Crossposted with TomDispatch.com.

Memo to President Obama: Given the absence of intelligent intelligence and the inadequacy of your advisers’ advice, it’s not surprising that your handling of the Egyptian uprising has set new standards for foreign policy incoherence and incompetence.  Perhaps a primer on how to...

A recent Global Research article by Tom Burghardt provides a chilling (if also somewhat hyperbolic) account of recent raids on activists in what many are now calling a reprise on the 1960s CONTELPRO project, which was aimed mainly at the Black Panthers and other black militant groups....

In a recent trip to England, I was struck by a severe case of sciatica. With excruciating pain that left me with no position to sleep for more than a few minutes without waking in agony, I was forced to face the nightmare of the National Health System.
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Will US troops leave Iraq in 2011?

I was asked recently by a friend what I thought would happen when the deadline for troop withdrawal from Iraq (December 2011) arrived. Here is my response, for what it is worth:

Like so many others who have been following the recent...

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com.

How the mighty have fallen. Just a few years ago, an overconfident Bush administration expected to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, pacify the country, install a compliant client government, privatize the economy, and establish Iraq as the political and military headquarters for a dominating...

The Pentagon's Long-Term Plan to Get Back on Campus

If the wrestling entertainment conglomerate, WWE, tried to set up a "wrestling" curriculum on a college campus, replete with course credit, training in how to become a professional wrestler, special graduation ceremonies, with Hall of Fame wrestlers Bobo Brazil and "Stone...

Netanyahu says Israel will never withdraw to 1967 borders.

It is so annoying that the U.S. corporate media decides that big news doesn't exist and non-news is big news. The New York Times, for example, has gone six days without any news from Iraq (where the U.S. is spending 10...

US presence in Iraq is actually growing.

Believe it or not, the U.S. presence in Iraq is growing under the leadership of antiwar president Barack Obama. A recent Washington Post by reporter Walter Pincus explains that when U.S. troops are "withdrawn," their jobs are taken over by......mercenaries --...

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com

Here's how reporters Steven Lee Myers and Marc Santora of the New York Times described the highly touted American withdrawal from Iraq's cities last week:

"Much of the complicated work of dismantling and removing millions of dollars of equipment from the...

There are still some great mainstream journalists in Iraq, sneaking in revealing stories that let us know what is really going on there. Jane Arraf of the Christian Science Monitor is one of the best operating there these days, and her recent article is really terrific, putting the...

By replacing his commanding general in Afghanistan, President Obama has taken authorship of the two-front war in the Middle East.

This was not an orderly succession, but a rare event fraught with historical significance. The firing of battlefield commanding General David D. McKiernan -- and his replacement by his...

A recent article written by Israeli journalist, Uri Blau, and published in the Israeli national newspaper Haaretz, details a small, but symptomatic aspect of Israel's colonial policy toward the Palestinians: the dehumanizing attitudes that some Israeli soldiers adopt toward the Palestinians. Apparently, it is a custom that small units (squads,...

Will The US Government And Media Finally Report The Slaughter Of Iraqis By The US Military?

I recently received a set of questions from Le Monde Diplomatique reporter Kim Bredesen about the 2007 Project Censored story about 1,000,000 Iraqi deaths due to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq....

The argument about torture has continued without resolution since the exposure of Abu Ghraib. Much of the discussion centers on the concatenation of three related, but nevertheless separate, questions: What is "moral"? What is "legal"? What is "effective"? The slippery linkage of the three questions is fully expressed in a...

Dean Baker of Truthout recently published a wonderful article about McCain's plan for oil drilling off the Florida coast.

Baker makes three very important points about this plan.

First, there is simply not enough oil there to make any kind of difference in terms of the energy crisis:...

Collateral Damage, a new book by Laila al-Arian, an independent journalist and Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and former Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times, offers the best account so far of what Hedges calls the "vast enterprise of industrial slaughter unleashed in Iraq," and its...

Ashley Smith has just published a fine article in the International Socialist Review analyzing the consequences of Bush's surge. It is short and to the point, and it frames the situation in Iraq very well. Here is a brief summary of what I think are the most important points:

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The best "Top Ten" list for the year 2007 is from Juan Cole: The Top Ten Myths About Iraq. This has been a myth-making year in Iraq, starting with the major media climbing aboard the Bush Administration effort to spin the "surge" as a big success in reducing violence--which...

Sometimes Paul Krugman cuts to the heart of some issue in a way that few people can. His December 17 Op Ed in the New York Times is an example. He compares the positions of John Edwards and Barack Obama on medical care, and finds Obama to be severely...

It doesn't matter what the news from Iraq is, the official bottom line is always the same (for all our leaders, Democrat as well as Republican): we have to stay there until the job is done.

Tom Engelhardt, in a recent "Tom Dispatch," clarifies what this means by...