The neoconservatives around Vice President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and their media allies bear the principal blame for bringing about the invasion of Iraq. As they cannot temperamentally consider themselves in any way culpable and...
Back in the EUSSR The standards used by the Empire to justify independence for Kosovo from Serbia should then be applied also to Nagorno Karabakh. The Republic of Nagorno Karabakh should be recognized by the UN as a sovereign country independent from Azerbaijan. But...
Way back in 1999, when I was still a TomDispatch-less book editor, I read a proposal from Chalmers Johnson. He was, then, known mainly as a scholar of modern Japan, though years earlier I had read his brilliant book on Chinese peasant nationalism – about a period...
People tend to stay fixated on the best time of their lives, and in the case of the neocons, that was undoubtedly the Cold War era. It is therefore no surprise that, with the coming of the "war on terrorism," they have likened the enemy, as Norman Podhoretz...
If 500 years from now American soldiers are still on patrol in Iraq, they won't be called Iraq's "liberators." After five centuries of armed occupation, it would be hard to describe them as anything other than an oppressive imperial force. And Iraqis who attack U.S....
At the beginning of May, Cpl. Cloy Richards tried to kill himself. "He punched out all his windows and cut major arteries," his mother, Tina Richards, told IPS. "He had to go to the hospital because he almost bled to death." Cloy Richards, who...
Congress voted this past week to authorize nearly $40 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, but the result will likely continue to be more bureaucracy and less security for Americans. Five years into this new department, Congress still cannot agree on how...
With its usual tin ear for public relations, the Bush administration provided another Kodak moment of incompetent belligerence by yet again sending a high-level administration official to use an aircraft carrier as a prop for a hawkish rant. Vice President Dick Cheney...
Realists in the administration of President George W. Bush appear to have won another victory over the dwindling ranks of neoconservatives and others hawks with this weekend's announcement that Washington will soon engage in bilateral talks with Iran. While the talks...
Gen. David Petraeus, touted by the Bush administration as the potential savior of the Iraq debacle, is like a lot of officers these days, a four-star general with relatively little combat experience. He led the 101st Airborne Division during the initial invasion of...
