Many historians consider Mesopotamia to be the cradle of civilization. Writing was invented here. The great Hammurabi's Code of Laws was first engraved here. This was the birthplace of Abraham, father of the Jews and the Arabs. The territory now called Iraq was the...
The Dragon and the Chrysanthemum
At first glance, the growing tension between China and Japan seems almost inexplicable. Massive anti-Japanese demonstrations in China over events that took place more than half a century ago? A heated exchange filled with mutual threats over an offshore petroleum...
World Cannot Afford Failure on the Nuclear Front
With the seventh Review Conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) ending in abysmal failure late last week at the United Nations, the worst fears about a tiny number of influential states holding the rest of the world hostage to their narrow interests...
Bush: Still Hazy After All These Years
Memo to: Andrew Card, White House chief of staff Re: Briefing your boss Just for the record, Andrew, as much as I have disagreed with the administration's foreign policy these past four years, I have never accused the president of telling lies to the American people....
Nancy Pelosi as ‘Winged Victory’
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...
War Made Easy: From Vietnam to Iraq
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...
Murder of Lebanese Journalist Points to Rising Crisis
BEIRUT - The prominent anti-Syrian journalist Samir Kassir was killed in a car explosion in a Christian residential neighborhood of Beirut Thursday morning, in an attack that drew widespread condemnation. The bomb was placed under the driver's seat of Kassir's car...
Backtalk, June2, 2005
Gagged, but Still Going StrongI have been following Sibel Edmonds' story avidly since the first time I saw a piece on it on Antiwar.com (the only place I've been able to learn about it by the way). There's not been another story that raises my blood pressure as much...
God, Drunks, and America
Winston Churchill once remarked that God protects drunks and the United States of America. Fortunately, the divine protection Churchill detected for the United States seems still in place if we are wise enough to see and take advantage of it. In the past month,...
Battle for Bosnia
The Forgotten Balkans Flashpoint When French voters rejected the EU Constitution this past weekend, among the loudest defenders of the EU were leaders of the Balkan countries that aspire to eventual annexation by the bloc, assuring their subjects that the road to...


