Category: Uncategorized

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”

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”

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”

Even with mainstream reports that American troops are slaughtering Iraqi civilians, there are still plenty of lefties in the United States who cannot unify behind a call for an immediate and unconditional withdraw of occupation forces from Iraq. Fortunately, the majority of Americans understand that the U.S. presence in region is only contributing to the … Continue reading “Leftists for Occupation”

By just about any measure, May has been a bad month for U.S. policy in Afghanistan. It began with a warning by a shopkeeper in a small-town bazaar in the Pashtun southern part of the country to the visiting commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, duly recorded by the New York … Continue reading “Bad Month in Afghanistan May Delay US Drawdown”

As our government concentrates on fighting a "war on terrorism" in the distant battlefields of Iraq, what about the real war on terrorism – the effort to track down and neutralize al-Qaeda operatives in the U.S.? After all, that last warning from Osama bin Laden, in which he implied that another 9/11 is in the … Continue reading “Faux ‘Terrorism’”

In recent months, among other uproars and scandals, Americans learned that the Defense Department has been collecting intelligence on and tracking domestic antiwar activists; that, since 2001, the National Security Agency (NSA) has had a presidentially authorized, law-breaking, warrantless surveillance program to listen in on the international phone calls of possibly tens of thousands of … Continue reading “The Tangled Web
of American ‘Intelligence’”

The media feeding frenzy around what has been referred to as “Iraq’s My Lai” has become frenetic. Focus on U.S. Marines slaughtering at least 20 civilians in Haditha last November is reminiscent of the media spasm around the “scandal” of Abu Ghraib during April and May 2004. Yet just like Abu Ghraib, while the media … Continue reading “Countless My Lais in Iraq”

“The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity!” – this phrase, coined by Abba Eban, has become a byword. It also illustrates a wise Talmudic saying: “He who finds fault in others (really) finds his own faults.” No doubt, from the beginning of the conflict, the Palestinians have missed opportunities. But these are … Continue reading “Missed Opportunities
(Partial List)”