Month: June 2017

The number of people killed in Iraq during June was higher than that reported in May.

Conan Doyle, the creator of the legendary Sherlock Holmes, would have titled his story about this incident "The Bizarre Case of Bashar al-Assad". And bizarre it is. It concerns the evil deeds of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, who bombed his own people with Sarin, a nerve gas, causing gruesome deaths of the victims. Like … Continue reading “The Bizarre Case of Bashar al-Assad”

Mohammed Abed is a 28-year-old taxi driver from the village of Qarara, near the town of Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip. He has no teeth. Lack of medical care and proper dentistry work cost him all of his teeth, which rotted and decayed at a very young age. Yet, his dire financial needs prevented … Continue reading “Pushing Gaza to Suicide: The Politics of Humiliation”

With the Eid over, reports of casualties in Iraq resumed.

"The North Korean regime is causing tremendous problems and is something that has to be dealt with, and probably dealt with rapidly." So President Trump told reporters in the Rose Garden this week. But how this is to be done "rapidly" is not so easy to see. North Korea has just returned to us Otto … Continue reading “An America First Korea Policy”

Originally posted at TomDispatch. In America’s Afghanistan, it’s all history – the future as well as the past, what’s going to happen, as well as what’s happened in these last nearly 16 years of war.  You’ve heard it all before: there were the various “surges” (though once upon a time sold as paths to victory, … Continue reading “Fighting the War You Know (Even If It Won’t Work)”

As the “Russia-gate” farce continues to dominate the American “news” media, and President Trump’s foreign policy veers off in a direction many of his supporters find baffling, one wonders: what the heck happened? I thought Trump was supposed to be “Putin’s puppet,” as Hillary Clinton and her journalistic camarilla would have it. The Russian president, … Continue reading “Why The Elites Hate Putin”

A family being used as human shields died when the tunnel underneath their home collapse.

During the Cold War, the US military and the CIA were involved in a multitude of "indirect" interventions in developing countries. A few – most dramatically and tragically, Vietnam – evolved from a supporting US role to large-scale combat missions. The Pentagon typically defined these missions as "low-intensity conflicts," though they hardly seemed as such … Continue reading “Advise, Assist, Arm: The United States at War”

Militants in Hawija are thinning their own numbers.