Iraq Troika: McCain, Obama and Clinton

Awash in the blood of 4,000 U.S. soldiers and at least 1,000,000 Iraqi men, women and children, Arizona Senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain returned from a trip to Iraq and declared "we are succeeding."..

When They Pick Up the Phone at 3 AM, What Will They Say?

America’s tragedy is that we have three neoliberals left in the presidential race, at a time when, as Martin Wolf correctly pointed out in Wednesday’s Financial Times, neoliberalism has collapsed. The bailout by the Fed of Bear Stearns sounded the death knell for 30 years of deregulation...

War on the Mehdi Army

The Iraqi army is fighting the Mehdi Army Shia militia in the streets of Basra after the government launched its most serious offensive to gain control of the southern oil city...

Torture Stories Dog Guant?namo Trials

From the moment that the Toronto Star unleashed a gruesome, and previously unpublished photo of the chest wounds sustained by 15-year old Omar Khadr, after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002, it was clear that the resumption of Khadr’s pre-trial hearing at Guant?namo last week would once more raise murky issues of torture and untrustworthy intelligence that the administration -- desperate to secure a "clean" conviction in its much-reviled Military Commission process -- hoped would..

Bush Blisters the Truth on Iraq

On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Bush’s illegal war of aggression in Iraq, the Fabricator-in-Chief made a speech at the Pentagon, whose muzzled army chiefs had opposed his costly, ruinous adventure from the start for strategic, tactical and logistical reasons...

Iraq’s Blood-Sodden Anniversaries

"It reminds me of Iraq under Saddam," said a militant opponent of Saddam Hussein angrily to me last week as he watched red-capped Iraqi soldiers close down part of central Baghdad so the convoy of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki might briefly venture into the city. Five rears after the invasion of Iraq the US and the Iraqi government both claim that Iraq is becoming a less dangerous place, but the measures taken to protect Mr Maliki told a different story. Gun-waving soldiers fir..

Who Speaks for a Billion Muslims?

While speaking authoritatively about Islam and the "psychology" of the Muslim mind, the talking heads on television screens, the experts sitting in prestigious think tanks, the policy analysts strategizing in D.C., and the often loud and bombastic voices heard on the airwaves are rarely, if ever, Muslims...

Arresting Musharraf

Pervez Musharraf, who usurped power in Pakistan on November 3, 2007 by virtue of his Proclamation of Emergency, refuses to relinquish the office of the President, an office he unlawfully occupies against the will of the people and contrary to the Constitution of Pakistan...

Free Pakistan

It"s Monday, February 18, 2008, and the entire world is anxiously focusing on Pakistan. After nearly a month"s delay due to Benazir Bhutto"s assassination, Pakistan"s contentious and, some say, "historic" parliamentary elections were held amidst a sea of violence, unrest, and political instability...

Talking to a Wall

You would think that showing maps clearly delineating the truncated, obviously non-viable area available for a possible Palestinian state and showing pictures that define Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories would have some kind of impact on an audience of astute but, on this issue, generally uninformed Americans...

The Power of the Israel Lobby

Let’s move over here--in the corner. It’ll be better for us to talk in private. Or else some people might get the wrong idea," chuckles John Mearsheimer, a Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and co-author of the incendiary book, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy...

Lessons for Barack Obama

Barack Obama and his supporters are exuberant after their victories this last weekend in the Washington and Nebraska precinct caucuses, in the Louisiana primary and the Maine municipal caucus. But they would do well to remember that since the mid-1970s the Democratic National Committee has spent countless hours plowing firebreaks between expressions of the popular will in such caucus and primary votes and the ultimate selection of the nominee ...

Does the Republican Party Have Aces Up Its Sleeves?

The Brownshirt Party has chosen John "hundred year war" McCain as its presidential candidate. Except for Cheney, Norman Podhoretz, and Billy Kristol, McCain is America’s greatest warmonger...

America’s Gulag and the Good War

The long-running "progressive" stance on America’s 21st century imperial adventures can be reduced to this simple dichotomy: Afghan war good, Iraq war bad...

Did Rumsfeld Authorize War Crimes?

Wikileaks has obtained the long kept secret Rules of Engagement (ROE) for U.S. troops in Iraq. This document sets out the rules guiding authorized U.S. troop actions in that occupation. While the Wikileaks document dates from 2005, as these ROEs generally change slowly the rules for today are likely similar, though we can’t be sure, of course, to what extent more recent ROE’s differ...

Pandering to the New Prejudices

When I agreed to participate in the Turin Book Fair, which I have done before, I had no idea that the ’guest of honour’ was Israel and its 60th birthday. But this is also the 60th anniversary of what the Palestinian call the ’nakba’the disaster that befell them that year, when they were expelled from their villages, some killed, women raped by the settlers. These facts are no longer disputed. So why did the Turin Book Fair not invite Palestinians in equal numbers? 30 Israeli writers an..

What Do the Pentagon’s Budget Numbers Mean?

The new 2009 defense budget has just been released. The more you look into the numbers, the more things become unclear, very unclear. Most of the numbers being released today are inaccurate or incomplete, or both. Other numbers will change as the year progresses, but we do not know if they will go up or down...

Baghdad Still Lives in Fear

At least 72 people were killed in Baghdad this weekend when two female suicide bombers, each wearing long black cloaks to conceal explosives strapped to their bodies, blew themselves up at two bird markets...

Bush’s New War Budget

The President’s FY 2009-13 budget plan, which he will submit to Congress next week, includes $70 billion to cover only the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through the first four months of Fiscal Year 2009, which begins next October 1. This budgetary legerdemain is indeed a fitting memory pill encapsulating both Bush’s reckless philosophy of governance and his callous disregard for the sacrifices of the troops he asked to fight his wars...

An Interview with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari

US military forces will not stay in Iraq for anything like as long as some American politicians are demanding, says the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari. He said crucial issues about "Who is in charge in Iraq--we or you?" would be settled in negotiations between Iraq and the United States, starting this month...