US politics

Originally published in Hankyoreh. (Foreign Policy in Focus ) – It was not very long ago that Donald Trump was calling North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “Little Rocket Man” and threatening to rain “fire and fury” down on North Korea. In response, Kim called Trump a “dotard” and promised an equally fiery attack on […]

Pentagon

Wars R Us: Our Best and Brightest have Warned us of Pentagon Propaganda Machine

William J. Astore

(Tomsdispatch.com ) – Put up with me for just a moment while I wax literary. It turns out that, if French novelist Marcel Proust lived today, he might have had to retitle his Remembrance of Things Past as Remembrance of Things Present, or even more sadly, Things Future. As an ex-military man who lived through […]

Donald Trump

The ‘inept’ Mr Trump – and the Lost Art of the Diplomatic Cable

Brian Whitaker

(Al-Bab.com) – The point of diplomatic cables, and the cause of excitement when they are leaked, is that they are meant to be private – from which we might assume they contain information that is not generally known and is perhaps too interesting to be shared with the public. Sadly, that wasn’t the case with […]

Donald Trump

Trump’s Economic War on Iran: 88% reduction in Oil Exports, 6% Shrinkage of Economy

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The United States is already at war with Iran, squeezing its economy down to nothingness. If another country tried to do this to the US just on a whim and with no UN or international-law basis, the US would certainly launch a war over it. Iran’s choices are much more […]

Donald Trump

UK Ambassador: Trump ‘radiating insecurity,’ inventing ‘false statistics’ and Dreads Unpopularity of any War with Iran

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Isabel Oakeshott at the Mail on Sunday has gotten hold of troves of UK diplomatic cables back to Whitehall from Washington, D.C., sent by veteran diplomat Sir Kim Darroch, which are scathing on Donald Trump. What is in the cables is interesting, but it should be signalled that the Mail […]

Donald Trump

If Trump’s Steampunk History of Revolutionary War Airbases isn’t Grounds for Impeachment, What is?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Suhauna Hussain at the LA Times reviews Trump’s fragile grasp of history, from his Revolutionary War airports to his Revolutionary War bombardment of Ft.McHenry (which occurred during 1812). In the 1980s, K. W. Jeter and others, building on work of Michael Moorcock, developed a new genre of science fiction set […]

Immigration

Atrocity: American Concentration Camps for Immigrant Children

OtherWords

By By Lizet Ocampo | – Children are suffering and dying. Enough is enough. By Lizet Ocampo | July 3, 2019 Over the past several weeks, the brutal terror that immigrants face at the hands of our government has come into even sharper focus. As reports surface about immigrant children sleeping on concrete floors and […]

Immigration

American Concentration Camps, Then and Now

Foreign Policy in Focus

By Harry Blain | – ( Foreign Policy in Focus) – When human beings are framed as a national security threat, barbed wire is the next logical step. But unlike during the Japanese internment, today there’s high-level political resistance. By Harry Blain, July 1, 2019. Print A Japanese-American internment camp in Colorado (Shutterstock) In our […]

Bill of Rights

Your Fourth of July and My Fourth of July (in the Age of Trump)

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor | (Informed Comment) | – – Revised for the the Age of Trump: Your Fourth of July is tanks in the streets. My Fourth of July is James Madison’s warning, “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.” Your Fourth of July is unbathed refugee […]