Wednesday night, George Bush seemed to play his last card in the Iraq war. It was not impressive. Consider. First, he warned of the awful consequences of a US defeat: "Radical Islamic extremism would grow ... in strength and gain new recruits. They would be in a...
As expected, President George W. Bush announced on Wednesday that he planned to increase the number of troops in Iraq. From his point of view, he had no other choice. To "stay the course" meant doing same thing with the same force. That hadn't worked; after...
Delivered in a near monotone, and written by someone with a tin ear, the president's much-anticipated speech on the "new way forward" in Iraq has succeeded only in reinforcing the impression that he is deaf, dumb, and blind to reason when it comes to Iraq. As...
Coverage of the Democratic takeover of the U.S. Congress in the past couple weeks has focused on Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.), the first female Speaker of the House, and her "100 hours" agenda. But if most of the voters who booted the Republican incumbents in...
Jimmy Carter, probably the most decent man to occupy the White House, received a lot of grief during his term in office, most of it undeserved. His latest book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid has brought him even more grief, none of it deserved. My own appreciation of...
Updated at 1:05 a.m. EST, Jan. 12, 2007 In today’s developments, U.S. President George Bush’s latest speech is the subject of much international debate. Closer to home, at least 60 Iraqis were killed or found dead today and another 33 wounded. Also,...
President Bush may be a headless horseman. But the biggest problem is what he rode in on. Martin Luther King Jr. had a good name for it 40 years ago. "The madness of militarism." We can blame Bush all we want – and he does hold the reins right now...
There is an absurd scene in Palestinian writer Suad Amiry's recent book Sharon and My Mother-in-Law that is revealing about Israeli Jews' attitude to the two other monotheistic religions. In 1992, long before Israel turned Amiry's home city of Ramallah into a...
Is the surge an orchestrated distraction from the real war plan? A good case can be made that it is. The US Congress and media are focused on President Bush’s proposal for an increase of 20,000 US troops in Iraq, while Israel and its American neoconservative...
The series of blunders and willful miscalculations that led to our present predicament in Iraq are now being replicated in Somalia, where a rather large U.S. footprint is being stamped into the hard Somali soil. Well, it isn't a footprint, quite yet, but rather a...
