Polling results have tracked so closely with the politicization of the Afghan war that it's difficult to discern the public's actual views in such a polarized environment. The polls tell us less about what the public is really feeling than about how well the two...
In what the Los Angeles Times described as "a fence-mending trip" to Pakistan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton managed to tear down more fence posts than she repaired. Abrasive, arrogant, and condescending, she fired a series of verbal RPG volleys that...
There has always been in American foreign policy circles a virus called arrogance, caused by the hereditary assumption that Americans know better than others. Surprisingly, this does not always prove the case, but the condition seems highly resistant to treatment,...
In waging its war in Afghanistan, the Obama administration faces a big problem, and his name is Hamid Karzai. This fashion plate, whose name has become synonymous with corruption, claims to be the president of Afghanistan, but this is a double fiction. In reality, he...
Although President Barack Obama has more empathy for the opinions of the Islamic world than his predecessor and seems to vaguely understand that they do affect U.S. security, he doesn't seem to understand specifically that U.S. meddling in and occupation of Muslim...
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander in Afghanistan and Monty Python fan, has put on quite a show of insubordination in the past month or so in an attempt to cram his escalation plan down the world's throat. He has waged open information warfare in the media, right-wing...
The fifteenth anniversary of the U.S. ratification of the United Nations Convention Against Torture passed last week with little fanfare and virtually no press attention from the mainstream media. But according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), "U.S....
In 2007, just as the Bush administration was hyping the alleged "threat" from Iran's ostensible nuclear ambitions – and facing renewed pressure from the Israel lobby to go after Tehran – the CIA issued a National Intelligence Estimate that punctured the War...
The official explanation for Obama's Nobel Peace Prize is that the Norwegians are using the Nobel as an incentive for the president to fulfill what many see as his bright promise and a kind of prophylactic against a repeat of Bush-era warmongering. After all, how...
