The situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating because the Afghanistan project was always held hostage to Iraq. The Bush administration after 9-11 used Afghanistan as a casus belli to get to Iraq. And you can see this written in the lackluster way in which the administration embraced the project in Afghanistan ( Read more... )

The case of Iran Is a complicated one. Iran has to be punished because it broke free of U.S. control in 1979. The U.S. picture of Iran - as portrayed in media commentary and so on - says nothing ever happened in Iran up until 1979. The installation of the shah in 1953, that kind of thing is never mentioned. Here are some facts to help you ( Read more... )

Saddam Hussein was a monster. In fact if you listen to Bush Jr., Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Donald Rumsfeld or almost anyone who comments on this, they justify the war repeatedly by saying that this man is such a monster that we just can't let him survive. He's even committed the ultimate atrocity-namely, using weapons of mass destruction ( Read more... )

Do you get the feeling sometimes that you’re living in an occupied country? Very often that’s a feeling I get when I wake up in the morning. I think, “I’m living in an occupied country. A small group of aliens have taken over the country and are trying to do with it what they will, and really are.” I mean, they are alien to me. Those people who are ( Read more... )

Part of what we claim is that North Korea getting nuclear weapons would threaten the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty ( Read more... )

Israel is having more and more trouble putting down this popular revolution over the Occupied Territories. The repression of the Palestinians and the Lebanese is not qualitatively different right now from what it was 40 years ago -- it's just that it's escalated in scale sincee the Palestinians and the Lebanese started fighting back. For the ( Read more... )

One of the issues which has devastated a substantial portion of the left in recent years, and caused enormous triumphalism elsewhere, is the alleged fact that there's been this great battle between socialism and capitalism in the twentieth century, and in the end capitalism won and socialism lost-and the reason we know that socialism lost is ( Read more... )

The Batista dictatorship was overthrown in January 1959 by Castro's guerrilla forces. In March, the National Security Council (NSC) considered means to institute regime change. In May, the CIA began to arm guerrillas inside Cuba. "During the Winter of 1959-1960, there was a significant increase in CIA-supervised bombing and incendiary raids piloted ( Read more... )

The latest chapter of the conflict between Israel and Palestine began when Israeli forces abducted two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from Gaza. An incident scarcely reported anywhere, except in the Turkish press. The following day the Palestinians took an Israeli soldier prisoner and proposed a negotiated exchange against prisoners taken by ( Read more... )

The rapidly escalating costs of health care are threatening a serious fiscal crisis, along with immeasurable human costs. Infant Mortality in the U.S. is one major index. The UN Human Development Report 2005 reveals that "since 2000 a half century of sustained decline in infant death rates [in the United States] first slowed then reversed." By 2005 ( Read more... )