Barack Obama Takes Charge: Time to Leave Iraq

The Bush administration's time is draining away. President George W. Bush apparently believes that history will vindicate his policies, but a positive legacy is not likely to be. On the domestic side his record is a horrid mishmash of wild spending, massive corporate...

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The North Korean Conundrum

Recently, TomDispatch launched a series of pieces aimed at the coming Obama era. Michael Klare wrote on the new president's "energy challenge of a lifetime"; I explored his future arrival in "airless Washington"; and today, John Feffer, co-director of the Foreign...

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Torture – Yes We Can?

Most politicians wait at least until they've been sworn in before they start breaking their campaign promises. In this sense, as in so many others, Barack Obama represents an entirely new phenomenon: the politician who preemptively reneges. A recent Wall Street...

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Obama Pressured to Back Off Iraq Withdrawal

The promotion of Robert M. Gates as President-elect Barack Obama's secretary of defense appears to be the key element in a broad campaign by military officials and their supporters in the political elite and the news media to pressure Obama into dropping his plan to...

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Don’t Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart

On the day that Americans turned out in near record numbers to vote, a record was set halfway around the world. In Afghanistan, a US Air Force strike wiped out about 40 people in a wedding party. This represented at least the sixth wedding party eradicated by American...

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Arabs Uneasy About Joining Israeli Army

TEL AVIV - The Israeli government has begun to actively promote voluntary army service for Israeli Arabs. The Knesset, the Israeli parliament, is meanwhile considering plans to make civil service compulsory for all Israeli citizens, including Israeli Arabs. The Arab...

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The Audacity of Hype

The Obama bandwagon is moving fast and furious, rolling over the few remaining pockets of dissent even as it prepares to take power. The mainstream media, particularly on television, has lost all sense of objectivity and proportion, and their reporting of the...

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Pundits Debate the Inevitability of a Nuclear Iran

It wasn't U.S. relations with an Arab country on the tips of many tongues at this year's National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations meeting in the last week of October. Rather, much of the focus was on the Arab Middle East's ethnic Persian neighbor to the east: Iran. The...

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