Tom Barry

The neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC) has signaled its intention to continue shaping the government’s national security strategy with a new public letter stating that the “U.S. military is too small for the responsibilities we are asking it to assume.” Rather than reining in the imperial scope of U.S. national security strategy … Continue reading “Liberals and Neocons: Together Again”

There is little doubt that George W. Bush and Natan Sharansky, a Soviet émigré who is a top political official in Israel, share a similar perspective about international affairs, especially in the Middle East. Following his inaugural address, the U.S. president said that Sharansky’s book The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome … Continue reading “Natan Sharansky and US Israel Policy”

Douglas Feith serves as the number three civilian in the George W. Bush administration’s Defense Department, under Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Undersecretary for Policy Feith previously served in the Reagan administration, starting off as Middle East specialist at the National Security Council (1981-82) and then transferring to the Defense Department where he spent two … Continue reading “Douglas Feith: Portrait of a Neoconservative”

Blame the CIA. That’s a political agenda that has found bipartisan support in Congress. Both the right and the left saw the departure of CIA chief George Tenet as a first step toward improving U.S. intelligence capabilities. This month two bipartisan committees – the independent 9/11 commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee – reviewing U.S. … Continue reading “CIA: From Bad to Worse?”

In the heat of Iraq the neoconservatives are seeing their visions of Pax Americana turn into nightmares and headaches. But they are not alone. Liberal hawks like Ivo Daalder, Robert Kerrey, and Will Marshall also find themselves discredited as the quagmire in Iraq swallows up all their arguments supporting the invasion and occupation. Without the … Continue reading “Liberal Hawks: Flying in Neocon Circles”

The cold war is long over, but with the support of U.S. supremacists in both parties NATO lives on as America’s global cop. Seven more nations are joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and three more Central European nations have their applications pending. Although the Bush administration has set an overall course in foreign … Continue reading “Long Live NATO”

In two major speeches at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 2003, President Bush sketched the outlines of what he called “a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East”: in short, a militantly interventionist foreign policy in the Middle East. This new paradigm, according to the President, … Continue reading “One Year After the Invasion: Baghdad and Beyond”

Getting out of the political quicksand of Iraq, or at least burying the bloody occupation as an embarrassing daily news item, is mission number one for the Bush campaign. Extricating U.S. troops and political capital from the mess the Bush administration created in Iraq may be mission impossible. But the president’s political and ideological handlers … Continue reading “Neocons’ Iraq Strategy Now Focused on Syria”

“The message is that there are no ‘knowns’. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know. So when we do the best … Continue reading “The Neocon Philosophy of Intelligence”