Despite Republican senator John McCain’s conviction that “We’ve already won that one,” i.e. the Iraq War, actually you couldn’t say either that the war is over or that things are going well politically in that country. It lacks a new government, the political wrangling is interminable, the apparatus of state is paralyzed, and big bombings […]
40 Killed in Bombings of Shiite Pilgrims in Iraq;
Cloughley– “Against a Rush to Judgment: Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban”
In light of the Wikileaks Pentagon documents are full of allegations by US military personnel of Pakistani collaboration with the Taliban, and they have increased tensions among the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is worth taking a step back, however, and remembering that not everything in classified documents is true or well founded. It is […]
Wikileaks on Hiding the War; and, American Security? Rethinking Afghanistan Pt. 6
The Taliban now claim that they killed one US sailor and captured another in Logar Province as the US mounts a massive manhunt for the survivor. The Afghanistan war now has its own Pentagon papers— 90,000 documents leaked to Wikileaks and then to The Guardian and two other newspapers, which show a pattern of covering […]
Jahanpour: Iran, Turkey and Israel: New Global Realities
Farhang Jahanpour writes in a guest editorial for Informed Comment : Iran, Turkey and Israel: New Global Realities Ten years ago this month (11 July 2000), in a last-minute attempt to bring peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, President Bill Clinton invited the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak […]
Women of Afghanistan: Rethink Afghanistan, Part 5
Rethink Afghanistan, pt. 5, directed by Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films, covers women’s issues. Recent news on this front: On Saturday it became clear that fighting on Friday between NATO and Taliban guerrillas left some 30 civilians dead, including women and children, when they were caught in the crossfire. Gayle Tzemach Lemmon asks of […]
Repubs Plot Israel-Iran Apocalypse and the Collapse of the US Economy
Jamal Abdi at HuffPo explains that almost a third of Republicans in the House have signed on to a resolution urging Israel to attack Iran. The National Iranian American Council has a petition you can sign calling on minority leader John Boehner to repudiate this measure. The move is reminiscent of the 1998 letter the […]
Civilian Casualties are Causing the War in the First Place: Rethinking Afghanistan, Pt. 4
Part Four of Rethinking Afghanistan, directed by Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films, covering the issue of civilian casualties. A new study by America’s National Bureau for Economic Research looking at the circumstances around 4,000 civilian deaths in Afghanistan found a high correlation between NATO killing of even two civilians in an area and a […]
The Israel Lobbies and Breitbartism: Dirty Tricks, Taboos and the threat to American Democracy
Phil Weiss notes that another of the Dirty Tricks divisions of the Israel lobbies in the US, CAMERA, has denounced CNN´s Ben Wedeman for retweeting a post of mine on Turkey-Israel relations. By the way, I am particularly proud of that posting, which examines the political economy of “re-Ottomanization” and Turkey´s emergence as a significant […]
The $1 Trillion Cost of War: Rethinking Afghanistan, Pt. 3
Part 3 of Rethinking Afghanistan— on the cost of the war– directed by Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, initiated by the Bush Minor administration as the “war on terror,” have now cost over $1 trillion, according to the Congressional Research Service. It is the most expensive conflict […]