(Today, a rarity at the site. Two pieces, officially identified as such and piled atop each other – think of them like a double-decker bus – each focused on a different aspect of the Iraq situation as Washington imagines it. First comes a little "political...
Right now, we have on the table a "possible exit strategy" from Iraq – James A. Baker's Iraq Study Group report [.pdf] – that, once you do the figures, doesn't get the U.S. even close to halfway out the door by sometime in 2008; and that report is already...
An early impulse of Bush administration officials after the attacks of September 11, 2001 was to take off "the gloves," or, as CIA Director George Tenet put it (so Ron Suskind tell us in his book, The One Percent Doctrine), "the shackles." Those were the "shackles"...
[Note for TomDispatch readers: Be on the lookout – former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega, who took over TomDispatch last week, is tentatively scheduled to appear on The Colbert Report tonight. Don't forget to be the first person in the neighborhood to...
Finally, the president and the New York Times agree. In a news conference with the Iraqi prime minister last week, George W. Bush insisted that there would be no "graceful exit" or withdrawal from Iraq; that this was not "realism." The next day the Times, in a...
This is the first "indictment" of the president, the vice president, and their colleagues for defrauding us into war in Iraq. I put that "indict" in quotes because what follows, as former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega makes clear in her new book United...
On Sunday, in a front-page New York Times piece ("U.S. Finds Iraq Insurgency Has Funds to Sustain Itself"), John Burns and Kirk Semple reported that a federal "interagency working group," looking into the finances of the various branches of the Sunni insurgency in...
Keep in mind, I've run TomDispatch.com for only a few years, but I've been a book editor in mainstream publishing for over 30 years. Sometime last spring, I was on the phone with former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega talking about books she might someday...
Things are always complicated. In the Washington Post, for instance, James Mann, author of Rise of the Vulcans, recently suggested that it was far "too simplistic" to claim "the appointment of Robert M. Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld [represents] the triumph of Bush...
In September 2002, Arab League head Amr Moussa warned that an invasion of Iraq would "open the gates of Hell" in the Middle East. Four years later, with those gates – at least in Iraq – open wide enough to drive a tank through, the look of the Bush...
