Updated at 8:49 p.m. EDT, April 4, 2008Although Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki stopped threatening more crackdowns, he continues his attempt to reassert his power against Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army. Meanwhile, at least 51 Iraqis were killed and...
Reclaiming Conservatism
The conservative movement is dead. At least, anything resembling the traditional conservative movement. As represented by the Bush administration, Republican congressional majority, and right-leaning punditocracy, conservatism means more federal spending, an...
A Liberal Politician Libertarians Can Appreciate
Author's note: I gave this talk at the Peace Feast in Seaside, Calif., on March 29. This week the Monterey County Weekly ran an article in which it "outed" me as an antiwar professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. I'm not complaining: everything in that...
Latest Gitmo Charges Questionable
The U.S. Department of Defense announced Monday that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian captured after a gunfight in Gujrat, Pakistan, in July 2004, would be the fifteenth Guantánamo prisoner to be tried by military commission, in connection with his alleged...
Delusional Bush Dances Toward War
Events of the last week offer a metaphorical glimpse at the delusion pervading President George W. Bush's White House and other enclaves of Iraq supporters in Washington. Bush and the First Lady spent last Monday clowning with the Easter Bunny (White House counsel...
Should We Fight for South Ossetia?
In an echo of Warren Harding's "A Return to Normalcy" speech of 1920, George Bush last week declared, "Normalcy is returning back to Iraq." The term seemed a mite ironic. For, as Bush spoke, Iraqis were dying in the hundreds in the bloodiest fighting in months in...
Embarrassed US Starts to Disown Basra Operation
As it became clear last week that the Operation Knights Assault in Basra was in serious trouble, the George W. Bush administration began to claim in off-the-record statements to journalists that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had launched the operation without...
Tuesday: 1 US Soldier, 40 Iraqis Killed; 25 Iraqis Wounded
Updated at 7:30 p.m. EDT, Apr. 1, 2008Despite what appeared to international eyes as a massive political loss for Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister called his failed Basra security operation a success. Also, U.K. Defense Minister Des Brown warned that the...
Putting Lipstick on a Pig
Some things never change. In a continuation of the Bush administration's Orwellian doublespeak on the Iraq War, President Bush recently gave an upbeat speech in Dayton, Ohio, extolling the progress in Iraq and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's military offensive...
The Pentagon’s Battle Bugs
We at TomDispatch love anniversaries. So how could we have forgotten DARPA's for so many months? This very year, the Pentagon's research outfit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), turns 50 years old. Happy birthday, DARPA! You were born as a...


