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The Haaretz article that made such a stir by reporting that the Pentagon had turned down Israeli requests for high-powered equipment to aid an attack on Iran’s nuclear research facilities has a coda that I looked at again this morning: ‘Russia, however, is considered key to efforts to isolate Iran, and Israeli officials have therefore […]

My column, , “Putin’s War Enablers: Bush and Cheney (Russia’s escalating war on Georgia reveals the consequences of the Bush administration’s long assault on the international rule of law.) is now out in Salon.com. Excerpt: ‘ The run-up to the current chaos in the Caucasus should look quite familiar: Russia acted unilaterally rather than going […]

McCain’s campaign strategist Randy Scheunemann was a lobbyist for Georgia until recently, and remained part of Orion Strategies until May 15. OS had signed a $2 mn. deal to provide “strategic advice” to the Georgian government. Update: Bob Scheer entertains dark suspicions that Scheunemann, a leader of the Neoconservative Project for theNew American Century, put […]

Andrew Arato writes in a guest op-ed for IC The Turkish Constitutional Court has made its very important decision. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) will not be closed. It is the right decision, even if fining the party for supposedly anti-secular activities was legally dubious and politically unnecessary. As one of the very few […]

Bush’s demand that Russia “reverse course” on Georgia and not try to overthrow an elected government is full of special pleading. Bush has no standing to ask anyone not to go around invading countries, of course. Russian PM Vladimir Putin has already thrown Iraq in Bush’s face, saying ‘”Of course, Saddam Hussein ought to have […]

John Walbridge writes in a guest op-ed for IC: Most of the discussion of Ron Suskind’s new book, “The Way of the World,” has focused on a single anecdote. Citing CIA sources, he claims that the White House ordered the production of a rather clumsy forgery of a letter from the head of the Iraqi […]

Dawn says that the parliament in Pakistan has prepared a mountain of documentation in its push to impeach President Pervez Musharraf. Senate leader Raza Rabbani said that if all the documents they have on Musharraf’s misconduct were dumped in the Ravi river (which runs through Lahore), it would cause it to flood. The opposition to […]

Sumbul Ali-Karamali writes in a guest op-ed for IC: A lazy way to dismiss conflicts as hopeless is to characterize (usually erroneously) the disputing parties as having been “at each other’s throats for centuries.” It happened in Bosnia when the Christian Serbs started expunging Bosnian Muslims from the area; it happened in Rwanda when the […]