US Lifts Ban on Sale of Arms to Indonesia

Moving with unusual speed, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush officially normalized military relations with Indonesia Wednesday when the State Department posted a formal notice permitting the sale of lethal military equipment to Jakarta for the first time in seven years. The announcement in the Federal Register came just two weeks after Condoleezza [...]

Public Continues to Sour on Bush’s Crusade

The vast majority of the U.S. public appears to have grown thoroughly disillusioned with President George W. Bush’s crusade to spread democracy abroad, according to a new survey by one of the country’s premier public opinion analysts. The survey, designed by Daniel Yankelovich, also found that public concern about U.S. dependence on foreign energy sources [...]

The Lobby Strikes Back

The reaction to the Harvard University study by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” [.pdf] has been fury by the Lobby and its partisans – and a demotion for Walt, who, it was announced shortly after the paper’s release, would be stepping down from his post as [academic] [...]

An ‘Alliance’ of Violence

A disturbing trend noticeable in Iraq for quite some time now is that each aggressive Israeli military operation in the occupied territories results in a corresponding increase in the number of attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. One of the first instances of this was the assassination of Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin in March [...]

The Good, the Bad,
and the Ugly

Three years into Operation Iraqi Freedom one thing should be apparent: Iraq was not a cakewalk. Maybe the fight against the Iraqi military on the open battlefield was a cakewalk, but everything since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1, 2003 – taking a victory lap by landing aboard the [...]

Making the World Safe for Christianity

The top neocon of the 20th century was Woodrow Wilson. His supposed idealism, symbolized in the slogan "Make the world safe for democracy," resulted in untold destruction and death across the world for many decades. His deceit and manipulation of the prewar intelligence from Europe dragged America into an unnecessary conflict that cost the world and us [...]

Israeli Electorate Rebukes Bush

Israeli elections this week swept the right-wing Likud Party from power and installed a center-left government committed to peaceful coexistence with Palestine. Ehud Olmert, the leader of the new Israeli government, told the new Palestinian government that "we are ready to compromise and evacuate, under great pain, Jews living there [the West Bank of Palestine] [...]

‘Democratizing’ Iran:
A Case of Déjà Vu

In the 1993 movie comedy Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays a weatherman who is reluctantly sent to cover a story about the rodent whose internal clock is believed to be affected by annual changes in the amount of daylight and who is supposed to start ending its hibernation on the second of February (marking the [...]

Rights Group: Iraqi Women Worse Off Under Occupation

Women were far better off under former Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein, a women’s group has found after an extensive survey in Iraq. “Under the previous dictator regime, the basic rights for women were enshrined in the constitution,” Houzan Mahmoud from the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq told IPS in an interview. The group is [...]

The Politics of PTSD

Recent news articles have reported that nearly 216,000 veterans diagnosed with PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder – receive benefits from the Veterans Administration (VA). Most of these veterans are from the Vietnam period, and many, including myself, were granted their disability ratings only during the last decade. Since 1999, the VA’s PTSD benefit payments have [...]