In every way they could imagine – unnoticed in broad daylight and in the darkness of eternal secrecy – the president and his top officials have been hardest at work not at governing the country but at bulking up presidential powers. This, it now seems, was the centerpiece of an audacious lawbreaking plan – or …
Continue reading “Does the President Really Know Best?”
TOKYO – Brushing aside its failure to win a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) last year, Tokyo is betting on backing the United States and its policies as a means of achieving a goal viewed as key to playing a more active role in global affairs. "A role in the prestigious …
Continue reading “Japan Wooing the US to Gain Security Council Seat”
Has Al Gore become a conservative? His recent speech to the Liberty Coalition, a group of conservatives and liberals united in opposing the growing authoritarianism that drives this administration, sounded as if it had been written by some disgruntled paleoconservative. With his frequent references to the Founders and their philosophy of strictly limited government, his …
Continue reading “Gore Channels Taft”
Hebron is again in the headlines. More than almost any other place, this divided city represents the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a nutshell. Occupied by Israel in 1967, the Palestinian town saw its very heart taken over by Israeli settlers, whose presence there is illegal according to international law but supported by all Israeli governments. For …
Continue reading “Hebron for Beginners”
Is the United States about to launch a second preemptive war, against a nation that has not attacked us, to deprive it of weapons of mass destruction that it does not have? With U.S. troops tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Pakistanis inflamed over a U.S. airstrike that wiped out 13 villagers, including women …
Continue reading “Another Undeclared War?”
If you’ve been listening to the recent "democracy is the way to go" sermons by President George W. Bush and his advisers, you’ll have to conclude that embracing "democracy" – a concept that is open to different interpretations – is the cure for most of humanity’s ills, ranging from political violence and economic underdevelopment to …
Continue reading “Guess What? Democracies Are Not Always Peaceful”
Individually, the new “dots” supplied by revelations about the Iraq war in James Risen’s State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration are not very surprising. Collectively, though, they provide valuable insight into the peculiar way in which President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair prepared to …
Continue reading “The Empty Shirts, Courtiers, and ‘Crazies’”
In President Bush’s first State of the Union message, he essentially accused North Korea, Iran, and Iraq of having clandestine nuke programs: “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. “I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand …
Continue reading “What Noncompliance?”
http://www.independent.org/tii/antiwar/e060117.html
Although Iranian and EU officials have recently agreed to resume talks on Iran’s nuclear activities, there is little optimism that such talks will lead to any breakthrough in the existing deadlock over Iran’s nuclear program. As senior Iranian diplomats and nuclear negotiators have remarked, Iran is determined to continue work on the nuclear fuel cycle …
Continue reading “If Iran Gets Nukes…” 
