Their war plan to defeat the Islamic State
The Kagan clan of heavyweight neocons has now advanced a scheme for vanquishing the latest Muslim monster in the Middle East. To put their plan in proper context, we must begin by acknowledging the serious faults in President Obama's own plan to rid the world of the Islamic State, or as he calls the group,...
Read MoreThe crisis in Iraq and the centrality of Israel’s national interest
Writing in the ultra-establishment Washington Post, mainstream liberal David Ignatius observes: The Post publishes views that respectable people are allowed, or even expected, to hold, so it is quite significant that Ignatius's assessment has now emerged on center stage. Of course, it was not given any attention during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq...
Read MoreThe United States, Russia, and Israel
The American involvement in the Ukrainian imbroglio has a number of causes, which include the significant role of the neoconservatives. In a series of articles, investigative journalist Robert Parry has made an insightful analysis of this neocon role, linking it to their opposition to Obama's recent "foreign policy that relies heavily on cooperation with Russian...
Read More“War for oil” — the notion that will not die
Those who claim that the United States went to war for oil seem to assume that since Iraq has huge reserves of oil, gaining control of that resource must have been the reason that the United States invaded the country. As the most prominent intellectual exponent of that view, Noam Chomsky, has put it: Operating...
Read MoreRussia’s wasteful Olympics vs. necessary U.S. Government spending
Orwellian "doublethink" — the holding of two mutually contradictory beliefs — has once again surfaced in the mainstream media in their view of Russian government spending on the Sochi Olympics compared with their polar-opposite view of the usual American government spending. The American media's picture of the Sochi Olympics is largely negative. True, the media...
Read MoreThose of a skeptical mind who want evidence for the culpability of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in the August 21 poison gas attack may find the first part of a recent Washington Times article very revealing. The story is "Kerry tells U.N. to focus on ridding Syria of chemical weapons, not on sarin attack," by...
Read MoreWhen the Constitution was being adopted to rectify the apparent weaknesses of the existing government under the Articles of Confederation, critics of the new document charged that it would create a central government able to use its expanded powers to oppress the people. Although supporters of the Constitution, the self-styled Federalists, vehemently denied that it...
Read MoreThe Yinon thesis vindicated
It is widely realized now that the fall of President Bashar Assad's regime would leave Syria riven by bitter ethnic, religious, and ideological conflict that could splinter the country into smaller enclaves. Already there has been a demographic shift in that direction, as both Sunnis and Alawites flee the most dangerous parts of the county,...
Read MoreMitt Romney, who in the past was considered a moderate Republican, has surrounded himself with neoconservative foreign-policy advisors. Romney's chameleon approach to politics is to simply say, and sometimes do, whatever would appeal to his current audience. To win the governorship of Massachusetts, Romney had to be something of a liberal. To win the Republican...
Read MoreThe push for war against Syria: James Morris dares to mention the taboo history
On Russia Today's "Crosstalk" program on Syria, presented February 10, guest James Morris was brave enough to incisively point out the taboo fact that the Israel Lobby has been in the forefront in pushing a hard-line interventionist approach for the United States toward that divided country. The host and the two other guests on the...
Read MoreA review of Maria Ryan's Neoconservatism and the New American Century
Yet another book on the neocons from a mainstream publisher has recently appeared that — like the works of Danny Cooper and Justin Vaïsse — acknowledges the neoconservatives' influence, especially in regard to Bush administration policy, while avoiding the obvious fact that the neocons' policy in the Middle East rested on their ethnic identification with...
Read MoreMainstream publishers have recently come out with a number of books dealing with the neoconservatives, and it is significant that those works acknowledge some obvious truths that were denied and even largely taboo some time ago. For example, they admit not only that neoconservatives exist — something that was denied a few years ago, most...
Read MoreNo place at anti-AIPAC conference for the author of Transparent Cabal
It was good to hear that AIPAC's 2011 conference in Washington during the latter part of May faced a counter-conference and demonstration, Move Over AIPAC, organized by Code Pink: Women for Peace, a group that has protested America's wars in the Middle East. It was the first time any large group had dared to make...
Read MoreAuthor's introduction A bottom-up democratic revolution in Egypt has brought down what had seemed until very recently to be the unshakable rule of Hosni Mubarak. It was an amazing accomplishment of the people's power — something that is often sloganized about but rarely realized. The fact that the revolution succeeded with little violence on the...
Read MoreAs Egypt burns for democracy...
The current uprisings against the autocratic regimes in the Middle East seem to be in line with the neoconservatives' advocacy of radical democratic change in the region. But there is one significant difference. The neocons had sought to use democratic revolutions to overthrow the enemies of Israel, even applying the strategy, unsuccessfully, to countries such...
Read MoreThe conservative columnist and former assistant editor of National Review, Joe Sobran, passed away September 30 at age 64 from complications of diabetes, a disease that had seriously afflicted him for years. Much can be said about Sobran. He was an extremely talented writer and political commentator who dissected the politically correct cant of the...
Read MorePresident Obama is often portrayed as a political neophyte who is forever confronting situations that are far over his head, but his choice of General David H. Petraeus to replace General Stanley A. McChrystal was in some ways a masterly political stroke, though it does not seem to have achieved all that Obama may have...
Read MoreAs the United States berates Iran for its nuclear program — though there is no substantial proof that the latter country even intends to develop nuclear weapons — Washington intentionally overlooks Israel's existing nuclear arsenal so that the latter country will remain free from international inspection. Reporting in the Washington Times on October 2, Eli...
Read MoreThe Obama administration has made Afghanistan the focus of its foreign policy, significantly escalating the war effort there. That is so even though division exists within the administration regarding the degree of escalation sought. Barack Obama's motive for expanding the war in Afghanistan seems to be a desire to appear strong in foreign policy, combined...
Read MoreMy book, The Transparent Cabal, has received a favorable review in the Spring 2009 issue of Middle East Policy. The review is not on line, but it is mentioned at www.mepc.org/journal_vol16/1toc.asp. The publication is a major scholarly journal on foreign-policy developments in the Middle East, characterizing itself this way: "Hard evidence is available that Middle...
Read MoreMemo to Post editorialists: Please turn to page one
In the Washington Post for March 12, an editorial adamantly rejects as a crackpot "conspiracy theory" the allegation that the Israel Lobby was behind the attacks on Charles W. ("Chas") Freeman Jr.'s appointment to chair the National Intelligence Council. However, on the front page of the very same issue, an article by Walter Pincus cites...
Read MoreTwo cheers for Harding
Those who follow politics are hearing much talk about the possibility of Barack Obama's becoming the first black president of the United States. But if elected, Obama would probably be the second black president, with a much better claim for number one going to Warren Gamaliel Harding, who occupied the office from 1921 until his...
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The bankruptcy of the mainstream Left as illustrated by Stephen Zunes
The antiwar Left would prefer that old-style American imperialism and the quest for oil had caused the Iraq War. They are the preferred enemies of the Left. They are the traditional villains. And they are safe villains. Mentioning Israel as a culprit would cause problems: it would lose support for the Left among activist Jews,...
Read MoreA well-tempered smother-out as a new war looms
The initial reaction to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's essay "The Israel Lobby" consisted of a relentless barrage of vituperative insults, smears, character assassination, misrepresentations, and other inflammatory rhetoric that condemned the essay in toto. In large part, the vicious pillorying of the piece came from members of the Israel lobby denying their own power...
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Israel lobbying
The elephant in the room that no one is supposed to mention is the role of the supporters of Israel in shaping American foreign policy in the Middle East. Their role has become especially apparent with the American attack on Iraq and the subsequent American policy toward Iran and Syria, in all of which the...
Read MoreThe Downing Street memos and Nuremberg
The American Establishment has conventionally praised and invoked the 1945-46 Nuremberg trial of the Nazi leadership as a model for bringing international criminals to justice. But what if the same standards applied at Nuremberg were also applied to current U.S. policy? And a parallel trial were convened? In such a proceeding, would American leaders fare...
Read MoreWriting at CounterPunch (June 24), Michael Neumann offers a program for the Left to bring about an end to America's war on Iraq. In so doing, he makes some poignant and also trenchant points, though I take exception to some of his analysis. Bush's war now enjoys less than 50 percent support among those polled....
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