Early this month, the George W. Bush administration's plan to create a new crescendo of accusations against Iran for allegedly smuggling arms to Shiite militias in Iraq encountered not just one but two setbacks. The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki refused...
Three weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regimes in Iran, Syria, and four other countries in the...
The nomination of Gen. David Petraeus to be the new head of the Central Command not only ensures that he will be available to defend the George W. Bush administration's policies toward Iran and Iraq at least through the end of Bush's term and possibly even beyond. It...
In testimony before Congressional committees last week, Gen. David Petraeus portrayed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's late March offensive in Basra as a poorly planned effort that departed from what US officials had expected. What Petraeus did not reveal is...
A key objective of the congressional testimony by Gen. David Petraeus this week will be to defend the George W. Bush administration's strategic political line that it is fighting an Iranian "proxy war" in Iraq. Based on preliminary indications of his spin on...
As it became clear last week that the Operation Knights Assault in Basra was in serious trouble, the George W. Bush administration began to claim in off-the-record statements to journalists that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had launched the operation without...
The escalation of fighting between Mahdi Army militiamen and their Shi'ite rivals, which could mark the end of Moqtada al-Sadr's self-imposed cease-fire, also exposes Gen. David Petraeus' strategy for controlling Sadr's forces as a failure. Petraeus reacted...
Sen. John McCain's confusion in recent allegations of Iranian training of al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq is the result of a drumbeat of official propaganda about close Iran-al-Qaeda ties that the George W. Bush administration and neoconservatives have promoted ever since...
For decades, it has been generally accepted that the My Lai massacre of as many as 400 Vietnamese civilians by U.S. Army troops on Mar. 16, 1968 was a violation of official policy directives on the treatment of civilians in South Vietnam. That was the conclusion...
Adm. William Fallon's request to quit his position as head of the U.S. Central Command (Centcom) and to retire from the military was apparently the result of a George W. Bush administration decision to pressure him to resign. Announcing the resignation, Defense...
