Two Elephants in the Room

It's funny how the "debate" over Israel's role in the making of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is playing out, now that John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have let the cat out of the bag. Their critics have yet to confront the cogent arguments laid...

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The Five Morons Revisited

When the neocons launched the Bush administration's invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and announced plans for invading Syria and Iran, I labeled Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Rice "the Five Morons." With the passage of time, I see that I...

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French Wary of a Lebanese Sandwich

PARIS - Military experts are warning of dangers for the new peacekeeping force in the south of Lebanon, sandwiched as it will be between Israeli forces on one side and Hezbollah on the other. "We are going there only to take blows," a French general who...

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Backtalk August 30, 2006

How Washington Goaded Israel Into War Mr. Zunes, in his effort to get Israel off the hook (it's only a "proxy" now in its devastation of Lebanon) omits to mention just who "Washington" is and who the neocons are, and Zunes even has the gall to play the "anti-Semitism"...

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Bigotry and Ignorance of Islam

President George Bush's ignorance of the Middle East and its people is well-known. So also is his habit of parroting words and sentences given to him by other people. He hit a new low when he referred to "Islamic fascists." No two more opposite concepts are to be...

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Bush Goes Retro to Avoid Prosecution

When I was a kid, John Wayne war movies gave us the message that America was the good guy, the white hat that fought the villain. Alas, today the U.S. and its last remaining non-coerced ally, Israel, are almost universally regarded as the bad guys over whom John Wayne...

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Cooking Intelligence Again

Four years ago, President Bush ordered Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet to prepare a National Intelligence Estimate to be used to "justify" to Congress the preemptive war against Iraq we now know he had already decided to launch. Two years...

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Selective Prosecution of
War Crimes

In Saddam Hussein's war crimes trial for the 1988 Iraqi "Anfal" campaign that gassed Kurdish villages, his defense lawyers have argued that Iraqi forces were really attempting to strike Iranian forces and the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga militias that were in and supported...

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UK Foreign Policy Hangs Above Terror Threat

LONDON - The suspects in the bomb-plot case in Britain are a long way from being convicted, but Muslim leaders are blaming government policy for provoking youths to consider terrorist ways. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his ministers have flatly dismissed...

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