The New Saddam

With Saddam captured, and the U.S. squaring off against a faceless enemy in Iraq, it was necessary to create a new demon figure, and the occupiers couldn't have done a better job of it if they had gone to Central Casting: Moqtada al-Sadr is a radical, he's got a big...

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Shi’ite Uprising Signals Double Trouble for US

With U.S. Marines effectively locking down the defiant city of Fallujah in the rebellious "Sunni Triangle," other US military forces in Iraq opened a new front Monday to quash an apparent uprising by a Shiite militia in Baghdad and the south, in what some...

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Don’t Expand NATO!

Further expansion of NATO, an outdated alliance, is not in our national interest and may well constitute a threat to our national security in the future. More than 50 years ago the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed to defend Western Europe and the United...

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Chinese Generalizations

In my last column, I made some broad generalizations about Chinese and China. One of the points of the column was to show that Chinese businessmen make decisions based on guanxi. Any businessman – or any foreigner for that matter – has a collection of...

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Phase II of the Anti-Occupation Revolt Begins

The always tense relationship between the Sadrist movement among Iraqi Shiites and the US and its Coalition partners has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Perhaps a third of Iraqi Shiites are sympathetic to the radical, Khomeini-like ideology of Sadrism, and some...

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Corroborating Clarke at Pentagon

WASHINGTON – While President Bush and his security advisers obsessed over Russia, China, Iraq and missile defense before 9/11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his neoconspirators were just as stuck in the Cold War over at the Pentagon. Al-Qaida hardly...

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The Worst Idea, Ever

The invasion and occupation of Iraq is turning out to have been the worst idea in the history of American foreign policy, far stupider than the Vietnam debacle, and potentially even more destructive and futile than our entry into World War I. Up until now, the scale...

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