Washington Ups the Ante in Afghanistan

Despite growing domestic opposition to his plans for escalating US military intervention in Iraq, US President George W. Bush is calling for a sharp increase in Washington's economic and military commitment to Afghanistan. At a ministerial meeting of the North...

read more

Mideast Strategy Increasingly Targets Iran

Six months after last summer's war between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah, Iran has become the George W. Bush administration's "Public Enemy Number One," against which its Middle East strategy is increasingly focused, according to one of the US's leading experts...

read more

US, Iranian Publics Not So Different

The people of Iran and the United States share many of the same hopes and fears about global problems but remain deeply distrustful of each other's government, according to a major survey of public opinion in both countries released here Wednesday. As speculation...

read more

Revolt Builds Against Bush’s Iraq Policy

In the first step toward what some believe could eventually lead to a constitutional crisis, a key Congressional committee approved a nonbinding resolution here Wednesday formally dissenting from President George W. Bush's plan to send some 21,000 more troops to Iraq....

read more

Bush Continues to Unite the World… Against Him

Despite two years of a concentrated effort by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her public diplomacy major-domo Karen Hughes to boost Washington's global image, more people around the world have an unfavorable opinion of U.S. policies than at any time in recent...

read more

US Offers Scant Help to Fleeing Iraqi Refugees

With some two million of its citizens having fled to other countries and another 1.7 million internally displaced, Iraq has become one of the world's biggest and fastest growing humanitarian crises for which the United States should take far more responsibility,...

read more

Democracy Languishes, but Neocon Strategy Lives

The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) may have effectively closed up shop two years ago and its key neoconservative allies in the administration, such as Scooter Libby and Douglas Feith, may be long gone, but the group's five-year-old Middle East strategy...

read more

Foes of Cuba Embargo See Hope in New Congress

A bipartisan coalition of US lawmakers who favor an easing of the nearly 50-year-old trade embargo against Cuba say the new Democrat-led Congress offers hope for progress this year. The coalition, which embraces Democratic liberals from the Northeast and the West...

read more

Bush Isolates Himself Further

President George W. Bush's decision to escalate U.S. military intervention in Iraq and issue new threats against Syria and Iran appears to have left him politically more isolated than ever. Both Democrats and Republicans expressed regret that Bush appeared to reject...

read more

Hardliner’s Hardliner Led Bush’s Iraq Review

When President George W. Bush's unveils his long-awaited new strategy on Iraq Wednesday night, he will be relying heavily on the counsel of one J.D. Crouch II, perhaps the most hardline – if most obscure – of his hawkish advisers. Over the past 15 years, the...

read more