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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
