Measure Iraq any way you want and it adds up to disaster: Less electricity is now being delivered than in the Saddam Hussein years; infant malnourishment has, according to a Norwegian study, doubled in the same time period ("It's on the level of some African...
Here we are, because time has some of the qualities of a tsunami, deposited in 2005, whether we like it or not. As the year changed, nature trumped the Bush administration in an appropriately, if horrifyingly Biblical, way, with a preemptive strike against shorelines...
You come out of the subway at Times Square across the street from the Gap and catty-corner to ESPN Zone, walk past the Drug Enforcement Agency's temporary museum ("Freedom is … Drug Free!") with its "Target America: Drug Traffickers, Terrorists, and You" show,...
A week after the assault on Fallujah began in early November, our military announced that the city had been secured – at the cost of a thousand or more dead Iraqis and 51 American soldiers. Articles about the "reconstruction" of Fallujah soon began...
For the Pentagon, Xmas is an everyday affair. And the wonderful thing – for those who make its presents – is that there's never a December 26th. Unlike the rest of us, the Pentagon, which evidently doesn't keep its sales slips, never rushes to its nearest...
The human imagination is quicker off the mark than any six-gun, bomb, or JDAM missile. Long before humans made it into airplanes, whole cities were being destroyed from the air – in an avalanche of popular fiction. By the late 19th century London had gone down...
Sometimes it helps just to open an atlas and stare for a few moments. I did so this morning, checking out the Southwestern Asia map (#98) of the National Geographic Atlas of the World (a handsome volume, by the way). And what you see on the page is something simple...
"Every country and every people has a stake in the … resistance, for the freedom fighters … are defending principles of independence that form the basis of global security and stability." "The war … was in itself criminal, a criminal adventure. This...
It's well known that Washington was originally built on a pestilential swamp. Right now, the Bush administration is in the process of draining its own "swamp" of potential critics and doubters of any sort and installing "family" members, many from George's (and...
Along with Jack Shafer of Slate, Michael Massing was one of the first media critics to take on our imperial press for the shameful way it caved to the Bush administration in covering the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. He did so in two devastating critiques in the New...
