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According to neo-crazy media sycophants at the New York Times and elsewhere, the Bush-Cheney administration is currently engaged in the six-party talks "aimed at ending North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs" and is "supporting" European Union efforts to force Iran "to end its nuclear weapons program." But media sycophants to the contrary, that is not what … Continue reading “No Stinking Badges”

In the 16th century, Europe was devastated by wars of religion, a fact that gives that unhappy time some relevance to our own. The foremost soldier and commander in 16th-century Europe was the duke of Alba. An excellent new biography of the duke by Henry Kamen offers some less than encouraging lessons. In the 1560s, … Continue reading “Discouraging Lessons From Imperial Spain”

JERUSALEM – A growing number of Palestinians are beginning to believe that Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip will not mean the end of occupation. "The Gaza Strip will still be occupied territory under international law," says Renad Qubbaj of the Palestinian NGO Network, based in Ramallah in the West Bank. "After implementation of the … Continue reading “Gaza Will Be ‘Vacated but Still Occupied’”

The five elderly women stood in front of a U.S. Army recruiting office in Tucson, Arizona, and began to sing. To the tune of "There’s No Business Like Show Business," they belted out the lyrics they had written: "There’s no business like war business The worst business we know Never mind the homeless and the … Continue reading “Grannies Rage Against the Machine”

The election of the hardline Tehran mayor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, over former President Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani as the new head of Iran is undeniably a setback for those hoping to advance greater social and political freedom in that country. It should not necessarily be seen as a turn to the Right by the Iranian electorate, however. … Continue reading “Democracy, Terrorism, and Nuclear Weapons”

Barely two minutes into the premiere episode of Over There, Steven Bochco‘s gritty television series about soldiers fighting in the Iraq war, and already the myth of the “stab in the back” – the nutty idea that we are, somehow, not being allowed to win by pansy generals and public relations hacks – had reared … Continue reading “Over There – Hollywood Joins the War Party”

There’s been a distinct shift in the way U.S. officials talk not only about the war on terror, but about the "mission" in Iraq. As the International Herald Tribune noted in a story Wednesday, the "global war on terror" has been transmogrified into "a global struggle against violent extremism," as Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman … Continue reading “Reality Bites Back”

Bombers struck again with utmost viciousness at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheik last Saturday. The pattern remains relatively consistent: hitting soft targets, killing innocent civilians, attacking countries whose policies are supposed to be close to Washington’s. There are also some differences compared with past attacks. Last October, bomb attacks on the Egyptian resort of … Continue reading “The Meaning of Sharm el-Sheik”

The Media’s Roving Eye by Tom Engelhardt Oh what a tangled web we weave When we first practice to deceive… I‘ve written regularly about the media’s inability to connect the dots. The other day a reporter out in the far-flung reaches of our imperium wrote in to TomDispatch pointing to a front-paged dot that no … Continue reading “Unraveling the Plame Case”

June 30, 2005, was the peak of neocon delusion. On that day American Enterprise Institute neocon Karl Zinsmeister posted his article on the AEI online site titled: "The War Is Over, and We Won." No sooner than Zinsmeister put delusion to paper than U.S. military commanders reported escalating and more sophisticated insurgency attacks. Casualties exploded … Continue reading “The War Is Over, and We…”