Nicolas J. S. Davies

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 "big lie" about a nonexistent nuclear weapons program, based on politicized intelligence … Continue reading “The US Is Recycling Its Big Lie About Iraq To Target Iran”

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 Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) that were recruited … Continue reading “A New Year and a New Trump Foreign Policy Blunder in Iraq”

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, are based on the premise that the US and its allies will keep intervening militarily in other countries, … Continue reading “The Real Lesson of Afghanistan Is That Regime Change Does Not Work”

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 beginning of October. Human rights groups have described the crisis in … Continue reading “Iraqis Rise Up Against 16 Years of ‘Made in the USA’ Corruption”

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 day. On September 18, the Trump administration, blaming Iran, announced it was … Continue reading “Will Americans Let Trump Start a War for Saudi Arabia?”

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 to zero, denying the regime its principal source of revenue.” … Continue reading “US Sanctions: Economic Sabotage That Is Deadly, Illegal, and Ineffective”

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 over $200 billion to the total "national security" budget ($93 billion to … Continue reading “A $350 Billion Defense Department Would Keep Us Safer Than a $700 Billion War Machine”

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. This hasn’t stopped the war yet, … Continue reading “War, Peace and Presidential Candidates”

In his masterpiece, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, William Blum, who died in December 2018, wrote chapter-length accounts of 55 US regime change operations against countries around the world, from China (1945-1960s) to Haiti (1986-1994). Noam Chomsky’s blurb on the back of the latest edition says simply, “Far and … Continue reading “Venezuela: The US’s 68th Regime Change Disaster”

When the Trump administration unilaterally pulled out of the Iran nuclear agreement in May 2018 and announced it would reimpose sanctions against Iran, the European Union (EU) declared its commitment to preserving the agreement and finding ways for its companies to circumvent U.S. sanctions. Now, eight months later, the Europeans finally announced the creation of … Continue reading “Will Iran Sanctions Herald the Fall of the Imperial Dollar?”