"What a world! What a world!" That's what the Wicked Witch of the West exclaimed as she melted in one of the final scenes of The Wizard of Oz, and today her plaintive cry seems the only possible reaction to the headlines reporting trouble every which way: Pakistan...
Recently, Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has shown striking signs of wanting to be his own man in Baghdad, not Washington's (as has Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul). What happens when parrots suddenly speak and puppets squawk on their own? The answer,...
Updated at 8:30 p.m. EDT, Sept. 7, 2008A significant number of attacks occurred across Iraq today. Almost all of them caused very few casualties though, keeping the figures deceptively low. At least 26 Iraqis were killed and 52 more were wounded. No Coalition...
You can definitely count me among those who are skeptical of the official cover story that Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide recently as the FBI seemed to be closing in on him, was solely responsible for the series of anthrax attacks on people in Congress and the...
Updated at 7:02 p.m. EDT, Sept. 7, 2008At least 20 Iraqis were killed or found dead and 26 more were wounded in the latest reports. Hundreds more are ill in what may be a new cholera epidemic. Meanwhile, Baghdad suffered a number of small bomb attacks, and an...
I grew up in Iran and immigrated to US to avoid living in a theocracy. Lately though, the trajectory of US politics is something to worry about, not only to me, but also to many others in my predicament. Wednesday night at the Republican convention was an especially...
While the Republicans were nominating Sarah Palin – who reportedly believes the Bush-Cheney war of aggression against Iraq was inevitable, part of "God's plan" – French President Nicolas Sarkozy was in Damascus, warning the "leaders of Syria,...
In her "I'm just a hockey mom" speech at the Republican National Convention, Sarah Palin – who has rapidly rocketed from an unknown, recently-minted governor of Alaska to Republican Vice Presidential candidate – questioned, with a straight face,...
As if the outgoing administration of U.S. President George W. Bush didn't already have enough on its plate, the question of whether and how to rearm Georgia in the aftermath of its thrashing last month by Russia is moving steadily up its increasingly crowded foreign...
Few people have thought as much about the morality of the US occupation of Iraq than Joshua Casteel, a former US Army interrogator who served at Abu Ghraib prison in the wake of the detainee abuse scandal there. Once a cadet at the US Military Academy at West Point...
