While the world is consumed with the terrifying coronavirus pandemic, on March 19 the Trump administration will be marking the 17th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq by ramping up the conflict there. After an Iran-aligned militia allegedly struck a US base near...
Afghan Troops Say Taliban Are Brothers and War Is ‘Not Really Our Fight.”
The world is waiting anxiously to see whether the U.S. and Afghan governments and the Taliban will agree to a one-week truce that could set the stage for a "permanent and comprehensive" ceasefire and a withdrawal of US and other foreign occupation forces from...
The US Is Recycling Its Big Lie About Iraq To Target Iran
Sixteen years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, most Americans understand that it was an illegal war based on lies about nonexistent"weapons of mass destruction." But our government is now threatening to drag us into a war on Iran with a nearly identical...
A New Year and a New Trump Foreign Policy Blunder in Iraq
It’s a new year, and the U.S. has found a new enemy – an Iraqi militia called Kata’ib Hezbollah. How tragically predictable was that? So who or what is Kata’ib Hezbollah? Why are US forces attacking it? And where will this lead? Kata’ib Hezbollah is one of the...
The Real Lesson of Afghanistan Is That Regime Change Does Not Work
The trove of U.S. "Lessons Learned" documents on Afghanistan published by the Washington Post portrays, in excruciating detail, the anatomy of a failed policy, scandalously hidden from the public for 18 years. The "Lessons Learned" papers, however,...
Iraqis Rise Up Against 16 Years of ‘Made in the USA’ Corruption
As Americans sat down to Thanksgiving dinner, Iraqis were mourning more than 60 people killed by police and soldiers on Thursday in Baghdad, Najaf and Nasiriyah. Nearly 400 protesters have been killed since hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets at the...
Will Americans Let Trump Start a War for Saudi Arabia?
On Saturday, September 14th, two oil refineries and other oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia were hit and set ablaze by 18 drones and 7 cruise missiles, dramatically slashing Saudi Arabia’s oil production by half, from about ten million to five million barrels per...
US Sanctions: Economic Sabotage That Is Deadly, Illegal, and Ineffective
While the mystery of who is responsible for sabotaging the two tankers in the Gulf of Oman remains unsolved, it is clear that the Trump administration has been sabotaging Iranian oil shipments since May 2, when it announced its intention to “bring Iran’s oil exports...
A $350 Billion Defense Department Would Keep Us Safer Than a $700 Billion War Machine
The U.S. Congress has begun debate on the FY2020 military budget. The FY2019 budget for the US Department of Defense is $695 billion dollars. President Trump’s budget request for FY 2020 would increase it to $718 billion. Spending by other federal Departments adds...
War, Peace and Presidential Candidates
Forty-five years after Congress passed the War Powers Act in the wake of the Vietnam War, it has finally used it for the first time, to try to end the U.S.-Saudi war on the people of Yemen and to recover its constitutional authority over questions of war and peace....