The fake debate over the misnamed "defense" budget underscores everything that’s wrong with our foreign policy, our political system, and the crooks who rule the roost in Washington. This Washington Post piece on the politics surrounding the issue tells us everything we need to know about how the political class – and its journalistic camarilla …
Continue reading “Sequester the Empire”
A series of bombing rattled Baghdad on Tuesday. At least 59 people were killed across the country. Another 56 were wounded.
Last September President Obama cited his drone program in Yemen as a successful model of US anti-terrorism strategy. He said that he would employ the Yemen model in his effort to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS in Iraq and Syria. But just a week ago, the government in Yemen fell to a Shiite militia movement …
Continue reading “The Failed ‘Yemen Model’”
Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu’s acceptance of an invitation to speak to the US Congress on 3 March, two weeks before the Israeli election and without any consultation with the White House, is aimed at advancing both Netanyahu’s re-election and the proposed new set of sanctions against Iran in the US Congress. For many months, …
Continue reading “Netanyahu’s Speech and the Politics of Iran Policy”
Among Cold War presidents, from Truman to Bush I, there was an unwritten rule: Do not challenge Moscow in its Central and Eastern Europe sphere of influence. In crises over Berlin in 1948 and 1961, the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Prague in 1968, U.S. forces in Europe stayed in …
Continue reading “U.S.-Russia Clash in Ukraine?”
In a symbol of the broader sidelining of his "pivot to Asia" to attend once again to the recurrent quagmire that is the Middle East, President Barack Obama decided to cut out his visit to the Taj Mahal and leave India early to fly to Saudi Arabia – to pay his respects to the family …
Continue reading “Obama Should Have Visited the Taj Mahal Instead of Saudi Arabia”
At least 96 people were killed, including those whose bodies were found in a mass grave, and 46 more were wounded.
What’s happening in Libya today is a crime: murder, rape, looting, chaos, a war of all against all. The perpetrator, the one key person who made all this possible, is a well known personage in American politics, a former Secretary of State and the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination. What Hillary Clinton did to …
Continue reading “Hillary’s War”
Originally posted at TomDispatch. It was August 2, 1990, and Saddam Hussein, formerly Washington’s man in Baghdad and its ally against fundamentalist Iran, had just sent his troops across the border into oil-rich Kuwait. It would prove a turning point in American Middle East policy. Six days later, a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division …
Continue reading “Groundhog Day in the War on Terror”
At least 205 were killed in Iraq and another 27 were wounded.
