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Amnesty International is expressing “serious concerns” about reports that least 20 people have been killed and hundreds of Syrian Kurds arrested by security forces since clashes broke out at a football match in the largely Kurdish town of Qamishli last Friday. Unrest spread to several other northeastern cities where Kurdish demonstrators clashed with security forces … Continue reading “Syria’s Treatment of Kurds Sparks Concern”

I suppose you could make a case, and in fact not a bad one, that the bombings of hotels and attacks on hotels and patrols in Basra, Baghdad, Falluja and Baquba should be viewed in some context. Even if things were going reasonably well, we could have expected opposition forces to be able to muster … Continue reading “A Year On: Time to Change Course”

Political aphorisms don’t get any more cogent: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." George Orwell’s famous observation goes a long way toward explaining why – a full year after the invasion of Iraq – the media battles over prewar lies are so ferocious in the United States. … Continue reading “Spinning the Past, Threatening the Future”

The growing gap between the United States and its European allies over the Iraq war – most recently highlighted by last weekend’s Spanish elections – belies deeper strains that date to the end of the Cold War, according to a report released Friday by the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). But tensions produced by … Continue reading “Euro-US Rift Over Iraq Belies Much Deeper Strains”

American and other “coalition” forces try to keep order, but outbursts of ethno-religious violence break through the façade with dismaying regularity and increasing intensity. As of Thursday, 22 civilians were dead, and hundreds wounded, in the latest wave of rioting, with 35 occupation troops injured – and immediate reinforcements totaling some 2,000 rushed to the … Continue reading “The Déjà Vu War”

The United States is moving to freeze millions of dollars in accounts held by relatives of Saddam Hussein and other senior officials in his fallen regime, months after Washington seized billions of dollars in frozen Iraqi assets overseas. The US Treasury Department in a statement Thursday urged other countries to follow suit and transfer the … Continue reading “US Moves to Seize More Iraqi Assets”

The terrorist attacks in Spain and the resulting meltdown of the pro-Bush regime in Madrid, along with the ongoing implosion of the occupation in Iraq, are currently the stuff of headlines. Little attention is paid to developments in the Balkans, which continue to challenge policy assumptions and ideological trappings of both the “humanitarian hegemony” of … Continue reading “Notes on the Margin”

One of the clichés one hears incessantly from the mouths of politicians is that we have the "best-trained, best-equipped Army" in the world. No we don’t. We have a military that is overstretched and underequipped because it has more missions than resources. We have a military that is suffering from a leadership crisis. We have … Continue reading “This Cliché Is A Lie”

On March 9, the all-but-official Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry told a group of supporters after a speech in Illinois that he had never had to deal with such "lying and crookedness." He did not specify about whom he was speaking, but outraged Republican leaders assumed, probably correctly, that he was referring to the Bush … Continue reading “Untruth And Consequences”

For neo-conservative and other right-wing US hawks, Madrid has suddenly become Munich in 1938 and Spain’s Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. In an extraordinarily unanimous campaign, newspaper columnists and television commentators are flooding the media with cries of “appeasement,” the dreaded epithet with which Chamberlain was permanently … Continue reading “Madrid 2004 = Munich 1938? Not Even Close”