The ‘New Anti-Semitism’ and Nuclear War

The trajectory of a long-running campaign that gave birth this month to the preposterous all-party British parliamentary report into anti-Semitism in the UK can be traced back to intensive lobbying by the Israeli government that began more than four years ago, in...

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The Facts on the Ground

This August, a site of shame, shared by Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush, was emptied. Abu Ghraib prison is the place where Saddam's functionaries tortured (and sometimes killed) many enemies of his regime, and where Bush's functionaries, as a series of notorious...

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As Crazy as It Sounds

As crazy as it sounds, President George Bush might be planning to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. There are two currents of speculation flowing through Washington these days. One current says that the Bush administration is planning the bombing campaign, but only as a...

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More Bush Diplomacy

Is it true that President Bush’s recent speech to the UN General Assembly means he no longer intends to use Iran’s "defiance" of a resolution by the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency and a resolution by the UN Security Council...

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US-Iran Shootout Is Inevitable

Would US President George W Bush and Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad run into each other by chance during their opening session of the United Nations General Assembly this week? That seemed to be the major concern occupying US officials. It seems White House...

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Torture Chic: Sign of Decadence

The great American essayist Albert J. Nock once devoted a long piece to the question of how one knows whether or not one is living in a Dark Age. From inside such an era, of course, the question is not so simple. Historians and propagandists name ages years or even...

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Groups Denounce Deal on Detainee Rights

Human and civil rights groups have broadly denounced a compromise deal on the application of the Geneva Conventions to detainees in the "global war on terror" worked out between the White House and a group of rebellious Republican senators whose efforts have been...

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A Foreign Policy of Failure

Rare is it to find a president whose foreign policy has imploded as dramatically and catastrophically as has that of George W. Bush. Little more than a year after taking office, the candidate who espoused humility turned into the chief executive who embraced empire....

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Backtalk, September 22, 2006

Somalia: A Case Study in Interventionism "The Somalis were crushed by the formerly American-aided Ethiopian military, which was outfitted with the latest weaponry, and Barre's Soviet sponsors abandoned him." Crushed? Excuse me? FYI, Somalia lost to Ethiopia in 1977...

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