With numbing regularity we hear the refrain: Why won’t President Obama name “the enemy”? This is the battle cry of the Republican clown show and their Greek chorus in the conservative media, and it raises the question arises: who and what are they talking about? The...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In the many strategies proposed to defeat the Islamic State (IS) by presidential candidates, policymakers, and media pundits alike across the American political spectrum, one common element stands out: someone else should really do...
Since ISIS rose to conquest in Syria and Iraq, then turning its deadly attention westward, it (with the help of its government and media accomplices) has unleashed a fresh flood of terror, which the people of the West have, unresisting, let wash over them. In America,...
At least 391 were killed, mostly militants, and seven were wounded in the latest bloodshed: In Baghdad, a blast in the Zaafaraniyah district killed one person and wounded seven more. Three Peshmerga were killed in a mortar attack near the Mosul Dam. A bomb in an Abu...
If you were looking for a needle in a haystack, simple logic would tell you that the smaller the haystack the likelier you are to find the needle. Except for the government. Since Edward Snowden revealed the federal government’s unlawful and unconstitutional use of...
At Progressive Review ("Two Types of Terrorism," Dec. 7), Sam Smith breaks terrorism down into two types: "That which uses guns and bombs and that which uses words to terrify the public into going along with whatever those in power want." But the...
I am a child of two empires, the Japanese and the American. My mother was born among the famed rolling hills of east Tennessee in the small town of Johnson City. Her great-grandfather had roamed the hills as an itinerant fire-and-brimstone preacher. My father was born...
In Syria, the West finds itself stuck between the Islamic State and President Bashar al-Assad, fighting a war that the West doesn’t want either side to win. It fights the Islamic State enough to weaken it without a victorious Assad staying in power; it opposes Assad...
The latest outburst of self-righteous indignation directed at Donald Trump underscores what hypocrites Americans are, as well as illustrating their seemingly endless capacity for self-delusion. This latest eruption of moralizing is occasioned by Trump’s proposal that...
