Will the Bush Administration bomb Iran? Recently that question has been the subject of enormous speculation and numerous articles in the press. Newsweek asked, "Is war with Iran next?" and the Economist asked, "Next stop Iran?" The BBC reported this week that our government's "contingency plans for air...

Imagine this. Suppose the UN Security Council were to impose financial sanctions on Iran, supported by the U.S. The U.S. moves to implement the sanctions, forcing U.S. banks to cut off their relationships with Iranian banks. Now suppose that there is a financial institution based in the British Virgin Islands...

The key talking point of supporters of indefinitely continuing the U.S. occupation of Iraq boils down to this: there is nothing Congress can do to compel the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq except "cut the funding," and cutting the funding would hurt the troops.

So far this argument has...

Ladies and Gentlemen, I rise in defense of Condoleezza Rice.

It's great that the Bush Administration's failure to respond to Iran's peace offer of 2003 is again in the news, thanks to the Leverett affair and Glenn Kessler's reporting in the Washington Post.

But 99% of...

Today's media weasel word is "meddling." As in, the Bush Administration has accused Iran of "meddling" in Iraq.

This weasel word is extremely dangerous, because it's being used to conflate two very different accusations:

Accusation One: the government of Iran is supplying weapons to Shiite militias for use in attacks...

The intelligence-cookers are at it again, trying to link the government of Iran to attacks on U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Many reporters are deeply skeptical, like Helene Cooper and Mark Mazzetti at the New York Times and Dafna Linzer at the Washington Post. (Michael Gordon, the go-to guy...

Robert Naiman, Just Foreign Policy, February 12, 2007

Australian Prime Minister John Howard criticized Barack Obama for saying US troops should withdraw from Iraq by March 2008, BBC reports. Howard said al-Qaeda should be "praying as many times as possible" for an Obama victory in the 2008 elections....

Articles Reminiscent of Reporting That Led to Iraq War

It's Déjà Vu All Over Again

The front page headlines of the New York Times today (Saturday, February 10) bring back old memories:

"Deadliest Bomb in Iraq is Made By Iran, U.S. Says"

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned yesterday a U.S. attack on Iran would trigger Iranian retaliation against U.S. interests "around the world," the Washington Post reported.

In response to Khamenei's warning, White House spokesman Tony Snow said, "I've said it, the secretary of defense has said...

A New York Times editorial today on trade policy says:

"To win Democrats' support, the White House will have to accept some of their demands for stronger labor provisions in future trade accords. Bans on forced labor and child labor, and similar mandates, are laudable goals. But...

By Mark Weisbrot, February 1, 2007

There has been an enormous uproar in the media here - that part of the media that covers Latin America - about the Venezuelan national legislature voting to authorize President Hugo Chavez to enact certain legislation by decree, for 18 months. It is being...

If there's something you were thinking of apologizing for, but you were holding back on the grounds that apologizing might be taken as an implicit commitment not to make the same mistake in the future, I can now reassure you.

No less venerable an institution than the New York Times...

When the Iraq Study Group report was released in December, much of the focus was on its recommendations regarding the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. But it may turn out that the group's unanimous, bipartisan recommendation to negotiate with Iran and Syria will be the greater threat to the...

Robert Naiman, Just Foreign Policy, January 23, 2007

Ordinarily, I fight shy of the risky business of making predictions.

But now, in this space, I am ready to make a prediction about President Bush's State of the Union speech tonight, with what Mark Twain called the calm confidence...

By Mark Weisbrot and Robert Naiman, Just Foreign Policy
Monday, January 22, 2007

"[I]f we have a president that is going to effectively defy the American people, going to defy the generals, defy the majority of the Congress of the United States, Republicans and Democrats, then we, I...

Robert Naiman, Just Foreign Policy, January 19, 2007

Arash Norouzi, co-founder of the Mossadegh Project (which incidentally has really cool "No Iran War" t-shirts), is no apologist for Ahmadinejad or the Iranian government, as the last paragraph of this article makes clear:

'Iran's President has written two rather...

Robert Naiman, Just Foreign Policy, January 17, 2007

If someone were keeping a "doomsday clock" of the impending threat of a U.S. military attack on Iran, that clock surely would have ticked forward in the last week. President Bush's speech last week was less about Iraq than about Iran,...

I had the opportunity to talk on C-SPAN yesterday about how the media here misrepresents the reality of Venezuela for the vast majority of Americans who will never set foot in the country. Exhibit A, from the Washington Post editorial board last week: "despite a one-sided campaign that left...

Robert Naiman, Just Foreign Policy, January 10, 2007

To no-one's surprise, President Bush has announced his "new strategy": 20,000 more troops. To no-one's surprise, the November election has not changed Bush's underlying policy one whit. To no-one's surprise, he ignored the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, in particular,...

Written by:
Tom Andrews, Win Without War
Robert Naiman, Just Foreign Policy
January 8, 2007

Defying the vast majority of the American public and top military leaders, the president of the United States is about to announce an escalation of his failed war in Iraq....