The controversy over the "reinterpretation" of the Japanese constitution – which would allow the military to engage in "collective defense" overseas – is itself being misinterpreted. Instead of signaling a revival of Japanese nationalism, it is in...
Security Forces Kill Scores of Militants Across Iraq
Rep. Walter Jones on Dick Cheney and the Consequences of Intervention
The following letter by GOP Congressman Walter Jones of North Carolina was written in support of an editorial published in the Greenwood Commonwealth.To the editor: I write in agreement with the following statement from the June 20 editorial in the Greenwood...
Independence Day, 2014
After a brief holiday last week, I returned to some heavy reading courtesy of the federal government. Some of the materials that I read were gratifying, and one was terrifying. In one week, the Supreme Court told the police that if they want to examine the contents of...
The Risk of a Ukraine Bloodbath
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko – by thumbing his nose at the leaders of Russia, Germany and France as they repeatedly appealed to him to renew the fragile ceasefire in eastern Ukraine – has left himself and his U.S. patrons isolated, though that’s not the...
The Perfect Arrogance of the Warmongerer
One of the easiest ways to confirm that there is no difference between (mainstream) Republicans and Democrats is to compare the latter’s vision of perfectible economic meddling with the former’s right-wing dreamworld of international democracy and low, low oil prices....
Old Iraq Rivalries Stirred Up, 138 Killed
ISIS: The Spoils of the ‘Great Loot’ in the Middle East
“So far as Syria is concerned, it is France and not Turkey that is the enemy.” – T. E. Lawrence, February 1915. It was a curious comment by the oddball but unarguably brilliant British agent and scholar, Thomas Edward Lawrence. The time was World War I, and...
Gulf War Without End: Iraq’s Forty Years of Conflict
The article originally appeared at Muftah.org and is reprinted with permission.The recent offensive by forces of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), along with their allies, opens a new chapter in the conundrum of violence that has devastated Iraq throughout...
The Return of Ahmad Chalabi
A recent New York Times account of the reemergence of Ahmad Chalabi as one of the leading candidates to replace Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki opined "everything old seems new again in Iraq" – as if to confirm the growing sense here in the US that Iraq...


