Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author's permission. Military invasions don’t produce democracies – who knew? Whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, somehow the U.S. government worked to convince itself and the American people that democracy could be exported at...
Twenty years ago on this coming weekend, I was in Mongolia as the Deputy US Ambassador. After writing a Dissent Cable in early March 2003 on the pending US war on Iraq to my boss Secretary of State Colin Powell, I made the decision to resign from the US government as...
Well it seems like only yesterday, though it was half a lifetime ago. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their men and women, especially the neoconservatives, knowingly and deliberately lied this country into starting an aggressive war against Iraq – a war they pretended...
"All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory." -- Viet Thanh Nguyen As mainstream U.S. media outlets pause to remember the US invasion of Iraq, it’s clear that there’s a lot they hope we’ll forget –...
A New York Times Magazine article in July 2020 focused on then Secretary of State Powell and his U.N. speech of Feb. 5, 2003 and the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) upon which it is largely based. A lot of the detail in the article may have been new to many...
There is a historically possible world in which the Minsk Agreement never needed to be made. In 2014, a US supported coup removed the democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, with his eastern base, and replaced him with a West leaning president...
Twenty years ago on March 16, the world got a tragic glimpse into what the state of Israel was going to become. Given the green light in the Oval Office by President George W. Bush, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon – "a man of peace," Bush said at the time –...
It may have been "a Freudian slip of the tongue," as Russia’s ambassador to Canada called it, but at a press conference on March 10, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Mélanie Joly, raised the possibility of regime change in Russia. Addressing...
On February 6th, 2023, Northern Syria and Southern Turkey was struck by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake. For reference, the famous 2010 Haiti earthquake that dominated headlines for weeks was a 7.0 on the Richter Scale. For Syria – a country already war-torn from over a...
