The perfectly timed release of photographic evidence of torture and killing on the part of the Syrian government on the very eve of the Geneva II peace talks may or may not be authentic. There have been atrocities on both sides, and these pictures could be evidence of...
We haven’t seen anything like this since the Vietnam war era: an administration caught red-handed illegally and systematically spying on Americans in the midst of an increasingly unpopular war. At that time, too, the political class was badly divided, with the...
The speaker of parliament, Osama al-Nujaifi, is on a trip to Washington to meet with U.S. leaders. The top Sunni politician said that the Sunnis are hoping the situation in Anbar province will force Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government to give greater power to...
When President Obama chose a Friday before a three-day holiday weekend to address a matter as profound as the NSA spying scandal, I suspected he would raise issues that he hoped the media would ignore. That’s because the Reagan White House did a study in the early...
Eight years ago, Stephen Rosen, then a top official at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and well-known around Washington for his aggressiveness, hawkish views, and political smarts, was asked by Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker magazine whether...
It’s heartening to see that an agreement has been reached to ensure that Iran honors its commitment, made when it signed the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to forgo developing nuclear weapons. But what about the other key part of the NPT, Article VI,...
All the hoopla in the media over Bob Gates’ scathing criticism of President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in his new memoir, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, has missed the mark. Obama can be criticized legitimately for his deplorable policy of piling...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. It was 1949. My mother – known in the gossip columns of that era as “New York’s girl caricaturist” – was freelancing theatrical sketches to a number of New York’s newspapers and magazines, including the...
Since its founding six years ago, J Street has emerged as a major Jewish organization under the banner "Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace." By now J Street is able to be a partial counterweight to AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The contrast between...
