time machine to the darkest, sub-zero days of the Cold War era, when Americans were frantically digging bomb shelters in their back yards, Godless Communism was on the march, and the jackboots of the KGB were just inches away from our waiting necks. Tony … Continue reading “Hunting the Russian Bear”

Here’s the strange thing: Since 2001, our media has been filled with terrifying nuclear headlines. The Iraqi bomb (you remember those “mushroom clouds” about to rise over American cities), the North Korean bomb, and the Iranian bomb have been almost obsessively in the news. Of course, the Iraqi bomb turned out to be embarrassingly nonexistent; … Continue reading “A Catch-22 Nuclear World”

What’s up with Putin? What’s up with Putin? The Russians feel U.S. encroachment into the former Soviet Union is starting to represent an existential threat to the Russian Federation. It’s evident American elites are in the dark, and they ought to be aware the neocon empire has tweaked the Russian bear’s nose a little too … Continue reading “Backtalk, June 11, 2007”

Updated at 1:04 a.m. EDT, June 11, 2007During attacks mostly directed at Iraqi security forces, 73 Iraqis were killed and 149 more were wounded. Turkey shelled Kurdish locations inside Iraq again, but no casualties were reported. Two American servicemembers were also reported killed. An MND-B soldier was killed and another was wounded during combat operations … Continue reading “Sunday: 2 GIs, 73 Iraqis Killed, 149 Wounded”

U.S. President George W. Bush this week discussed a U.S. missile base in Eastern Europe with Polish and Czech officials, but the results were merely words, and the two European countries showed some naivety as international players. There were great expectations from two of Washington’s most faithful allies, but the young democracies revealed, each in … Continue reading “For U.S. Base, Bush Finds Czech Enthusiasm, Polish Reserve”

A May 29 IPS report on clashes between Kurdish Peshmerga troops and militiamen of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Baghdad has been confirmed by an Iraqi member of Parliament, representing the Sunni-led Iraqi Accordance Front (Al-Tawafuq). Speaking on condition of strict anonymity inside the heavily-fortified Green Zone of central Baghdad where the Iraqi government meets, … Continue reading “Iraqi Lawmaker Confirms Kurd-Shia Clashes in Baghdad”