Norman Solomon

The Sept. 25 edition of Time magazine illustrates how the U.S. news media are gearing up for a military attack on Iran. The headline over the cover-story interview with Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is “A Date With a Dangerous Mind.” The big-type subhead calls him “the man whose swagger is stirring fears of war with … Continue reading “Media Tall Tales
for the Next War”

This month began with 140,000 American troops in Iraq – 13,000 more than in late July. Almost 30 months have passed since Time magazine’s mid-April 2004 cover story, "No Easy Options," reported that "foreign policy luminaries from both parties say a precipitous U.S. withdrawal would cripple American credibility, doom reform in the Arab world, and … Continue reading “Spinning the Troop Levels in Iraq”

When Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, invited President Bush to engage in a "direct television debate" a few days ago, the White House predictably responded by calling the offer "a diversion." But even though this debate will never happen, it’s worth contemplating. Both presidents are propaganda junkies – or, more precisely, propaganda pushers – so any … Continue reading “Bush vs. Ahmadinejad: A Debate We’ll Never See”

Nearly five years into the "war on terror," it’s still at the core of American media and politics. Yeah, I’ve seen the recent polls showing a drop in public support for President Bush’s "war on terror" claims. And I’ve read a spate of commentaries this month celebrating Bush’s current lack of political traction on the … Continue reading “The Mythical End to the Politics of Fear”

Since the Soviet Union collapsed a decade and a half ago, nuclear weaponry has been mostly relegated to back pages and mental back burners in the United States. A big media uproar about nuclear weapons is apt to happen only when the man in the Oval Office has chosen to make an issue of them. … Continue reading “News Media’s Love-Hate for Nuclear Weapons”

Syndicated columnist Richard Cohen declared in the Washington Post on Tuesday that an-eye-for-an-eye would be a hopelessly wimpy policy for the Israeli government. “Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that proportionality is madness,” he wrote. “For Israel, a small country within reach, as we are finding out, of a missile launched from … Continue reading “Applauding While
Lebanon Burns”

The Baghdad bureau chief of the New York Times could not have been any clearer. "The story really takes us back into the 8th century, a truly barbaric world," John Burns said. He was speaking Tuesday night on the PBS NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, describing what happened to two U.S. soldiers whose bodies had just … Continue reading “Their Barbarism, and Ours”

Two years from now, Hillary Clinton might be pleased to hear the kind of boos and antiwar chants that greeted her days ago when she spoke at the annual Take Back America conference of Democratic activists and argued against a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. But so much of politics is about timing. And right … Continue reading “Hillary Clinton’s
Premature Triangulation”

I‘ve been thinking about Tariq Aziz a lot since the New York Times printed a front-page story on the former Iraqi deputy prime minister in late May. A color photograph showed him decked out in what the article described as "an open-necked hospital gown, with a patient’s plastic identification tag on his wrist." He looked … Continue reading “The Urbanity of Evil”