The discovery of a labyrinth of underground bunkers used by the insurgency – complete with air-conditioning, shower facilities, and furnished living space – in western Iraq yielded a rich arsenal of sophisticated weaponry, including: "Mortars, rockets,...
You wouldn't know it from the media focus on Deep Throat last week, but the lies that Richard Nixon told about the Watergate break-in were part of his standard duplicity for the Vietnam War. It wasn't just that the Nixon administration engaged in secret illegal...
Afghanistan: An Imperial DilemmaI am reassured by Alan Bock's response. Perhaps he would understand my sharp reaction if he were to consider the following:Back in the 1950s, my father was Afghan ambassador to the United States. Therefore, I spent seven years of my...
Hawks in the administration of President George W. Bush may think that they are tough, but their dreams of "regime change" in Iran and North Korea are increasingly deluded, not to say dangerous, according to their hard-edged realist rivals who have become...
In 2002, President Bush indicted Iran as a member of an "axis of evil." What I found in Iran during my ten-day visit with a Global Exchange delegation in April makes this pronouncement sound ridiculously foolish as well as just plain false. I confess that I...
In my non-Tomdispatch life as a book editor, I used to have a modest dream. Every season, editors like me send the galleys of books they're publishing off, en masse, to likely blurbees, who will, if all goes well, reach for their thesauruses, gather their adjectives...
Less than a year ago John Kerry declared that if elected president, his first priority would be preventing nuclear weapons proliferation. George Bush immediately rejoined that preventing the proliferation of "weapons of mass destruction" was high on his priority list,...
Slowly, it seems, all my sources are dying. The latest death is in the northern oil rich city of Kirkuk, where there have been a number of attacks on non-Kurdish members of the City Council. I get a terrible sickening feeling when I read about the assassination...
The news that war is good for your mental health should confirm, once and for all, that we are truly living in Bizarro World – a universe of inverted values and the upside-down laws of a very unnatural nature. This explains why the U.S. government has engaged in...
On February 27, 1968, I sat in a small room on Capitol Hill. Around a long table, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was in session, taking testimony from an administration official. Most of all, I remember a man with a push-broom moustache and a voice like...
