As Donald Trump demonstrated in his first address to Congress, no matter how loathsome a ruler may be, he can bring an assembly of politicians to its feet and disarm some critics simply by invoking the quasi-secular faith – Americanism – and eulogizing the latest uniformed war-state employee to sacrifice his life for it. Trump …
Continue reading “Trump Assumes Command of the American Church”
The enemy of my enemy is my friend is a Cold War-like mentality that the United States has operated under for decades and decades. Perhaps it’s natural, human, tribalism to do this. Or at the very least, it’s coldly pragmatic. If your enemy is the Godless Soviet Union, then your friend are the Muslim "freedom …
Continue reading “Trump Is the Enemy of Neocons, But He’s Not Our Friend”
Kurdish Peshmerga and Sinjar
Resistance Units clashed in northern Iraq on Friday.
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Here’s a little fact of our age: Rear Admiral Peter Clark is the 16th commander of America’s notorious prison complex at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, opened in January 2002, and it seems he won’t be the last. As the New York Times recently reported, the Trump administration is already readying a draft …
Continue reading “The Forever Prisoners of Guantanamo”
It used to be that the American left, or at least substantial portions of it, were reliable allies in the war against the warmongers No more. What we are witnessing today is a complete turnaround of the American left’s historic foreign policy stance. The glory days of the 1950s and Sixties, when liberals and leftists …
Continue reading “Can Anti-Interventionism Survive the Trump Era?”
For decades, much of the political struggle within Israel could be traced back to the fundamental conflict anchored in its Janus-faced self-definition – coined in the 1980s and legally formalized in 1992 – as a “Jewish and democratic” state. While centrist politicians have always emphasized the harmony of these two sets of values, the political …
Continue reading “Israel: Neither Democratic or Jewish”
A chemical attack was reported in Mosul.
Last week, President Donald Trump erupted with fury over a series of public revelations of private facts – some top-secret and some office gossip – that painted him and his White House in a bad light. The president ordered the FBI to investigate some of these so-called leaks and his own White House counsel to …
Continue reading “Concealing and Revealing”
Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has apparently admitted defeat in Iraq and told his fighters to return home or commit suicide. The admission came in a speech that was distributed among militant preachers on Tuesday. Albania announced it is sending an as yet undetermined number of troops to assist in operations against the Islamic …
Continue reading “129 Killed in Iraq; Dozens Freed from ISIS Prisons” 
