Crossposted with Tomdispatch.com

Or Killing a Chicken to Scare the Monkeys

Is the Israel lobby in Washington an all-powerful force? Or is it, perhaps, running scared?

Judging by the outcome of the Charles W. ("Chas") Freeman affair this week, it might seem...

Reposted from TomDispatch.

What, exactly, does Barack Obama's mild-mannered choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services, former Senator Tom Daschle, have to do with neocons who want to bomb Iran?

A familiar coalition of hawks, hardliners, and neoconservatives expects Barack Obama's...

The United States, it is said, invaded Iraq to create democracy. The truth of that proposition aside, the unseemly, hurried-up renewal of the United Nations mandate that supports the U.S. occupation of Iraq this week trampled on the very idea of democracy.

Last summer, Iraq's parliament - yes, the very...

Like sly foxes watching the trapper step into his own trap, European diplomats are saying that the release of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran won't change anything. They will, they said, continue to work for stronger sanctions against Iran both at the United Nations and unilaterally, to pressure Iran...

The improved security situation in Iraq has exposed the ugly underbelly of the Democratic Party's lame opposition to the war in Iraq. It remains to be seen whether or not the uneasy stability taking hold in Iraq will boost the GOP's chances at the polls next November.

Since 2003, the...

Vice President Cheney is losing a trusted aide: David Wurmser, Cheney's chief adviser on Middle East affairs and perhaps the Bush administration's most radical hawk. According to multiple sources, Wurmser will leave the office of the vice president (OVP) in August for the private sector, where he will start a...

Some scattered items in the news today shed yet more light on the oft-overlooked U.S.-Iranian alliance in Iraq. Yes, that would be the same U.S-Iran alliance that many Sunnis in Iraq, including Baathists and resistance leaders, keep talking about.

Here's the problem: Most of the key forces in Iraq that...

Last week, a little noticed but potentially important dialogue occurred on Capitol Hill. A dozen or so members of Congress, led by Rep. Jim McDermott (D.-Wash.) held a video teleconference with five members of the Iraqi parliament. The parliamentarians from Iraq included both Sunnis and Shia, and the members of...

The following is an unedited transcript of today's White House press briefing by Tony Snow:

Q. There's a controversy this week over Congressman John Murtha's comments about Karl Rove. What can you tell us? Specifically, does Mr. Rove have a "fat backside"?
Snow: I don't want to comment on...

The slaughter of innocents in Haditha, Iraq, last November could make a final turning point in the U.S. war against Iraq. Representative John Murtha, the former Marine who has turned against the war, and bitterly, suggests that when the full truth is known about the Haditha massacre (note to media:...

By now it's not surprising when the Wall Street Journal's editorial page utterly contradicts news accounts in its own pages, but this week the Journal did it in spades. And it goes to the heart of the crisis in Iraq, where the Bush administration has just about handed Iraq to...

Former secretaries of state and defense aren't supposed to be poodles and patsies, but I've gotta wonder. What were they thinking? They all linked up like kindergartners for the photo op with the prez in the Oval Office, a baker's dozen of 'em by my count: Albright, Baker, Carlucci, Cohen...

Call me paranoid, or obsessive, but I never count Ahmed Chalabi out. His recent (some might call it triumphal) visit to Washington seemed to patch up relations with the more skeptical among the Bush administration's leading lights, and it certainly won him the renewed plaudits of the neocon chattering classes....

More and more evidence is mounting that Iran’s ayatollahs have their hands deep into the Shiite-led government of Iraq. Astonishingly though, the Bush administration – and its allied phalanx of neoconservatives – have turned a blind eye to Iran’s influence in Iraq. That’s because the Iraqi Shiites, who run the...

Eric Edelman is still lying for the Vice President. Edelman, from 2001, served as Dick Cheney's chief adviser on matters related to national security and Iraq. Since then Edelman has succeeded Douglas Feith, the man who ran the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, as undersecretary of defense for policy. And...

So it looks like it will be announced this afternoon that the Pentagon's inspector general will launch an investigation into the activities of one Douglas Feith. Feith, as we know, was the inside ringleader for the neoconservative cabal during the run-up to the war in Iraq. He created the Counterterrorism...

Yesterday I was speaking with someone who was involved in the pre-war, 2002-2003 planning for Iraq, and he told me of the exact moment at which some of his colleagues realized that the United States was proceeding with a policy that would turn Iraq over to a horde of Shiite...

Recent news from Iraq has engendered an inescapable, and exquisite, paradox for the neoconservative backers of the war in Iraq. Happily I want to draw it out.

Astonishingly, the very Iraqi government whose supposed legitimacy the neocons want Americans to support has now made a deal with the neoconservatives’ worst...

I paid pretty close attention to the just-concluded visit to Washington by Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. It had its comic moments, especially when President Bush called him an "open fella," thus making an unintended pun in Arabic, since fellah is Arabic for peasant. And both Bush and Jaafari stuck...