British Prime Minister David Cameron went to Turkey this week and engaged in some refreshingly blunt talk about Ankara’s application to join the European Union (which does not appear to be going anywhere fast), and about the strained Turkish-Israel relationship. Cameron slammed France and Germany for putting the brakes on Turkey’s EU membership, which US […]
War is Theft: Pentagon cannot account for $8.6 Billion of Iraq’s Reconstruction Funds
The Pentagon cannot account for the over $8 bn. given out to cronies in the first years of the Iraq occupation, money which came from Iraq’s oil proceeds to begin with. The reason is that in the chaotic days after the fall of the Baath government and the collapse of the old economy, Paul Bremer […]
Dietrich: Energy and the Future of U.S. Diplomacy
Christopher R. W. Dietrich writes in a guest editorial for Informed Comment: Energy and the Future of U.S. Diplomacy In a paper written in conjunction with Lloyds of London, Dr. Paul Stevens of Chatham House recently predicted that oil could arrive at $200 per barrel by 2013. As the events in the Gulf of Mexico […]
40 Killed in Bombings of Shiite Pilgrims in Iraq;
Constitutional Crisis Unfolds
Despite Republican senator John McCain’s conviction that “We’ve already won that one,” i.e. the Iraq War, actually you couldn’t say either that the war is over or that things are going well politically in that country. It lacks a new government, the political wrangling is interminable, the apparatus of state is paralyzed, and big bombings […]
Cloughley– “Against a Rush to Judgment: Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban”
In light of the Wikileaks Pentagon documents are full of allegations by US military personnel of Pakistani collaboration with the Taliban, and they have increased tensions among the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is worth taking a step back, however, and remembering that not everything in classified documents is true or well founded. It is […]
Wikileaks on Hiding the War; and, American Security? Rethinking Afghanistan Pt. 6
The Taliban now claim that they killed one US sailor and captured another in Logar Province as the US mounts a massive manhunt for the survivor. The Afghanistan war now has its own Pentagon papers— 90,000 documents leaked to Wikileaks and then to The Guardian and two other newspapers, which show a pattern of covering […]
Jahanpour: Iran, Turkey and Israel: New Global Realities
Farhang Jahanpour writes in a guest editorial for Informed Comment : Iran, Turkey and Israel: New Global Realities Ten years ago this month (11 July 2000), in a last-minute attempt to bring peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, President Bill Clinton invited the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak […]
Women of Afghanistan: Rethink Afghanistan, Part 5
Rethink Afghanistan, pt. 5, directed by Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films, covers women’s issues. Recent news on this front: On Saturday it became clear that fighting on Friday between NATO and Taliban guerrillas left some 30 civilians dead, including women and children, when they were caught in the crossfire. Gayle Tzemach Lemmon asks of […]
Repubs Plot Israel-Iran Apocalypse and the Collapse of the US Economy
Jamal Abdi at HuffPo explains that almost a third of Republicans in the House have signed on to a resolution urging Israel to attack Iran. The National Iranian American Council has a petition you can sign calling on minority leader John Boehner to repudiate this measure. The move is reminiscent of the 1998 letter the […]
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