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First Formal US-Iran Talks since 1980 The US has dealt differently with Iran than with any other of its major enemies. Then President Ronald Reagan spoke directly with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev even though the USSR had thousands of nuclear missiles aimed at the US. The US talks to North Korea. It talks to Venezuela. […]

Memorial Day, 2007 A couple of months ago I was at Detroit Metro and two very young soldiers timidly approached me. They were changing planes there, but the airport deeply confused them. When and where was their flight? Their brows knitted beneath extreme crewcuts (they were the victims of an overenthusiastic army barber of a […]

Logic Lessons on Iraq and Terror for Bush and McCain The Palm Beach Post editorial on Bush’s illogic does what newspapers are supposed to do. It questions the logicality of a politician’s assertion. Last week Bush gave a news conference in which he was asked why Bin Laden hadn’t been caught. He said, “because he […]

Basra Battle between Mahdi Army and British In apparent retaliation for the killing of their commander, Mahdi Army militiamen launched a fierce 2 and a half-hour assault on a British base in the southern Shiite city of Basra. The British military must have been alarmed by the assault, since they called in an air strike […]

Cheney Conniving at Iran War Says Bush Cannot be Trusted Shorter Steve Clemons: Cheney and his staff are colluding with the Neoconservatives at the American Enterprise Institute and with Israeli hawks to sideline Condi Rice’s negotiations with Iran by getting up an Israeli cruise missile strike on Iranian civilian nuclear research facilities at Natanz, in […]

Democratic Party Divided on Iraq Supplemental Although everyone is syaing that September is now the potential turning point in congressional support for the Iraq War, I don’t see how things will change much then. Supporters of the “surge” will be able to find some evidence of “progress” even if it is “slow.” Unless there are […]

Starving the Americans Out Someone in the Green Zone leaked the following memo, which shows that US personnel are now actually facing difficulties in getting food by convoy up from Kuwait. They avoid local food in the Baghdad region because of the danger guerrillas will poison it. ‘Due to a theater-wide delay in food delivery, […]

USG Defends Haleh After many days of silence, the US government finally spoke out on Tuesday against the absurd charges lodged by the Iranian government against imprisoned Iranian-American academic Haleh Esfandiari. Robin Wright has more, noting that Haleh is considered the “gold standard” with regard to academic scholarship. The Ibn Khaldun Center for Human Rights […]

Esfandiari charged with Serious Crime The Iranian government has now charged detained Iranian-American academic Haleh Esfandiari with trying to overthrow the current regime, according to the Washington Post’s Robin Wright. This AP article calls it a “soft revolution.” How was she going to do this? By academic interchanges and conferences! I think I speak for […]