As Crazy as It Sounds

As crazy as it sounds, President George Bush might be planning to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. There are two currents of speculation flowing through Washington these days. One current says that the Bush administration is planning the bombing campaign, but only as a...

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More Bush Diplomacy

Is it true that President Bush’s recent speech to the UN General Assembly means he no longer intends to use Iran’s "defiance" of a resolution by the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency and a resolution by the UN Security Council...

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US-Iran Shootout Is Inevitable

Would US President George W Bush and Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad run into each other by chance during their opening session of the United Nations General Assembly this week? That seemed to be the major concern occupying US officials. It seems White House...

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Torture Chic: Sign of Decadence

The great American essayist Albert J. Nock once devoted a long piece to the question of how one knows whether or not one is living in a Dark Age. From inside such an era, of course, the question is not so simple. Historians and propagandists name ages years or even...

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Groups Denounce Deal on Detainee Rights

Human and civil rights groups have broadly denounced a compromise deal on the application of the Geneva Conventions to detainees in the "global war on terror" worked out between the White House and a group of rebellious Republican senators whose efforts have been...

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US Isolated on Guantánamo

GENEVA - A team of United Nations human rights experts set forth sharply worded arguments Thursday against the U.S. detention center at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and announced that investigations into secret detention centers would continue in...

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A Foreign Policy of Failure

Rare is it to find a president whose foreign policy has imploded as dramatically and catastrophically as has that of George W. Bush. Little more than a year after taking office, the candidate who espoused humility turned into the chief executive who embraced empire....

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Backtalk, September 22, 2006

Somalia: A Case Study in Interventionism "The Somalis were crushed by the formerly American-aided Ethiopian military, which was outfitted with the latest weaponry, and Barre's Soviet sponsors abandoned him." Crushed? Excuse me? FYI, Somalia lost to Ethiopia in 1977...

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Why We Can’t Win Against Guerrillas

Two interesting reports explain in detail why America simply cannot win wars against guerrilla terrorism. A Washington Post report details the conflict between Special Forces and regular Army units in Iraq. The Special Forces officers and sergeants speak some Arabic,...

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