At least four Iraqis were killed and 19 more were wounded in the latest violence. Meanwhile, the Iraqiya party continues to use the Wikileaks Iraq reports to bolster their claim that the prime minister is unfit for a second term.
Some have expressed hopes that the tea partiers, many of whom grew out of the Ron Paul movement, will bring about a shift away from American imperialism through their demands for smaller, cheaper, less intrusive, and more accountable government. But it ain’t necessarily so. The tea partiers generally fail to understand that the indispensable element …
Continue reading “The Tea Party Disconnect”
Updated at 5:50 p.m. EDT, Oct. 27, 2010
Tariq Aziz remained the focus of news as his death sentence, considered unfair by many, could further stall the process of government formation, the number two story in Iraq today. The two topics overshadowed a return of Tony Blair to the Chilcot inquiry and a possible delay in the national census. At least 12 Iraqis were killed in new violence. Another 33 were wounded. Also, a sniper wounded a U.S. soldier in Amara, and the Dept. of Defense announced the non-combat death of a U.S. soldier three days ago in Baghdad.
Note: The following is the text of a talk given Oct. 25 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Whatever happened to the antiwar movement? Remember all those marches, all those placards, those giant puppets and loud displays of moral outrage? It’s vanished! Gone! Evaporated like morning mist! At one point, millions were marching in …
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You can’t turn on the TV news or pick up a paper these days without stumbling across the latest political poll and the pros explaining how to parse it, or some set of commentators, pundits, and reporters placing their bets on the midterm elections. The media, of course, loves a political horse race and, as …
Continue reading “Handicapping the Global Midterms”
For proponents of American liberty, a volunteer military has always been preferable to conscription. Friends of liberty have appropriately asked how, in a supposedly free country, you can justify unfairly shanghaiing, against their will, an unrepresentative minority of the population – young men – for dangerous service in usually undeclared and often unnecessary wars. Yet …
Continue reading “Expand the Role of the Citizen-Soldier Without a Draft”
With tongue in cheek, constitutional experts congratulated the U.S. government Tuesday for negotiating a plea deal with Guantanamo prisoner Omar Khadr, thus avoiding a trial in the military commission “puppet theater” of a defendant who was just 15 at the time of his offenses. Details of the plea deal are not yet fully known, but …
Continue reading “Guilty Plea for Child Fighter Averts ‘Publicity Nightmare’”
At least 20 Iraqis were killed and 32 more were wounded in a series of attacks in the north. Among them was a jewelry heist in Kirkuk. Meanwhile, Tariq Aziz has been sentenced to death for his role in “persecuting Shi’ites” during the Saddam era.
Two revelations await the reader of the WikiLeaks section dealing with civilian deaths in the Iraq War: Iraqis are responsible for most of these deaths, and the number of total civilian casualties is substantially higher than has been previously reported. There were numerous gruesome but seemingly isolated events that caught the interest and attention of …
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The New York Times continues to serve as headquarters of the Pentagon’s bull feather merchant marines. The headline of an Oct. 20 Times piece by Carlotta Gall on the Kandahar offensive read “Coalition Forces Routing Taliban in Key Afghan Region.” Nothing in the text of the piece supported the conclusion that anything remotely like a …
Continue reading “Bull Feather Merchant Marines” 
