My longtime colleague at CIA, Mel Goodman, has written an instructive article about our decades-ago co-worker Robert Gates, whom Mel labels the “Poster Child for Bureaucratic Deceit.” Sadly, I can vouch for the correctness of Mel’s findings. Gates’s case is...
Don’t Wage Economic War on Afghanistan
Now that U.S. forces have finally exited Afghanistan, some American hawks are already agitating for the government to stoke internal conflict by backing a new insurgency and wage economic warfare on the country. Last week, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. Mike Waltz...
Barely Out of Afghanistan, Now America Is Supposed To Save Tigray From Ethiopia and Eritrea?
To most Americans the collapse of Afghanistan called into question Washington’s ability to manage the world. After devoting 20 years, thousands of lives, and trillions of dollars to creating a stable, democratic, and liberal Afghanistan, the entire Potemkin structure...
Afghanistan Collapse Reveals Beltway Media’s Loyalty to Permanent War State
Reprinted from The Grayzone with the author's permission. In the wake of a remarkably successful Taliban offensive capped by the takeover of Kabul, the responses of corporate media provided what may have been the most dramatic demonstration ever of its fealty to the...
Why US Negotiations Always Fail
From Cuba to Korea, from Iran to Russia and Palestine, there is a long history of failed negotiations and wasted time. The negotiations are all different, but a clear pattern establishes the reason why all of them fail. In each case, US negotiations fail because the...
Iraq Monthly Roundup: 122 Killed During August
Blame-Shifting: The Political Elites Response to the Messy Afghan Withdrawal
An optimist might hope that the ugly ending to Washington’s nearly 20-year occupation of Afghanistan would lead to some serious introspection on the part of America’s political and policy elites. A realist would assume (correctly) that such soul-searching would be in...
Afghanistan: A Tragically Stupid War Comes to a Tragic End
Sunday’s news reports that the Biden Administration mistakenly killed nine members of one Afghan family, including six children, in “retaliation” for last week’s suicide attack which killed 13 US servicemembers, is a sad and sick epitaph on the...
Your Tax Dollars Used To Support Criminals, Warlords, and Child Molesters
What if I told you that for decades a significant portion of your tax dollars have been used to aid and support criminals, warlords, and child molesters as they perpetrated atrocities against their victims? This may sound like a fringe conspiracy theory but, in fact,...


