From the earliest states to the Islamic State There has been some controversy over whether ISIS, or the Islamic State, is truly a state. Even according to the standard definition of “territorial monopoly of force” (which I think is too restrictive anyway), it would be...
Laugh All You Want, but Marie Harf is Basically Right About Jobs and Jihadis
I hold no brief for State Department spokesperson Marie Harf, who spends most of her time shilling for her bosses’ catastrophic policies in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and beyond. But it bodes ill for our prospects of peace that the most sensible thing I’ve ever heard her...
Blowback: Paris Terror Suspect Radicalized by Outrage Over American Torture and Invasion of Iraq
One of the Paris terror suspects was radicalized by outrage over American torture and the invasion of Iraq. The Huffington Post reports: "The Associated Press said that Cherif Kouachi was tried in 2008 for helping funnel fighters to Iraq and sentenced to 18 months in...
NY Times Deceived Americans on WMDs and Iraq Once Again, This Time with Help From The Drudge Report
Last October, The New York Times ran a story about the effects of abandoned chemical weapons in Iraq from a program that was abandoned in the early 90s, and so had nothing to do with Bush Administration WMD accusations that were used to justify the 2003 invasion of...
Blowback: Paris Terror Suspects Recently Returned from Syria and Demonstrated Military Training
Briefly noted in the third paragraph of a USA Today report about the suspects in today's Paris terror attack: "Both brothers returned from Syria this summer." What would French radical Islamists be doing in Syria around that time? Quite possibly getting training from...
Superman and Batman Tried to Warn Us About Iraq
A 1999 comic book examined humanitarian intervention and regime change, predicting the Iraq War catastrophe. Dictators are bad, therefore intervening to remove a dictator is good, right? For many Iraq War supporters it was as simple as that, and they derided opponents...
Watch Laura Poitras’s Iraq Documentary for Free Until Nov 24
The Sundance Now Doc Club is making My Country My Country, the Iraq documentary by Laura Poitras (of Edward Snowden fame, and director of the acclaimed new film, Citzenfour), available to watch for free online until November 24. Watch it here.
Religious Zealotry and Imperial Domination: Infection and Inflammation in the Body Politic
“Leave them to their sectarian religious wars. They’ve been killing each other for thousands of years, and it will continue unabated no matter what we enlightened, secular westerners do. Best not to get mixed up in it.” This sentiment is prevalent within certain...
Back to Black and Back to the Stone Age
You know how sometimes a cop will turn off his dash cam (often "mistakenly," or it "malfunctions") right before he brutalizes or executes a victim? That's what Israel did yesterday, when it knocked out Gaza's only power plant, killing the power for most of the...
The New York Times Soft-Pedals Israel’s Slaughter of Children, Shifts Blame to Victims
This was what the original The New York Times report of the Israeli military bombing to death four children while they were playing soccer on an otherwise generally empty beach. They have since made the URL for this article redirect to a different one, that...
