The Destabilization Game

One of these days, some scholar will do a little history of the odd moments when microphones or recording systems were turned on or left on, whether on purpose or not, and so gave us a bit of history in the raw. We have plenty of American examples of this phenomenon,...

read more

Sexual Terrorism in Iraq

Five American soldiers have been charged in a horrendous rape and murder case in Iraq (and a sixth for not reporting it). In the United States, rape is now a public crime. Cases are regularly discussed and followed in the media; victims are far less often blamed; if...

read more

Déjà Vu in Gaza

On the one hand, there's the madness of devolving Iraq, where dead bodies and sectarian bloodletting are now the daily norm; on the other hand, there's the eternal madness of the never less than devolving Israeli/Palestinian situation. There, last week, the Israeli...

read more

Karl Rove’s Scheherazade Strategy

Here's how a Washington Post piece soon after the Supreme Court's smack-down of the Bush administration's Guantanamo policies began: "Republicans yesterday looked to wrest a political victory from a legal defeat in the Supreme Court, serving notice to Democrats that...

read more

Pentagon Fireworks

One of the least noticed success stories of George Bush's years in power has been his administration's ability to focus the world's attention so singularly first on Saddam Hussein 's "nuclear program" – remember that yellowcake brick road? – which had...

read more

The Misuse of American History

I recently wrote about Karl Rove's gamble that Americans would prefer a Green-Zone version of our world to grim political reality and that, in the process of telling "Green-Zone stories" to the public, it was useful if you could also "Green Zone" history –...

read more

Running With the Barbarians

As every political junkie in the country now knows, just before finding himself not indicted by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Karl Rove went to a fundraiser in New Hampshire and launched the Republican campaign for the 2006 midterm elections. Its simple goal...

read more

The Imperial Press and Me

[The person who runs TomDispatch is not usually the focus of this space, but I decided to make an exception and run this Nick Turse interview with me. It's my way of announcing some TomDispatch news: All the interviews I've done so far for the site are to be collected...

read more

The Iraqi Insurgency and Us

Remember Saddam's "killing fields"? By now, the Bush administration has turned whole swathes of Iraq into a charnel house. Last week Hala Jaber, a fine British reporter, returned to Baghdad and visited one of today's killing fields – that city's morgue into...

read more