Richard Bruce Cheney

( Tomdispatch.com ) – In 2003, the Macedonian police arrested Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen vacationing in their country. They handed the unfortunate man over to the CIA, who shipped him off to one of their “black sites.” For those too young to remember (or who have quite understandably chosen to forget), “black sites” was […]

Barack Obama

Juan Cole: The Rise and Fall of Oil and the US Invasion of Iraq

Juan Cole

Here is the closing plenary panel of a conference held in mid-September by the Qatar branch of Georgetown University on “The Invasion of Iraq: Regional Reflections.” Juan Cole is the first speaker in the video below, on the changing relationship of the United States to Iraq and to energy markets in the Bush, Obama, Trump […]

Bush

Iraq’s Climate Crisis: America’s War for Oil and the Great Mesopotamian Dustbowl

Juan Cole

( Tomdispatch.com ) – It was one of the fabled rivers of history and the Marines needed to cross it. In early April 2003, as American forces sought to wrap up their conquest of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, and take strongholds to its north, the Marine Corps formed “Task Force Tripoli.” It was commanded by […]

Afghanistan

How the Bush “War on Terror” Fed US White Nationalism and brought the Terror Home

Andrea Mazzarino

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Recently, an agent of the Department of Homeland Security called me and started asking questions about a childhood acquaintance being investigated for extremism. I put him off. My feelings about this were, to say the least, complex. As a military spouse of 10 years and someone who has long written about […]

Bush

George W. Bush denounces “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq — I mean, Ukraine”

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Michael Williams at the Dallas Morning News reports on George W. Bush’s speech at his presidential center at Southern Methodist University, during which the former president made what MSNBC’s Mehdi Hassan called “one of the biggest Freudian slips of all time.” Bush denounced the rigged elections that produced the dictatorship […]

Bush

US Deplores Russia’s ‘Shock and Awe’ against Ukraine, but Found its own Against Iraq “Spectacular”

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The scenes of the horrible destruction that Russia is inflicting on Ukraine’s civilian cities, from Kharkiv to Mariupol, and the killing of nearly 1,000 civilians, including nearly 100 children, have tugged at the world’s heart strings — and rightly so. Nineteen years ago, when the George W. Bush regime unleashed […]

Bush

How Bush’s Iraq Fiasco ruined US Credibility and Enabled Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – George W. Bush issued a statement about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It went like this: DALLAS, TEXAS – “Russia’s attack on Ukraine constitutes the gravest security crisis on the European continent since World War II. I join the international community in condemning Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked and unjustified invasion of […]

Authoritarianism

Dick Cheney says he doesn’t Recognize current GOP, but he Helped pave way for Insurrection

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Former Vice President Dick Cheney accompanied his daughter, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), to the Capitol on Thursday to join the moment of silence in commemoration of the Jan. 6 insurrection. They were the only Republicans to attend. The elder Cheney was quoted as saying of the Republican House leadership, “It’s […]

African-Americans

“A Certain Hope Died:” How the White nationalist Republican Party used up Colin Powell, then Spit Him Out

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Colin Powell died on Monday, not long after his rival inside the Bush administration, Donald Rumsfeld. Both of them tore down the post-World War II order that the framers of the United Nations had erected (among them, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower), which aimed at criminalizing aggressive warfare. Despite his […]