Antiwar.com

Sometimes it helps just to open an atlas and stare for a few moments. I did so this morning, checking out the Southwestern Asia map (#98) of the National Geographic Atlas of the World (a handsome volume, by the way). And what you see on the page is something simple indeed, and yet I could … Continue reading “Iran: Even Paranoids Have Enemies”

Another year, another revolution – this time in Ukraine. First there was Albania (1996), then Serbia (00), followed in 2003 by Georgia’s "rose revolution." As though conceived by the same scriptwriter, they all fit the same fairy-tale pattern whereby a dictatorial regime tries to steal an election from the reforming, Western-orientated opposition. Western election observers … Continue reading “Ukraine: Diary of a Dissident Observer”

It’s a late morning start today. As I’m waiting for Abu Talat, who calls to tell me he is snarled in traffic and will be late once again, huge explosions shake my hotel. Shortly thereafter, mortars are exploding in the "Green Zone" as the loud warning sirens there begin to blare across Baghdad. Automatic weapon … Continue reading “The Quiet of Destruction and Death”

In the film Schindler’s List, there’s a scene where Nazi soldiers are coming to take the Jews out of the ghetto in which they’ve been forced to live as refugees in their own country. The soldiers look anxious and extremely "pumped up," as would be necessary for any human being ordered to carry out such … Continue reading “Palestinian Girl, Interrupted”

TORONTO – How to shed light on one Canadian’s nightmare experience in a jail in Syria and the secretive U.S.-inspired, extralegal global system of interrogation and torture that put him there are challenges facing one judge here, who must also confront "national security" barriers put up by Ottawa. The circumstances surrounding the treatment of Maher … Continue reading “Canada May Seal Details of Arar Torture”

Newtopia: Give us a little background on yourself. Where did you grow up, go to school? Where have you lived? What’s been your professional background? What were your main social, political, and cultural influences?   Dahr Jamail’s article archive on Antiwar.com     Dahr Jamail: I was born and raised in Houston, Texas, and attended … Continue reading “Unembedded: An Interview With Dahr Jamail”

It was not enough for the UN to whitewash NATO’s illegal invasion and occupation of Kosovo, to sit idly by and even justify the ethnic cleansing and barbaric destruction of Serbs and their cultural treasures, or even to stage sham elections designed to give a veneer of legitimacy to the abomination they have created. Now … Continue reading “Democratic Terrorists, and Other Lies”

Shortly before sunrise this morning, a small band of us gathered at a busy Chicago intersection and unfurled vinyl banners bearing enlarged pictures of Iraqi children. One banner called for an end to U.S. warfare in Iraq. On my banner was Johan, smiling wanly, a 14-year-old child who weighed 75 pounds shortly before she died … Continue reading “Child Sacrifice in Iraq”

What Became of Conservatives? I agree completely with Paul Craig Roberts. I too was a conservative/ libertarian who believed in small government, keeping a low profile in the world, not interfering in other nations’ folly, not nation-building. The new conservatives, neoconservatives, are not conservatives but big government activists. The war on Iraq is almost without … Continue reading “Backtalk, December 2, 2004”

They don’t have neocons in Britain: over there, they’re called Blairites, or New Labourites. But it’s essentially the same thing: they love the State, they love themselves, and, most of all, they love war – in the name of idealism, you understand, which, in Blairite circles, amounts to what passes these days for "humanitarian" interventionism. … Continue reading “Commissar Aaronovitch”