b. traven After 9/11, Bush/Cheney and an authoritarian national security state ran amok. Vengeance was the byword, and few in the government were careful about who the enemy was. Fear of another humiliating attack on the scale of 9/11, combined with a sociopathic disregard for human rights, drove a torture regime that was authorized from…
W.J. Astore About seven years ago, I had an impassioned debate with a conservative friend about whether the U.S. had engaged in torture and, if we had, whether it had been effective. My position was clear: we had engaged in torture, and it was both wrong and counterproductive. My friend was unconvinced. His arguments, which…
Michael Murry. Introduction by William Astore. It’s fascinating to witness Republican candidates for president continuing to swing and miss as they’re tossed softball questions about George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. Jeb Bush was first at bat. He initially said he’d invade Iraq all over again; then he got testy about answering “hypothetical”…
W.J. Astore On 30 April 1970, 45 years ago this month, President Richard M. Nixon ordered an invasion into Cambodia. Explaining his reasoning for widening the war in Southeast Asia, Nixon declared: If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy…
W.J. Astore American reporting on Iraq focuses on the eternal now, such as the rise of ISIS or recent battles in Tikrit. Rarely is any context given to these events, and rarer still is any accounting of the costs of war (still rising) to the Iraqi people. Let’s return to 2003 and the U.S. invasion…
b. traven In the run up to the Iraq war in 2002-03, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain worked so hard to get American approval that he was widely labelled as George W. Bush’s “poodle.” But who today yelps loudest when the kings of Saudi Arabia (that poor excuse for a nation) say “bark”?…
W.J. Astore Over at TomDispatch.com, retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich asks a telling question: Why does Washington continue to rely on policy “experts,” the “best and brightest” as they were called during the Vietnam War, even when events prove their advice to be consistently wrong? As Bacevich puts it (with considerable relish): “Policy intellectuals —…
b. traven Mission accomplished, George Bush! You succeeded in making Saddam Hussein look like Mahatma Gandhi compared to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the ISIS Caliphate. Your invention of non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) back in 2002 as an excuse to invade the sovereign state of Iraq in 2003 has come back to bite us…
Matthew Jacobson We just don’t know. On what date did a meeting occur at which the decision was made to wage war against Iraq? Who organized the meeting? Who attended the meeting? Where was it held? Read every book that you can find about the presidency of George W. Bush. You will not find the…
Michael Murry In 2008 Barack Obama was elected president in a wave of euphoria for “hope” and “change,” but he threw away his mandate during his first year in office when he did not liquidate Deputy Dubya’s dimwit debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. He became a predictable mediocrity after that, his two terms of office…
The Contrary Perspective 