Month: March 2017

Sadrists held a rally in Baghdad, calling for electoral reform.

Devin Nunes just set the cat down among the pigeons. Two days after FBI Director James Comey assured us there was no truth to President Trump’s tweet about being wiretapped by Barack Obama, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Trump may have had more than just a small point. The U.S. intelligence community, … Continue reading “Did Obama Plot To Sabotage Trump?”

United States foreign policy involves miserable choices. Were George W. Bush’s two boots on the ground wars worse than Barack Obama’s dabbling in six different countries with war robots, and his precedent-setting assassinations of American citizens? Was FDR worse than Harry Truman for pure body-count, even though the latter is responsible for the only use(s) … Continue reading “Is Trump Another Obama on Foreign Policy?”

It’s conventional wisdom that Washington, DC is a city marked by gridlock. Republicans obstructed President Obama’s agenda on principle, as Democrats are attempting to do now with Donald Trump. To give even an inch is a sign of political weakness. Trump is, admittedly, a polarizing figure, and there is certainly plenty of dissent in today’s … Continue reading “War on Terror Unites Trump and the Establishment”

The allegation – now accepted as incontrovertible fact by the “mainstream” media – that the Russian intelligence services hacked the Democratic National Committee (and John Podesta’s emails) in an effort to help Donald Trump get elected recently suffered a blow from which it may not recover. Crowdstrike is the cybersecurity company hired by the DNC … Continue reading “Rush to Judgment”

Authorities give conflicting information on new civilians casualties in Mosul.

Daesh targeted in civilians in liberated areas of Mosul.

Originally posted at TomDispatch. U.S. Marines are, for the first time, deploying to Syria (with more to come). There’s talk of an “enduring” U.S. military presence in Iraq, while additional U.S. troops are being dispatched to neighboring Kuwait with an eye to the wars in both Iraq and Syria. Yemen has been battered by a … Continue reading “Winning World War II in the Twenty-First Century”

The House Intelligence Committee’s reenactment of the McCarthy hearings dramatized Marx’s famous aphorism that history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” The only thing this circus was lacking was ringmaster Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California”) rising to declares that “I have in my hands a list!” War was on the minds … Continue reading “Adam Schiff: Grifter, Racketeer, Warmonger”

This week at the Voices for Creative Nonviolence office in Chicago, my colleague Sabia Rigby prepared a presentation for a local high school. She’ll team up with a young friend of ours, himself a refugee from Iraq, to talk about refugee crises driven by war. Sabia recently returned from Kabul where she helped document the … Continue reading “Reality and the US-Made Famine in Yemen”