Smear Pattern

On July 15, 2003, ABC News aired a story about the plummeting morale of U.S. troops in Iraq. It quoted soldiers questioning the war and the judgment and candor of their commanders. One frosted GI even went on camera to call for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to...

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A Clear Strategy – for Disaster

The bromide-heavy speech that President George W. Bush gave Wednesday at the Naval Academy presents a clear strategy for continued quagmire and eventual disaster in Iraq. Despite the gathering storm of opposition to the administration's approach to the war in Iraq,...

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Words and Reality

Politicians, like writers, preachers, and professors, are word people. They deal mainly in words, not in actions. If you wish to understand the present political situation, you need to understand how politicians use words. You can start by scratching off...

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Neo-Crazies Already Planning Beyond Iran

Maybe you thought that when President Bush declared war on terror it was just a euphemism. Wrong! By that declaration, Bush made himself commander in chief of our armed forces, which he is – under the Constitution – only "in time of war." Once...

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Arab World Remains Hostile, Fearful Toward US

While the past 15 months have brought a slight decline in anti-U.S. sentiment, public opinion in the Arab world about Washington's policies and intentions in the Middle East remains overwhelmingly negative and deeply skeptical, according to a major new survey released...

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A Pathetic Performance

I really should have learned by now. The White House offers some tantalizing hints that this time the president is really going to lay things out in a way the American people can understand, demonstrate that he is conversant with the facts on the ground and how to...

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The War on al-Jazeera

Nothing puts the lie to the Bush administration's absurd claim that it invaded Iraq to spread democracy throughout the Middle East more decisively than its ceaseless attacks on al-Jazeera, the institution that has done more than any other to break the stranglehold...

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Trophy Video Could Prove Costly for Aegis

A new spotlight has been thrown on the army of private military operators in Iraq, following the emergence of footage that appears to show security guards shooting up civilian cars on "Route Irish," the notorious Baghdad Airport road. The so-called trophy...

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Bush’s ‘Great Leap Forward’

There is no real need for a line-by-line analysis of the speech delivered yesterday by the Trotskyite-in-chief: a succinct summary will suffice. The president's response to the polls, which show overwhelming opposition to the Iraq war, is: screw you. To those...

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How (Not) to Withdraw from Iraq

On the Sept. 27 Charlie Rose Show, interviewing New Yorker editor David Remnick, Rose brought up the question of what the United States should do in Iraq. Should we "get out" – or, as Remnick so delicately put it, should we "bolt"? Here was how Remnick ended...

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