Syria: A New Iraq in the Making

DAMASCUS - Syria is almost visibly wilting under a double American onslaught. The Bush administration made it clearer than ever this week that it regards Syria as an important source of unrest in Iraq. At the same time President George Bush made hardly any attempt to...

read more

Backtalk, September 16, 2005

Katrina and 9/11: Criminal IncompetenceThe incompetence was more learned behavior than criminal. Katrina exposed in New Orleans the effects of the evolution of the American mindset from rugged independence by local communities to a sense of dependency entitlement on...

read more

America Has Fallen to a Jacobin Coup

The most important casualties of Sept. 11 are respect for truth and American liberty. Propaganda has replaced deliberation based on objective assessment of fact. The resurrection of the Star Chamber has made moot the legal protections of liberty. The U.S. invasion of...

read more

Whence Anti-American Terrorism?

On Sept. 6-7, 2005, the New America Foundation hosted "Terrorism, Security & America's Purpose," a policy forum featuring scholars, elected officials, intelligence experts, and journalists. A full list of speakers is available here. Ivan Eland is senior...

read more

Transatlantic Group Calls for Nuclear Deal With Iran

Ahead of a crucial International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meeting, next week, a group of some 50 prominent experts and former foreign-policy officials from the United States and Europe have mooted a deal with Iran on its controversial nuclear program. If Iran...

read more

The Bloodbath Becomes a Flood

For the last several days, at least 6,000 US soldiers along with approximately 4,000 Iraqi soldiers (read: members of the Kurdish peshmerga and Shia Badr Army) were laying siege to the city of Tal Afar, near Mosul in northern Iraq. It is estimated that 90 percent of...

read more

Remember Iraq

With all the attention being paid to the sorry aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – most of the media, especially the 24/7 cable channels, don't seem to be able to focus on more than one story at a time, but perhaps we should be grateful that Natalee Holloway has...

read more

The Imperial Delusion

Editor's note: Today's column is based on a speech delivered at Colorado College on Sept. 15, sponsored by the Robert and Janet Manning Endowed Fund for Political Science and the political science department. Why are we in Iraq? This question, I think, puzzles most...

read more

The United Gates of America

Glimpse through the commentary pages of American newspapers and you are bound to run into a headline comparing the mess in American-occupied Iraq to the chaos in hurricane-devastated Louisiana. In fact, forget about the op-eds bashing the Bush administration and watch...

read more

Covers for Peace

On the whole, I've been surprised and disappointed by the lack of well-known musicians stepping up to the microphone and singing out for peace lately, especially considering the resurgence of folk and Americana styles and artists (the traditional harbingers of "music...

read more