Cold War

How US-Soviet Cold War Competition led to Fall of the Afghan Left and Collapse of the Country into Fundamentalism

By Luis Edel Abreu Veranes | – From the turbulent 1970s ( Middle East Monitor) – With its geographic centrality on the Asian continent, Afghanistan has historically become a corridor and civilisational interstice between Persian and Hindustani empires and peoples flowing in from the north. Some were Turkic-speaking, who marked and shaped the ethnic synthesis […]

Cold War

Why the Suez Canal, now blocked, is so Important to the Global Economy and World History

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The super-super tanker Ever Given is stuck kitty-corner in the Suez Canal, having apparently run up on a sand bar. It is blocking dozens of other ships from going through the canal. The ship, one of the largest in the world, is a quarter of a mile long and can […]

CIA

JFK Files Reveal US Mulled Use of Biological Weapons in Cuba

contributors

TeleSur | – – During a top-level meeting, U.S. officials warned against the possibility of it being traced back to the United States. The recently published JFK files have shed further light on U.S. plans to use biological weapons as part of its Cuban Project, an agricultural sabotage plot against the socialist country. During a […]

Central Intelligence Agency

“Secret” JFK Assassination Files Reveal Bizarre Allegations

Juan Cole

TeleSur | – – Nearly 3,000 documents previously kept secret are now in the process of being published online by the National Archive. As much as 88% of the collection has been available to the public since the late 1990s, but a small portion is still being withheld. Conspiracy theorists have been quick to seize […]

Cold War

The Break-Up of America: Donald Trump and the Fourth Great Shattering

Juan Cole

By John Feffer | ( Tomdispatch.com ) | – – When the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., published his bestseller The Disuniting of America in 1991, he didn’t seriously entertain the worst-case scenario suggested by the title. At the time, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were imploding, while separatist movements in Quebec, East Timor, Spain’s Basque […]

Cold War

‘Locked & Loaded’ Trump’s 1960s Cowboyism re: N. Korea & Venezuela

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – If you were away from news on Friday, you might like to know that in addition to hot wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Yemen (and maybe Somalia and Libya), the Trump administration talks as though it is on the brink of opening new fronts in […]

Central Intelligence Agency

Want Iranian Democracy? We had one & CIA overthrew it

contributors

By Joseph McQuade | (The Conversation) | – – The US and Iran have a complicated relationship. At the moment, it is tense, divisive and delicate. Just over 60 years ago, things were not that different. In 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) organised a coup to oust Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Muhammad Mossadegh. […]

Arms Sales

First, the Soviets Collapsed: Is it America’s Turn Now?

contributors

By William J. Astore | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – – Jump into your time machine and let me transport you back to another age. It’s May 2001 and the Atlantic Monthly has just arrived in the mail. I’m tantalized by the cover article. “Russia is finished,” the magazine announces. The subtitle minces no words: “The […]

Cold War

The Untold Violence of the Pax Americana

contributors

John W. Dower | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – – [This essay is adapted from “Measuring Violence,” the first chapter of John Dower’s new book, The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War Two.] On February 17, 1941, almost 10 months before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Life magazine carried a lengthy essay by […]