Bush

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Well we had the primetime GOP debate, so the 2016 election season has formally begun. Trump declared himself more or less an independent. When Megyn Kelly pressed him on his history of misogyny and putting down women, he threatened not to be nice to her any […]

Barack Obama

Top 5 Ways Obama’s ‘All of the Above’ Politics led to Sanders & Trump

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole – (Informed Comment) – It is said that one of the things President Obama wanted to talk to comedian Jon Stewart about was his occasional cynicism. “Obama scolded him for turning young Americans cynical.” But the approach to politics taken by Obama until recently — of promising genuine change but governing as […]

Bush

The Middle East Policy of President John Ellis “Jeb” Bush: Iraq, Iran Wars?

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Jeb Bush announced his run for president on Monday. It is hard to know what his Middle East policy would be from his wibbly wobbly pronouncements, but that it would be imperial and aggressive can be deduced from his foreign policy advisory team, including Neoconservatives such […]

Bush

Donald Rumsfeld Blames Bush For Iraq Democracy Fail

contributors

Mark Sovel & Elliot Hill | (The Lip TV – Video) | – – “Donald Rumsfeld said George W. Bush was wrong about Iraq in a recent interview with British newspaper The Times where the former Secretary of Defense called the Bush administration’s efforts to push democracy on Iraq “unrealistic”. In the interview, Rumsfeld, a […]

Bush

Did Jeb Bush’s brother “Create ISIL” in Iraq?

contributors

by Brian Glyn Williams It was one of those moments that politicians dread. An unscripted incident last month when a voice in a crowd pinned down a candidate on an issue he could not squirm away from and made news in the process. With the media recording every word, a 19 year old college student […]

Bush

2007: Progress Continues in Ramadi, Mullen Notes During Visit

contributors

Just to show Iraq’s ups and downs, here is a celebratory article from the US Department of Defense about the apparent rollback in Ramadi of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (the parent organization of Daesh/ ISIS/ ISIL) from 2007 DoD News By Jim Garamone American Forces Press Service RAMADI, Iraq, Dec. 19, 2007 – Driving through downtown […]

Bush

Did Jeb Bush just commit a War Crime in Justifying the Iraq War?

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | — Jeb Bush’s people are trying to walk back his disastrous interview with Megyn Kelly in which he said that even if he knew then what we all know now, he would have launched the war on Iraq in 2003. It is true that he doesn’t seem to […]

African-Americans

We’re all Iraqis now: How Bush’s Wars Militarized Baltimore & Ferguson Police

contributors

By Michael Gould-Wartofsky | (Tomdispatch.com) | – Last week, as Baltimore braced for renewed protests over the death of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) prepared for battle. With state-of-the-art surveillance of local teenagers’ Twitter feeds, law enforcement had learned that a group of high school students was planning to march on the Mondawmin […]

Barack Obama

Bush blames Obama for lack of Wars (‘Follow-Through’ on ‘Threats’)

contributors

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – George W. Bush spoke privately this weekend at a Republican Jewish Coalition session hosted by casino sleazeball Sheldon Adelson, who made his pile in a very shady way in China’s Macau and now gets to choose the US president with his ill-gotten gains. What was remarkable was that […]