If you prefer charade to reality, inquisition to investigation, trees over forest — the House Government Oversight Committee hearing last Tuesday on “Security Failures of Benghazi” was the thing for you. The hearing was the latest example of the myopic negligence and misfeasance of elected representatives too personally self-absorbed — and politically self-aggrandizing — to …
Continue reading “The Real Blame for Deaths in Libya”
Army Gen. Carter F. Ham, head of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), stood at a podium in Algeria and addressed the deteriorating security conditions in the neighboring country of Mali. (For those geographically-challenged, remember when you were a kid and people used to say, “that’s way out in Timbuktu”? Well, this is that place, literally). …
Continue reading “Next Stop Mali?”
After several days of relative peace, attacks resumed at a full pace. At least 25 Iraqis were killed and 53 more were wounded across the country, with northern cities getting the lion’s share of the violence.
Some of the most important obstacles to the efforts by the War Party in the United States and Israel to gain absolute hegemonic power in the Middle East and create what Condoleezza Rice once called a “new Middle East” have been countries that follow a path that is politically independent of Washington and Tel Aviv. …
Continue reading “Stop Supporting Separatist Groups in Iran”
In the first exchange of the presidential election season over foreign policy issues, the neocons — in the person of GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan — got creamed. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Ryan got creamed by Joe Biden — who serves in an administration that is pursuing each and …
Continue reading “The Creaming of Paul Ryan”
Light violence over the last pair of days left three dead and nine wounded.
Mitt Romney’s foreign policy speech at the Virginia Military Institute, while trotted out as a major rejection of the current administration’s approach to the Middle East, mostly just rehashed President Obama’s policies, albeit with more hawkish bravado. But Romney’s speech also included a host of faulty assumptions about Arabs and Muslims, indicating a potentially reckless …
Continue reading “Romney on the Middle East: Obama, but Worse”
Editorial note: This is the third in a three-part series. Part I appeared here, and the second part here. Israel is like a spoiled child who has grown stronger, more willful, and outright dangerous under the nurturing care of its US parent – a parent who has lost all authority and can no longer restrain …
Continue reading “The Israel Lobby and the Road to War”
Ten years ago, on October 10, 2002, the United States House of Representatives made one of the most calamitous mistakes of a generation. Congress, with willful blindness, voted to attack, invade and occupy a sovereign, oil-rich nation in the Middle East that did not attack us and did not pose a threat to the American …
Continue reading “Weapons of Mass Distraction: The Big, Long Lie about Iraq Lingers Still”
We had a debate club back in high school. Two teams would meet in the auditorium, and Mr. Garrity would tell us the topic, something 1970s-ish like “Resolved: Women Should Get Equal Pay for Equal Work” or “World Communism Will Be Defeated in Vietnam.” Each side would then try, through persuasion and the marshalling of …
Continue reading “Don’t Ask and Don’t Tell” 
