Since the release of the US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear capabilities last December, the prevailing conventional wisdom has been that the report's finding that Iran is not currently pursuing nuclear weapons had derailed the possibility of the...
Describing the current Lebanese political impasse as a moment "pregnant with incredible danger," a US expert Tuesday urged rival factions and their international patrons to adopt of a formula of "no victim, no vanquished" in order to mitigate a...
Updated at 11:36 p.m. EDT, Mar. 13, 2008As the body of a kidnapped Chaldean Catholic priest was found in northern Iraq, a car bomb blast in Baghdad killed and injured scores of civilians. Overall at least 39 Iraqis were killed or found dead and another 112 were...
On Tuesday, March 11, the US House of Representatives voted for the version of the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2008 that banned waterboarding and other forms of torture. The measure, previously passed by Congress, was vetoed by President Bush. This vote was an...
If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the world's most intractable, much the same can be said of the parallel debate about whether its resolution can best be achieved by a single state embracing the two peoples living there or by a division of the land into...
At a recent book party for Winslow Wheeler's new history of the military reform movement of the 1970s and 1980s, I was asked for my views on the prospects for genuine reform. I replied that "So long as the money flow continues, nothing will change." Chuck Spinney, a...
[Excerpt from the new book by Greg Mitchell, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits – and the President – Failed on Iraq (Union Square Press).] On March 6, 2003, less than two weeks before he ordered the country to war, President Bush conducted a...
"If, in the dying light of the Bush administration, we go to war with Iran," says the March Esquire, "it'll all come down to one man. If we do not go to war with Iran, it'll come down to the same man." The piece describes this top military figure as the last obstacle...
The global human rights panorama offered a decidedly mixed – if not mostly negative – picture in 2007, according to the latest edition of the State Department's annual human rights Country Reports released Tuesday. Its 19-page introduction, the most closely...
Adm. William Fallon's request to quit his position as head of the U.S. Central Command (Centcom) and to retire from the military was apparently the result of a George W. Bush administration decision to pressure him to resign. Announcing the resignation, Defense...
