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HOW MITT ROMNEY DODGED THE DRAFT — H. Bruce Franklin remembers Romney from his Stanford days and lays out exactly how he and his father ensured he would evade service in the war which, at Stanford, he was demonstrating for. Andrew Cockburn gives CounterPunchers a compelling investigation of the rise of automated warfare and of the Drones, their vast costs and constant failures. Wei Zhang  assesses the social and health costs of China’s incredible GDP growth.
Archives by Tag 'Iraq'
American Empire and the Future
PAUL L. ATWOOD
The Great Recession is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and, like the aftermath of Katrina, or the BP calamity, or the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, is a man-made disaster. Many signs point to worse ...
The Why of Terrorism
RAY McGOVERN
John Brennan, President Obama’s chief adviser on counter-terrorism, has again put on public display two unfortunate facts: (1) that the White House has no clue as to how to counter terrorism; and (2) (in Brennan’s words) “the unfortunate fact that to save many innoc...
The Hospital of Horrors
ROBERT FISK
The pictures flash up on a screen on an upper floor of the Fallujah General Hospital. And all at once, Nadhem Shokr al-Hadidi’s administration office becomes a little chamber of horrors. A baby with a hugely deformed mouth. A child with a defect of the spinal cord, ...
The Children of Fallujah
ROBERT FISK
For little Sayef, there will be no Arab Spring. He lies, just 14 months old, on a small red blanket cushioned by a cheap mattress on the floor, occasionally crying, his head twice the size it should be, blind and paralysed. Sayeffedin Abdulaziz Mohamed – his full name ...
Deadlock Over Syria
ALAIN GRESH
Patrick Seale’s 1965 classic, The Struggle for Syria, describes the battle for control ...
Why Can’t Americans Have Democracy?
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Syria has a secular government as did Iraq prior to the American invasion.  Secular governments are important in Arab lands in which there is division between Sunni and Shi’ite. Secular governments keep the divided population from murdering one another. When the...
Obama is Coming to My Town
RON JACOBS
Barack Obama is coming to the town where I live.  Like most other towns he will visit this election year, the state this town is in voted for Mr. Obama in 2008.  It is a state full of Democrats and liberals.  Many of those Democ...
Obama, the Human Rights Hypocrite
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Is Obama a hypocrite or merely insouciant?  Or is he an idiot? According to news reports Obama’s White House meeting on Valentine’s day with China’s Vice President, Xi Jinping, provided an opportunity for Obama to raise “a sensitive human rights issue with...
Empire and Its Discontents
NOAM CHOMSKY
Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated — Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example.  Others are ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is likely to lie ahead.  Right now, in fact. At the...
Syria: Slipping into Civil War
PATRICK COCKBURN
As Syrian army tanks mass around Homs and its artillery pounds Sunni districts of the city, Syria is slipping into the first stages of a sectarian civil war. This conflict could be as bloody as anything seen in Iraq between 2006 and 2007 or as long as the civil war in Leb...
Spies in the Sky
CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI
It’s all because of the little noticed annual report for 2010 from the United Stat...
Cheering On Dumb, Stupid Animals
LINH DINH
Outrageously yet routinely, America is preparing for yet another war. Though warned by Iran not to bring an aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf, the US now has an unprecedented three. (Gee, I wonder why they call it the Persian Gulf, but don’t be surprised if, say, 2...
Not A Peep About The President’s Praise of Military
LAURA FLANDERS
The grades for the president’s State of the Union are in and the critics have been kind. In fact, it’s chilling to see just how few hits the President takes for couching his entire address in unqualified celebration of the US military. Speaking of the troo...
Will Turkey Join Sick Men of Europe?
PATRICK COCKBURN
Are the Turks seeing the Ottoman Empire reborn or are they going to be the next victims of economic chaos in Europe and political turmoil in the Middle East? Is Turkey about to pay a price for the overconfidence bred by a decade that brought it triumphant success while it...
The CIA’s Cassandras
GABRIEL KOLKO
At no time has the U.S. based its foreign policies on facts — as opposed to its conceptions reliant on sheer wishes, interests, or pretensions, (its ambitions are often a mixture of all of these). Nor has it had fears that are warranted by reality. It has needs, whe...
Collateral Savages
LINH DINH
It is a recurring theme: civilization committing barbaric acts to feed its refined gluttony. As we found out about American Marines urinating on dead Afghans, there was also a story about Brazilian loggers tying an eight-year-old girl to a tree and burning her to death. S...
The End of Something
THOMAS H. NAYLOR
The euro is going down and may take the 17 nation euro zone with it, if not the entire 28 nation European Union.  Or maybe it will be the other way around?  Does it really matter? Having never recovered from the 2008 recession, the collapse of the euro will drive...
Murderous Marines
BINOY KAMPMARK
There are Calleys in every army. What makes them dangerous is the set of circumstances in which their homicidal aberrations can run amok. Neil Sheehan, New York Times...
Superpower Adrift in an Alien World
TOM ENGELHARDT
Here’s the ad for this moment in Washington (as I imagine it): Militarized superpower adrift and anxious in alien world.  Needs advice.  Will pay.  Pls respond qkly.  PO Box 1776-2012, Washington, DC. Here’s the way it actual...
The Arms Merchants
CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI
Arms sales are not as straightforward as one might think. For one thing, Russia and the United States are both eager to maintain their respective positions as the most successful merchants of death dealing devices. That causes them to sacrifice principle to expediency.  ...
Iraqi and American Reconciliation
LUKE WILCOX
Standing in front of 40 religious and academic leaders in Najaf, Iraq this summer, I wondered how they would react to the presentation I was about to give. I was an unarmed, Christian American spending five weeks in Iraq with the Muslim Peacemaker Teams (MPT). The topic o...
Iran and Historical Forgetting
JOHN GRANT
Ever since George W. Bush lost the popular vote by 500,000 souls and was selected President by a right-leaning Supreme Court, the United States has seemed to me devoted to a twisted fate of slow-motion Armageddon. What seems to guarantee this is one of our most cha...
Doubling Down on a Debacle
TOM ENGLELHARDT
It was to be the war that would establish empire as an American fact.  It would result in a thousand-year Pax Americana.  It was to be “mission accomplished” all the way.  And then, of course, it wasn’t.  And then, almost nine dismal years later, it wa...
Are We Witnessing the Final Disintegration of Iraq?
PATRICK COCKBURN
Compared with many bombs in Iraq, it was not a big one. I had just arrived in the Al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad on  November 28 when there was the an explosion a few hundred yards away in front of the parliament building. I thought at first it must be a rocket or a mortar s...
The Sunni-Shia Wars
PATRICK COCKBURN
In three of the Arab countries east of Egypt – Syria, Bahrain and Yemen – protesters have challenged their governments over the past year but failed to overthrow them. The reasons for those failures are very different though they have important points in common. In ea...