Last week, President Donald Trump erupted with fury over a series of public revelations of private facts – some top-secret and some office gossip – that painted him and his White House in a bad light. The president ordered the FBI to investigate some of these...
129 Killed in Iraq; Dozens Freed from ISIS Prisons
Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has apparently admitted defeat in Iraq and told his fighters to return home or commit suicide. The admission came in a speech that was distributed among militant preachers on Tuesday. Albania announced it is sending an as yet...
Why Should Trump – or Anyone – Be Able To Launch a Nuclear War?
The accession of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency brings us face-to-face with a question that many have tried to avoid since 1945: Should anyone have the right to plunge the world into a nuclear holocaust? Trump, of course, is an unusually angry, vindictive, and...
In Afghanistan, America’s Biggest Foe Is Self-Deception
Originally posted at TomDispatch. If you had asked Americans about Afghanistan before 1979, it’s a reasonable bet that most of us wouldn’t have known much about that country or even been able to locate it on a map. Perhaps only to the “freaks”...
Enemy of the Year: Why Russia?
I once had an online conversation with a journalist whose name you would instantly recognize that started with a question for me: “Why Russia?” Why, this person wanted to know, are we witnessing a hate campaign aimed at Moscow, decades after the implosion of...
2,748 Killed in Iraq During February
The Risk of Baiting Trump on Russia
Four weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote that “nothing he has done since the inauguration allays fears that he is in effect a Putin puppet.” The liberal pundit concluded with a matter-of-fact reference to “the Trump-Putin...
On Military and Spending, It’s Trump Versus Trump
It can be a challenge to follow the pronouncements of President Trump, as he often seems to change his position on any number of items from week to week, or from day to day, or even from minute to minute. Consider his speech last week at the Conservative Political...
Lavrov vs. McCain: Is Russia an Enemy?
The founding fathers of the Munich Security Conference, said John McCain, would be "be alarmed by the turning away from universal values and toward old ties of blood, and race, and sectarianism." McCain was followed by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov who...


