Hats off to journalist Dafna Linzer and Sunday’s Washington Post for exposing a familiar but fallacious syllogism favored by senior Bush administration officials: Iran has a lot of oil. Ergo, Iran does not need nuclear energy for civil purposes. Ergo, Iran’s nuclear development program must be for weapons. Linzer and her researcher, Robert Thomason, remind …
Continue reading “Cheney’s Other Trick NIE?”
NEW DELHI – By offering nuclear-capable F-16 Falcon fighters to Pakistan and the even more advanced F-18 Hornets to India, Washington has shown a cynical readiness to profit from the long-standing rivalry between the nuclear-armed South Asian neighbors, say analysts. "This is a bit like the Aesop’s fable in which two cats fighting over a …
Continue reading “US Arms Industry Fishing in Troubled South Asian Waters”
President George W. Bush has taken a baby step toward fulfilling his pledge to spread democracy in the Middle East by giving grants totaling one million dollars to six civil society groups in Egypt, including perhaps the most controversial in the country – the organization whose leader spent a year behind bars on trumped-up charges. …
Continue reading “US Grants $1 Million to Egyptian ‘Pro-Democracy’ Groups”
"Watch out for Kurdistan," I tell everyone I know. It may take a few years, but Iraq will be cut up into two, possibly three, countries – and the Kurds will be the first to go. Already, northern Iraq is hardly one with the rest of the country. In the provisional capital of Arbil, the …
Continue reading “Watch Out for Kurdistan”
http://www.independent.org/tii/antiwar/e050329.html
On the first day of Kyrgyzstan’s “daffodil revolution,” photogenic girls smilingly offered daffodils to police guarding the presidential palace, but in a few hours those same guards were being pushed back and beaten by drunken crowds, who surged into the seat of government and ransacked the place. They also ransacked the entire city. “Democracy, whiskey, …
Continue reading “How the East Was Won”
One of the favorite fantasies of right-wing talk radio and Fox "News" is that only Bush-hating liberals oppose the Iraq war and additional U.S. military incursions into the Middle East or wherever. Yet, it is the March issue of the Washington Monthly, a magazine with a liberal Democratic audience, that makes a case for the …
Continue reading “Draft Needed to Bail Out Neocons”
Following Russia’s formal ratification of the Kyoto Protocol last November, it went into force on Feb. 16, 2005. The Protocol obligates "industrialized" signatories to reduce by 2012 their emissions of six "greenhouse gases" – primarily carbon dioxide – to 5.2 percent below 1990 levels. The United States is not a signatory. Of course, it’s obvious …
Continue reading “Kyoto Goes Nuclear”
An Evil Little WarMr. Malic, though entirely correct in his appraisal of the outrage, alas, offers no reason for it. What may we ask was this war waged for? Was it strategic, for minerals, or because Milosevic couldn’t be bribed to sell out his country and join the EU perhaps? Or just part of the …
Continue reading “Backtalk, March 28, 2005”
It was just over two years ago that I learned a little-known “antiwar” Democrat from Vermont was planning to run for president. At a rally on the eve of Bush’s Iraq invasion, a fellow protester handed me a leaflet touting the now infamous Howard Dean, hoping that the propaganda would entice me to support his …
Continue reading “Howard Dean Still Selling Out the Antiwar Movement” 
