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As you listen to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice deliver her ultimatum to the Iranian mullahs, imagine you are a passenger on a hijacked airliner, headed towards Iran. You already know what the neo-crazy hijackers did to Iraq, shortly after Bush-Cheney-Rice delivered a similar ultimatum to Saddam Hussein. “The pursuit by the Iranian regime of … Continue reading “Hijacked by the Neocrazies”

with Alaa Hassan BAGHDAD – The Iraqi government has decided to launch its own investigation into the killing of 24 people by U.S. Marines in the western town Haditha last November. The raid came to light after a local Iraqi videotaped the killings. The tape told a story dramatically different from the bland assertion by … Continue reading “Multiply Haditha By Thousands”

Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism Charles Peña Potomac Books 272 pp. If critics of the Bush administration are setting themselves up for a stay at Gitmo, then Charles Peña will end up spending a long time in a particularly small cell. A senior fellow with the Coalition for a … Continue reading “Readings in the Age of Empire”

Compare the two American dramas that the world was watching last Thursday. In Houston, Texas, two former Enron executives, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, were convicted of fraud and conspiracy for their role in the energy trader’s collapse in 2001 and could end up spending the rest of their lives in prison. The jury concluded … Continue reading “Iraq Like Water Off a Duck’s Back to Bush, Blair”

You never can be too early when it comes to an anniversary. It’s barely June, but a quick look down the road reminds us that the 20th anniversary of the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra Affair lies just ahead this November. As Greg Grandin reminds us, Irangate (as it came to be known in the wake of … Continue reading “Iran-Contra All Over Again”

Amid increasing tensions between Tehran and Washington over Iran’s nuclear program, the George W. Bush administration is courting the Persian/Arab Gulf monarchies with the same proposal it offered them 15 years ago after the first Gulf War – purchase U.S. armory in the billions and Washington will protect you against your Persian nemesis. But today, … Continue reading “Gulf States Rethink US-Led Security Alliance”

The Haditha massacre, as it will doubtless be known, tells us something about this war we are fighting, and something about ourselves as Americans – or, rather, as creatures who have become a little less American in the post-9/11 era. What that something amounts to, according to your view of the war and of U.S. … Continue reading “The Meaning of Haditha”

ARBIL – Sipping tea at a café in Arbil, Moayed Rafiq, 25, watches news of a car bombing in Baghdad on an Arab television channel. Others around him also watch, quietly. “When I see this every day on TV, I think there is no need for us to tie our destiny with Iraq,” Moayed said. … Continue reading “Iraqi Kurds Keep an Eye on Independence”

If we allow the Bush administration to drag this country into a war with Iran, we should all burn our voter-registration cards and go ahead and admit that we are no longer worthy of being citizens of a self-governing republic. For heaven’s sake, the administration is employing the same tactics it used to justify the … Continue reading “Too Stupid for Citizenship”

Wednesday’s unprecedented offer by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to join multilateral negotiations over its nuclear program was hailed as a positive step by Iran specialists who warned, however, that its conditional nature could prove problematic. Bowing to weeks of growing pressure from European allies, Rice announced that Washington was willing to join ongoing … Continue reading “Rice’s Conditional Offer to Iran May Be Problematic”