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The idea didn’t come from a newly arrived Harvard or Yale congressional staffer. They mostly feel sufficiently anointed to the ways of Capitol Hill—getting along with style while going along for ambition. Continue reading →

The Republican Party has surpassed assorted phony Nigerian princes and erectile dysfunction pill pushers in flooding email in-boxes across the nation with appeals for cash. At the top of the list is the former guy (Donald Trump). His emails, sent from “Save America,” lead with “Joe Biden Must Resign.” And for a contribution to Trump, he can allegedly make that happen. Save your money, Joe Biden isn’t going anywhere. Continue reading →

Amid chaotic politics and anti-immigrant and refugee sentiments, Stadio Olimpico in Rome seemed like an oasis of social and cultural harmony. AS Roma and Raja Casablanca fans gathered in their thousands on a hot Saturday evening to cheer for their teams in a friendly match, the first in the Olimpico for nearly a year and a half. Continue reading →

We don’t talk nearly enough about the fact that wealthy and powerful people are constantly pouring vast fortunes into manipulating the way we perceive our world and that this is the ultimate source of all our major problems. Continue reading →

America’s economic and political inequality has led workaday Americans to exclaim: “The system is broken. Let’s fix it!” Continue reading →

For whatever reason, rather than making his criticism public by putting it in the response section under the article, he sent it to me in a private email. I will do him the courtesy of referring to him only as W. Gelles, rather than using his full name. Continue reading →

Since the U.S. withdrawal in Afghanistan, there has been no shortage of solidarity statements to mourn the demise of democracy and support the rule of law in Afghanistan. I appreciate the sentiment, but I am also concerned about the loss of lives and the violations of international law that occurred during the decades of U.S. military occupation in Afghanistan and the failure of the international community to protect the sovereignty of countries. Continue reading →

Brooklyn, New York is the epicenter of gentrification, the displacement of Black people from cities in this country. Recently released census data shows that neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant, which was nearly all Black for decades, no longer has a Black majority. Bedford-Stuyvesant’s white population rose by 30,000 from 2010 to 2020 while its Black population decreased by 22,000. Continue reading →

The killing of four young Palestinians by Israeli occupation soldiers in the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank, on August 16, is a consequential event, the repercussions of which are sure to be felt in the coming weeks and months. Continue reading →

In the 1980s, the animal rights movement was a sorry sight. In Chicago, it consisted of three to five activists handing out soggy leaflets in the rain outside a fur store on a Saturday, one also holding his skateboard. No one remembered to bring the signs and no one could agree whether to protest carriage horses or captive whales at the Shedd Aquarium on the next Saturday. Continue reading →

A decade ago, John Lamberton Harper, a professor of US foreign policy and European studies at Johns Hopkins University, published an indispensable history of the first Cold War (The Cold War, Oxford University Press, 2011) in which he described the origins of what became known as “the Carter Doctrine.” Continue reading →

Imagine: You are an entrepreneur with a passion for cooking who dreams of one day opening your own food truck. You have lived in the United States for 20 years. One day, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents knock on your door. They say you will be deported to a country you haven’t seen in two decades. You know that if you are sent there, you may be threatened, arrested, jailed, beaten, or killed—with the assent of the country’s police and courts—just because of your sexual identity. Continue reading →

It has to be a scurrilous lie. Seriously, nobody is that evil. Continue reading →

Buried deep in Joe Biden’s various infrastructure deals is a bailout every bit as insane as the original decision to stay in Afghanistan—up to $50 billion in handouts to keep old nuke reactors operating … at least until they blow up. Continue reading →

The resignation of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo invites comparisons, historical context, and proposals for the future. Continue reading →

I still can’t find words to describe how insane it is that all the “experts” who spent twenty years being wrong about Afghanistan remain esteemed and wealthy while those who spent that time being right about Afghanistan remain marginalized and regarded as fringe kooks. Continue reading →

We’re getting a taste of what the civil rights and antiwar movements of the ‘60s would have been like without the not-quite-yet corporate media reporting on the daily events. But over the past half century with just about all the major media gobbled up by corporations, the monied powers and politicians decided very little of their criminal actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen would be televised. Now some are criticizing the American people for not caring about the death and destruction the US has rained on Afghanistan when it wasn’t being served up as a nightly dinner course by TV. Continue reading →

Kabul, it’s been noted, was not lost yesterday. It was the inevitable final fall of a calamitous, arrogant, 20-year, trillion-dollar, too-many-deaths imperial misadventure doomed, like too many before it, to failure from its inept start. In Biden’s speech, generally deemed resolute but callous about the mayhem unfolding, he asked a tough, good question – “How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war?” – but framed it in a cynical, disingenuous way by adding, “when Afghan troops will not?” The fourth president to oversee yet another senseless war in “the graveyard of empires,” he thus found an easy target for what is the “breathtaking failure” of longtime U.S. foreign policy while blithely ignoring the blood-soaked, hubris-laden history behind it – a “post-imperial Western fantasy” of disastrous military or CIA interventions through Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and then Iran, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, which was never at war with the U.S. and where Donald Rumsfeld, may he have no rest, demanded Bush “punish and get out.” Bush and his imperious ilk spoke of nation-building, “as if nations were made of Legos.” Instead, we got our forever war, where rather than offer schools, clinics, water, job training to a beleaguered population, the U.S. blew up whatever infrastructure they had and spent 86% of a staggering trillion dollars – though some say it’s closer to 2 trillion – on often hapless military initiatives that, thanks to “a complex ecosystem of defense contractors, Washington banditry” and corruption, largely returned to the U.S. economy. Add in corruption by Afghan elites, and ultimately less than 2% of U.S. money actually went to the people who needed it. A final irony: Even as the West frantically fought to stop it, soaring Afghan poppy production fueled the insurgency, spreading from six to 28 provinces: “Opium floated the Taliban back to power.” All topped by a rushed, artless, possibly balance-tipping “deal” giving too much to the Taliban by the idiot Former Guy. Continue reading →

A unique but critical conversation on Israel and Palestine is taking place outside the traditional discourse of Israeli colonialism and the Palestinian quest for liberation. It is an awkward and difficult—but overdue—discussion concerning American Jews’ relation to Israel and their commitment to its Zionist ideology. Continue reading →

The scenes of people desperately trying to board planes in Kabul, Afghanistan, hanging from and even falling from landing gear, are reminiscent of past United States exits, most notably from Vietnam. Yet these images should not be surprising nor should they change anyone’s views about the terror that the U.S. brought to that country. The turmoil in present day Afghanistan is the end result of more than 40 years of U.S. involvement and it should not be discussed without an analysis of that history. Continue reading →

President Joe Biden plans to hold a Summit of Democracies in December of 2021. This meeting will bring together all the usual cast of characters of “heads of state, civil society, philanthropy, and the private sector” according to a White House statement. Private citizens will be included but most likely those participants will be screened and have a question to pose to the “leaders” that will undoubtedly be carefully scripted. Nothing will come of this as the US will seek to steer the narrative towards America’s creation of the Post World War II order over which it lords and to trumpet its questionable premise that only it alone is capable of leading because, after all, Americans always work in the best interests of global peace and prosperity and, besides, it has the mightiest military with which to back up its words with violent deeds. Continue reading →

The people of Afghanistan are in a state of fear of the Taliban who now control Afghanistan’s capital, major cities, and countryside—after the U.S. and NATO twenty-year occupation. Here are some of my personal observances during sixteen years in the U.S. diplomatic corps and experiencing the opening and closing of U.S. embassies in Sierra Leone and Afghanistan and the effects on the civilian populations of the countries involved. Continue reading →

Let’s never forget that what we are watching happen right now in Afghanistan is the final act of George W. Bush‘s 2004 reelection strategy. Continue reading →

I sat in Court 4 in the Royal Courts of Justice in London on August 11 with Stella Moris, Julian Assange’s partner. I have known Stella for as long as I have known Julian. She, too, is a voice of freedom, coming from a family that fought the fascism of Apartheid. On August 12, her name was uttered in court by a barrister and a judge, forgettable people were it not for the power of their endowed privilege. Continue reading →

There’s a narrative out there that millennials and the Generation Zs behind them are lazy. Continue reading →