In March of 2003, the United States launched an illegal war of aggression against Iraq. The US regime promoted that illegal war of aggression, starting well in advance, through the manufacture and repetition of falsehoods for the purpose of cultivating fear over...
Reapers and Red Lines: The Downing of an American Drone
On March 14, A Russian jet collided with a US drone, leading to the downing of the drone in the Black Sea. The US says that the drone was flying in international airspace when two Russian Su-27 fighter jets made nineteen high-speed passes near the drone before dumping...
Learning Little from the Iraq War
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...
Don’t Let The Media Cheerlead Us Into More Wars Like It Did in Iraq
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...
Iraq War II 20 Years Later
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...
20 Years After the Invasion of Iraq, Will the Media’s Complicity Be Flushed Down the Memory Hole?
"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 –...
Iraq 20 Years: The Uses and Abuses of National Intelligence Estimates
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...
The Minsk Deception and the Planned War in Donbas
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...
Iraq Daily Roundup: Seven Killed
The Tragic Reality of Rachel Corrie’s Death
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 –...


