Comrade Aaronovitch
Strikes Again

David Aaronovitch, formerly a Communist Party youth leader and now the freshest shoot in Britain's bumper crop of Blairite neocons, tried to smear me once before, and I dealt with him here. The Stalinist school of falsification never sleeps, however: its practitioners...

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Immoral Relativism

"At a breakfast meeting with reporters, Wolfowitz said he hasn't read the [Downing Street] memos because he doesn't want to be 'distracted' by 'history' from his new job as head of the world's leading development bank. He returned this weekend from a tour of four...

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Ahmadinejad and Bush: Separated at Birth?

Despite the growing likelihood of confrontation between their two countries, U.S. President George W. Bush and Iranian President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad share a number of remarkable similarities. Juan Cole, a prominent blogger and Middle East historian at the...

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From Tehran to Washington, Demagogues Rule

Ten days ago, in one of southern Tehran's poor neighborhoods, I interviewed some voters in line to cast ballots for Iran's next president. After a while, when an official at the polling station asked who I thought would win, I repeated the conventional media wisdom:...

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Rights Groups Detail Growing Police State

The FBI is carrying out "unwarranted investigations for religious or political reasons," according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which charges that "the agency has sunk back into the kind of political monitoring it did in the 1960s and...

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Backtalk June 28, 2005

Iraq: What Price 'Victory'? Justin Raimondo recently asked: what price victory? I'm not sure victory is now what the Republicans are after, except the illusion that they are still after it. My reasoning for this comes from Karl Rove's comments about liberals and the...

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The Last Throes of US Dominance

Last Friday, the price of light sweet crude oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange for August delivery closed 16 cents short of $60/barrel – the highest price ever and an ironic outcome for the millions of Americans who believe that cheap oil was the reason for...

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A Scolding From Miss Rice

From The Washington Post to The Wall Street Journal to the Financial Times, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is being hailed for her latest public scolding of America's Arab allies. In what columnist David Ignatius calls the "signature line" of her speech at The...

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