Since ancient Rome, imperial republics have invariably felt a tension between cherished republican practices at home and distinctly unrepublican ones abroad; or put another way, if imperial practices spread far enough beyond the republic's borders and gain enough...

In the United States, the long-awaited Jan. 30 Iraqi election, assessed below by Dilip Hiro, might be labeled the "until" election or, more recently, the "in-the-days-before" election. Since "sovereignty" was turned over to the interim Iraqi government last June (a...

"'It's a finesse to give power to Rumsfeld – giving him the right to act swiftly, decisively, and lethally,' the first Pentagon adviser told me. 'It's a global free-fire zone.'" (Seymour Hersh, "The Coming Wars," the New Yorker magazine) George Bush's...

Recently, I wrote once again about the spread of torture as a way of life in the Bush administration's offshore imperium. I offered my version of a national "self-portrait" for the New Year ("American Gothic") and considered the latest torture news, now practically...

Here's a strange, small tale of our times, as reported from Washington by Guy Dinmore in the sober British Financial Times. According to an anonymous counterinsurgency expert Dinmore evidently interviewed, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has a "brutally accurate"...

The other day I posted a Dahr Jamail piece entitled, Iraq: The Devastation, but another word has recently come to mind that, I suspect, might apply no less aptly to Iraq and other areas where the Bush administration is exerting its muscle. That word is "desolation."...

Pick a week, any week, and you can now be guaranteed that yet more gruesome news will seep out about the global torture regime the Bush administration has set up around the world. Soon the leakage may reach tsunami levels in the press. Of course, last week was a...

Measure Iraq any way you want and it adds up to disaster: Less electricity is now being delivered than in the Saddam Hussein years; infant malnourishment has, according to a Norwegian study, doubled in the same time period ("It's on the level of some African...

Here we are, because time has some of the qualities of a tsunami, deposited in 2005, whether we like it or not. As the year changed, nature trumped the Bush administration in an appropriately, if horrifyingly Biblical, way, with a preemptive strike against shorelines...

You come out of the subway at Times Square across the street from the Gap and catty-corner to ESPN Zone, walk past the Drug Enforcement Agency's temporary museum ("Freedom is … Drug Free!") with its "Target America: Drug Traffickers, Terrorists, and You" show,...