1) Rights taken away from women. The Arizona Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw nearly all abortions in Arizona will likely lead to an influx of patients fleeing the state to find care in California, abortion rights activists said.
2) The world's policeman can't police its own borders. The asylum law lets anyone setting foot on American soil ask for asylum. Court dates for asylum cases are, on average, more than four years out in the future, and even longer for final decisions. Over 3 million cases were pending before immigration courts near the end of 2023, with the backlog growing by 1 million since 2022.
3) The archaic electoral college has never been replaced by a direct popular vote for President. The result is that the winner of the popular vote has not been elected President. Gore won the popular vote in 2000, but Bush was elected President. The Florida Supreme Court sided with Gore, but Bush appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ultimately voted 5 to 4 to reverse the Florida court’s decision and halt the recount. With Florida in hand, Bush won the Electoral College 271 to 266, while Gore ended up getting 500,000 more votes in the popular vote. As a result Gore's push for limits on global warming was lost as Bush promoted fossil fuels. Also Bush lied the US into a disastrous war in Iraq that resulted in Iraq becoming an ally of Iran.
4) 750 military bases in 80 countries are sitting ducks for an attack by Iran or its proxies. The largest U.S. base in the Middle East is located in Qatar, known as Al Udeid Air Base and built in 1996. Other countries where the U.S. has a presence include Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The US spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined. Three American service members were killed and dozens more were injured in an unmanned aerial drone attack on a base known as Tower 22 in Jordan on January 28, 2024. Now that the US is expecting an attack by Iran, which sitting duck will be next?
6) Futile wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush lied us into war in Iraq. Osama bin Laden eventually killed in Obama administration by small Seal team, proving futility of invading Afghanistan
8) Housing unaffordability. San Diego families need an income of nearly $275,000 a year to afford a mortgage on a home, which is nearly double what it was before the pandemic, according to a new report from the real estate website Zillow.
9) Homelessness is an intractable problem. On any given night in the United States, more than half a million people experience homelessness.
10) The filibuster rule and the bicameral legislature. Nothing much can get done unless one party controls both Houses of Congress and the Presidency. President Biden looks stupid since he can't even keep his commitments to NATO because the Republican controlled House won't vote the funds Biden has promised. This means Ukraine will lose the war with Russia, and other countries cannot trust the US to keep its commitments.
11) The Second Amendment. No other country allows the uncontrolled proliferation of guns. More Americans died of gun-related injuries in 2021 than in any other year on record, according to the latest available statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That included record numbers of both gun murders and gun suicides.
It's clear that Netanyahu doesn't condone the two state solution which Biden favors. Despite Netanyahu's intransigence, Biden and the US keep on giving Israel, one of the most prosperous countries in the world, more money. While the US has given Israel around $4 billion annually, it has given a relative pittance of $500 million annually to the impoverished Palestinian people. Most knowledgeable people think that a two state solution is the only way to resolve not only the crisis in Israel and Palestine, but in the larger Middle East as well. However, Biden is not demanding that Netanyahu accede to the two state solution. Why not? Why does the US keep giving billions of dollars to Israel when Israel is belligerent and intransigent about a rational solution to the problems between the Israelis and the Palestinians? Instead, an intractable problem remains, one which is guaranteed to provide additional conflict and bloodshed in perpetuity. I have written before that the US and the UN should impose a two state solution on Israel and Palestine. Indulging Israel only means that the conflict in the Middle East will never end. The additional issue is that the US has some 30 military bases in the Middle East. The people on these bases are sitting ducks to be picked off by militias operating in those areas as we saw recently when 3 US soldiers were killed at Tower 22 in Iraq. Why are these bases still there? Iraq doesn't want them there. Syria doesn't want them there. They are just contributing to the enmity that exists between some countries, mainly Shiite countries, and the US. Bin Laden's big beef with the US was the presence of US military bases in Saudi Arabia and Somalia. He sought to drive US personnel out of these areas by force. When that didn't work, he began formulating plans to attack the West with an evolving, deadly new brand of jihad. We all know what that led to. Clearly US military bases in the area are a major irritant to Shiite countries such as Iran, Iraq and Syria. And it is cooling what had seemed to be promising developments with the Sunni countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The Two State Solution Must Be Created, Implemented and Enforced ... Now.
We know what a Two State solution would look like. Even all the details have been worked out. It's just that Israel and the Palestinians won't agree to it. Therefore, it must be imposed on them ... both. They should not be free to continue their mutual madness forever. What a bizarre notion of "freedom:" this portends. Why, sir, your freedom includes a right to hate and attack your neighbor in perpetuity. Free and sovereign states should not be impeded from protecting themselves even if in the long run they are not protecting themselves but just involving themselves in endless rounds of attacks and counter attacks. The world's most powerful nation just stands back and says in effect "we don't want to impose ourselves on your freedom and sovereignty. You have a sovereign right to go on with endless rounds of revenge, hatred and war."
UN peacekeepers should separate the two sides and impose peace on Israel and Palestine by imposing a two state solution backed by the power of the US. The world should say to them, "Enough." You guys are totally incapable of solving your problems, and, left to your own devices, you will go on killing each other indefinitely. By virtue of your incompetence at creating peace among yourselves, you have both lost your right to come up with a workable solution, and, therefore, one must be imposed on you, like it or not. You have both lost your right to be completely free and sovereign nations. You are both making the world a worse place. Therefore, the world community has lost its patience and tolerance for your local squabbles which are forcing the whole world to stop what it is doing and deal with your seemingly overwhelming problems. We'd like to get on with solving the problem of climate change instead of devoting our attention to interminably, intermittent wars.
World leaders seem to be more adept on giving military advice rather than advice on creating peace in the world. They are just moving pieces around on a chess board devoid of any consideration of how many people will be killed or maimed in the process. For them war is a rational game. The peace makers can't seem to make a rational game out of the steps necessary to create peace in the world. It's not in their play book. So millions of innocents have to suffer because one side is right and the other side is wrong or vice versa. Where are the leaders willing to take a chance on peace?
When the hijacked planes hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center, pierced the Pentagon and buried into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, most of our thoughts were about the cruel, horrific shattering of family bonds, the forever severing of deep friendships, the senseless destruction of human life. More than that America was under threat and fear prevailed.
The never-ending heartache of loss was on display in photos with messages that ringed the fence of a church near ground zero in New York: “Have you seen him?” “Please, any information, call…” “Please help us find our wife and mother.”
Hundreds of messages. No responses.
I was in New York a few days after 9/11 and witnessed the devastation. I traveled to the site where Flight 93 impacted. And I had heard the plane hit the Pentagon, as I joined hundreds evacuating the Congressional House Office Buildings in Washington, D.C.
The personalization of immense loss compounded our anger and despair. We identified with the victims. We identified with the families. We mourned with them. We united in our grief.
The day after 9/11, with the nation frozen in fear and trauma, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld speculated to the Bush inner circle that the attacks presented an “opportunity” to strike Iraq, according to Bob Woodward, author of ‘Plan of Attack’.
Except Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
In my previous Substack post I detailed the carefully practiced lies, that were disseminated to ignite the war on Iraq. What enabled the execution of such a plan was the skillful manipulation of the fears of Americans.
The US military attack on Iraq commenced on March 20, 2003, after a highly structured domestic and international media campaign of misinformation and disinformation, by the Bush Administration, which succeeded in getting major media and Congressional support.
We were introduced to “Shock and Awe,” a military sword of Damocles flashing again and again in the starlight, against the bright yellow-orange glow of U.S. missiles hitting targets in Baghdad, all streamed live into our homes via network television. This is when an extraordinary disconnect occurred.
We were attacking Iraq!
No, wait. We were attacking the Iraqi people.
We were blowing up innocent people’s homes, businesses, places of worship, marketplaces, schools, nurseries. We killed Iraqis en masse. And neither the Bush Administration nor Congress, nor the embedded media showed the remotest interest in the casualties which the US attack on Iraq inflicted on its people.
This was, by all definitions an illegal war of aggression against a country that had little or no ability to defend itself against the mighty U.S. war machine. The media coverage was state-sponsored war porn. The words of the poet Yeats well described the U.S. presence in Iraq: “Everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”
After 9/11, I lamented the people on the hijacked flights, those victims who worked in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and their families. When the U.S. unleashed “Shock and Awe” upon the people of Iraq, my thoughts turned to Iraqi families shattered, to social structures lovingly knit together over generations, destroyed.
Wiped from the earth were ceremonies of birth and marriage, music, dance, literature, the stories handed down through word of mouth, the exchanges among friends and even strangers, woven into a beautiful fabric of life that informed an ancient, rich culture, in some places pulverized, vaporized, as if it never existed.
In October of 2006, an article in Lancet stated that 654,965 had already died as a result of the war. In January 2008, Reuters reported that one of Britain’s leading polling groups set the total of Iraqi deaths attributable to the war at slightly over a million people.
Numbers do not adequately communicate the depth of human suffering, but scale is instructive. Iraq, then a nation of 27 million people, suffered a million dead, millions injured and at least one million children orphaned and 4 million people displaced.
The war against the Iraqis was a criminal act of immense proportions. U.S. political leaders, and their complicit media counterparts, have been shielded from domestic and international courts for their actions that resulted in the mass deaths of innocent people.
In a just world, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and a long list of US government officials and their propagandists would be held accountable to both national and international law.
Think about this: If a comparable disaster had been visited upon the United States, then a nation of 290 million, we would have proportionally recorded 11 million dead, tens of millions injured, at least 11 million orphans, 44 million displaced. Would we have demanded justice?
The Bush Administration, their ideological retainers and supporters in the media, sent nearly 5,000 America soldiers to their deaths, and left tens of thousands permanently injured. Their service was honorable, but those who sent them were not. We owe their families continued appreciation and full support. We also owe them the truth.
The war’s dark legacy continues. The Iraq High Commission for Human Rights reported in December 2021 that there were 5 million orphaned children in Iraq and 4.5 million children in families living below the poverty line, with a million child laborers.
Consider the extraordinary level of deprivation experienced by the Iraqi people, without clean water, access to food, health care, their homes and places of work destroyed, schools laid waste, the wholesale destruction of infrastructure. Iraqis were, in a turn of a phrase from Winston Churchill, ‘stripped bare, with the curse of nothingness.’ This was no natural disaster. This was made by the American government and paid for by American taxpayers.
I ran for Congress so that I could represent the social and economic interests of working men and women. I intended to spend my service championing education, health care, pension protections and to save America’s manufacturing base.
I soon found myself trying to forestall one military adventure after another, which inevitably drained trillions of dollars away from domestic needs. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, America was losing its way by attempting to force “democracy” upon distant countries, while undermining democracy and the rule of domestic and international law.
The shameful lack of empathy in the White House, and in the U.S. Congress, for the people of Iraq was alarming. Those of us who raised questions about the legality of the war, and who pointed out that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and who reminded media and government officials alike that there was no proof Iraq’s alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction actually existed, were roundly chastised and ridiculed.
In a concerted effort to beat down the opposition, mainstream media, peddling the least intelligent positions that the U.S. government had to offer, brainwashed the American people with anti-Iraq propaganda. Those of us who dared object were condemned.
I answered this deadly war drumbeat as best I could through parliamentary procedures, 341 speeches on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in opposition to the war. I made two runs for president to attempt to rally the American people behind a fundamental transition in American foreign policy doctrine from militarism’s ‘Peace Through Strength’ to diplomacy’s, ‘Strength Through Peace’.
As a result of the War upon Iraq, America shifted its priorities ever more firmly to conquest. The constitutional doctrine of separation of powers has been shredded, establishing an imperial executive. The government has shifted the resources of our country away from a domestic agenda to a war-fighting mode. It has ever more firmly entrenched the military-industrial complex in the affairs of the nation.
The war against Iraq legitimized conquest for resources such as oil. It has set the very finances of our nation upon the precipice of unsustainable debt. It established the assassination of foreign leaders as a U.S. government policy. It normalized the use of depleted uranium munitions creating multi-generational birth defects. It has further energized a culture of violence and polarization.
The U.S. government broke Iraq, beginning on March 20, 2003 and committed wholesale aggravated, premeditated murder against Iraqis. Our leaders, their propagandists and war profiteers manipulated our deeply held feelings about freedom, fairness, and justice and our fears, and misled us in an unholy endeavor around which they sacrilegiously wrapped the American flag.
Imagine Iraq as a trial run for the next war; for ever-expanding military budgets, impunity from international trial; for media manipulation that makes the public fearful enough to accept their own economic demise in exchange for a false sense of security through militarism.
These individuals were members of the bi-partisan consensus that promoted the Iraq War: Then-Senator Joe Biden, Democratic Staff Director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Antony Blinken, and U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO, Victoria Nuland, were themselves promoted politically, to positions of greater influence where they could wreak even greater havoc upon the world.
These same individuals, Vice-President Biden, Deputy National Security Advisor, Blinken and assistant Secretary of State, Nuland, were joined by Hillary Clinton acolyte Jake Sullivan (Vice President Biden’s National Security Adviser in 2013), to engineer the overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014, and the subsequent sacrificing of Ukrainians in the U.S. proxy war with Russia.
It is critical to remember that in 2013, then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, rejected a NATO-inspired military agreement, in the guise of economic reform and EU association, that was aimed at severing Ukraine’s connections with Russia, and advancing a western geo-political agenda.
The West exploited the desperation of Ukrainians whose average monthly minimum wage was then about $150, violently propelled protests with the help of Right Sector and Svoboda parties, and ousted Yanukovych in a pro-western coup. Ukrainians thus became pawns in an international power struggle catalyzed with the help of Biden, Blinken, Nuland and Sullivan.
Now, in the White House and suspected of colluding to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines, President Biden, National Security Adviser Sullivan, Secretary of State Blinken and Undersecretary of State Nuland are positioning the U.S. to pivot from the proxy war with Russia.
Ukraine will be abandoned so the U.S. can prepare for war with China by 2025. This dangerous brinkmanship is supported by both parties in Congress, the media and so-called think tanks cashing in from military build-ups and unnecessarily created conflict.
How do we, as a nation, recover from the heinous deeds committed in our name against the people of Iraq? How do we stop government leaders from lying to us and the media, to stoke and to incite wider and wider wars?
The people who led us into the Iraq War must be held accountable. We must teach the real history of the Iraq war, the deceptions and propaganda a complicit media communicated unquestioningly to the American people.
The media must question the government’s current policies and not swallow sensational stories that government officials peddle for their own narrow, venal concerns. We need a return to investigative journalism, where the media properly holds government to account, instead of being compliant spear-carriers.
We must insist upon the constitutional safeguards which exist to insure such foreign adventures never happen again. Congress must return to its mandated role as a co-equal branch of government. It must guard against executive usurpation of the war power, as directed in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.
Congress must continually challenge the executive branch’s cause for military action by (1) insisting that intelligence be shared with all members of Congress and (2) bringing intelligence agencies forward to authenticate information attributed to them, either by anonymous news reports or the statements of top-ranking administration officials. There must be severe sanctions for presenting fake intelligence.
We must insist on strict accountability for those who have or will mislead us into aggressive wars, masked as “defending America and its values.” We, as a nation, cannot continue to act as if the U.S. can do whatever we wish to any other nation we please, without incurring the enmity of the world and endangering the future of the United States of America.
Unless we change course, the Pentagon budget and military contractors will soon command over 50% of U.S. discretionary spending. Congress has recently given the Administration an historic $858 billion for defense, an astounding $45 billion more than requested, to help sustain at least 750 military bases in 80 countries. This is a classic definition of a national death march.
Today, amidst rising the interest rates, bank failures, layoffs in tech, and with food prices rising sharply, the U.S. is drastically cutting food stamp benefits! We can’t feed our own people, but we have unlimited money for contrived wars everywhere.
It is time to ask, what the hell is the end game? Is there anyone who does not understand that a U.S.-initiated war with China and Russia means assured annihilation? It is time to demand that those who had have led us in this direction be voted out or removed from public office.
We must learn and then teach that it is not patriotic for a nation to wage aggressive war. Aggressive war, as the U.S. practiced in Iraq, does not extend prowess, but instead shows the absence of a moral code and the weakness of our craven, fearful leaders’ minds and the spirits. True strength extends from moral, not military authority. True patriotic leadership focuses on the needs of the American people and on taking care of things here, at home, in the United States.
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The United States and the International Criminal Court
by John Lawrence
The ICC has declared that Putin is a war criminal. Russia does not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC which comes as no surprise.What does come as a surprise though is that the US does not recognize its jurisdiction either. Neither Russia nor the US is a state party to the ICC. The purpose of the international criminal court, founded in 2002, is to "bring to justice the perpetrators of the worst crimes known to humankind—war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide," when national courts are unable or unwilling to do so. China is also not a member of the ICC. As of March 2023, 123 states are members of the Court. On May 6, 2002, the United States, having previously signed the Rome Statute, which founded the ICC, formally withdrew its signature and indicated that it did not intend to ratify the agreement. That was during the George W Bush administration. So the US wants to have it both ways. It does not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC if the ICC should be so bold as to declare a US President or citizen a war criminal, but it jumps on the bandwagon with the ICC if the ICC declares one of the US' enemies such as Putin a war criminal.
The abuses at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq war clearly would have qualified as war crimes according to the ICC if the US had been a member of the ICC. That's probably why George W Bush withdrew US membership. Torture or "enhanced interrogation techniques" were specifically authorized by the George W Bush administration and by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
"Enhanced interrogation techniques" or "enhanced interrogation" was a program of systematic torture of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and various components of the U.S. Armed Forces at remote sites around the world—including Bagram, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bucharest—authorized by officials of the George W. Bush administration. Methods used included beating, tickle torture, binding in contorted stress positions, hooding, subjection to deafening noise, sleep disruption, sleep deprivation to the point of hallucination, deprivation of food, drink, and medical care for wounds, as well as waterboarding, walling, sexual humiliation, rape, sexual assault, subjection to extreme heat or extreme cold, and confinement in small coffin-like boxes. A Guantanamo inmate's drawings of some of these tortures, to which he himself was subjected, were published in The New York Times. Some of these techniques fall under the category known as "white torture". ... In addition to brutalizing detainees, there were threats to their families such as threats to harm children, and threats to sexually abuse or to cut the throat of detainees' mothers.
The term "torture memos" was originally used to refer to three documents prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel at the United States Department of Justice and signed in August 2002: "Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 U.S.C. sections 2340–2340A" and "Interrogation of al Qaeda" (both drafted by Jay Bybee), and an untitled letter from John Yoo to Alberto Gonzales. Since the initial revelation of these documents, other communications related to the use of torture to coerce or intimidate detainees during the Bush administration have been divulged. These include a December 2, 2002, internal Department of Defense memo signed by Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense, authorizing 17 techniques in a "Special Interrogation Plan" to be used against the detainee Mohammed al-Qahtani; a March 13, 2003, legal opinion written by John Yoo of the Office of Legal Counsel, DoJ, and issued to the General Counsel of Defense five days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq started, concluding that federal laws related to use of torture and other abuse did not apply to agents interrogating foreigners overseas; and other DoD internal memos authorizing techniques for specific military interrogations of certain individual detainees.
In May 2002, senior Bush administration officials including CIA Director George Tenet, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Attorney General John Ashcroft met to discuss which techniques the CIA could legally use against Abu Zubaydah. Condoleezza Rice recalled "being told that U.S. military personnel were subjected in training to certain physical and psychological interrogation techniques". During the discussions, John Ashcroft is reported to have said, "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."
It's clear that the US with the full complicity of the George W Bush administration officials committed what are considered war crimes by the ICC during the Iraq war. War crimes include torture, mutilation, corporal punishment, hostage taking and acts of terrorism. This category also covers violations of human dignity such as rape and forced prostitution, looting and execution without trial. War crimes, unlike crimes against humanity, are always committed in times of war. In the King James version of the Bible, Matthew 7:3, it says "And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?" Hypocrisy is as old as the human race has existed on the planet. If the ICC has any legitimacy at all, it needs to condemn the war crimes of every nation that commits them.
A person carrying an umbrella passes a newspaper vendor on March 20, 2003 in Washington, D.C
(Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
by Brett Wilkins, March 20, 2023
"It should not be forgotten that this debacle of death and destruction was not only a profound error of policymaking; it was the result of a carefully executed crusade of disinformation and lies," said one prominent critic.
As the world this week mark the 20th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, journalism experts weighed in on the corporate media's complicity in amplifying the Bush administration's lies, including ones about former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's nonexistent nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons upon which the war was waged.
"Twenty years ago, this country's mainstream media—with one notable exception—bought into phony Bush administration claims about Hussein's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, helping cheerlead our nation into a conflict that ended the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis," Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian wrote Sunday.
That "one notable exception" was a group of journalists at the Washington, D.C. bureau of Knight Ridder—which was acquired by McClatchy in 2006—who published dozens of articles in several of the company's papers debunking and criticizing the Bush administration's dubious claims about Iraq and its WMDs. Their efforts were the subject of the 2017 Rob Reiner film Shock and Awe, starring Woody Harrelson.
"The war—along with criminally poor post-war planning on the part of Bush administration officials—also unleashed horrible sectarian strife, led to the emergence of ISIS, and displaced more than 1 million Iraqis," Abcarian noted.
She continued:
That sad chapter in American history produced its share of jingoistic buzzwords and phrases: "WMD," "the axis of evil," "regime change," "yellowcake uranium," "the coalition of the willing," and a cheesy but terrifying refrain, repeated ad nauseam by Bush administration officials such as then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
According to the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit investigative journalism organization, Bush and top administration officials—including then-Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Rice—"made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq."
Those lies were dutifully repeated by most U.S. corporate mainstream media in what the center called "part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."
"It should not be forgotten that this debacle of death and destruction was not only a profound error of policymaking; it was the result of a carefully executed crusade of disinformation and lies," David Corn, the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Mother Jones, asserted Monday.
Far from paying a price for amplifying the Bush administration's Iraq lies, many of the media hawks who acted more like lapdogs than watchdogs 20 years ago are today ensconced in prestigious and well-paying positions in media, public policy, and academia.
In a where-are-they-now piece for The Real News Network, media critic Adam Johnson highlighted how the careers of several media and media-related government professionals "blossomed" after their lie-laden selling of the Iraq War:
David Frum—Bush's lead writer who coined the term "Axis of Evil" to refer to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—is "a well-paid and influential columnist for The Atlantic and a mainstay of cable TV."
Jeffrey Goldberg, then a New Yorker reporter who pushed conspiracy theories linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11 and al-Qaeda to Iraq, is now editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, an erstwhile Iraq War hawk, rebranded himself as a critic of the invasion and occupation, and is a multimillionaire morning show host on that same network.
Fareed Zakaria hosts "Fareed Zakaria GPS" on CNN and writes a weekly column for The Washington Post.
Anne Applebaum, a member of the Post's editorial board at the time who called evidence of Iraq's nonexistent WMDs "irrefutable," now writes for The Atlantic and is a senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.
"The almost uniform success of all the Iraq War cheerleaders provides the greatest lesson about what really helps one get ahead in public life: It's not being right, doing the right thing, or challenging power, but going with prevailing winds and mocking anyone who dares to do the opposite," wrote Johnson.
Other journalists not on Johnson's list include MSNBC's Chris Matthews—who infamously proclaimed "we're all neocons now" as U.S. forces toppled Hussein's statue while conquering Baghdad—and "woman of mass destruction"Judith Miller, who although forced to resign from The New York Times in disgrace over her regurgitated Bush administration lies about Iraq's WMDs remained an influential media figure over the following years.
In an interview with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft—which is hosting a discussion Wednesday about the media's role in war and peace—Middle East expert Assal Rad noted:
Rather than challenging the narrative of the state, calling for evidence, or even humanizing the would-be victims of the war, the Iraqi people, reporters such as Thomas Friedman with significant platforms like The New York Times most often parroted the talking points of U.S. officials. There was little critical journalism to question the existence of WMDs and little reflection on important issues, such as the U.S. role in supporting Saddam Hussein in the 1980s against Iran, international law, or the humanity of Iraqis.
While there was some contrition from outlets including the Times as the Iraq occupation continued for years and not the "five days or five weeks or five months" promised by Rumsfeld, journalist Jon Schwarz of The Intercept noted that media lies and distortions about the war continue to this day.
"Perhaps the most telling instance of the media's acquiescence was a year after the Iraq invasion," said Rad, "when President Bush's joke at the White House Correspondents' dinner about finding no weapons of mass destruction was met with uproarious laughter from an audience of journalists."
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US Would Like to Forget It Invaded a Sovereign Country Recently
by John Lawrence
The hypocrisy is appalling. The US invaded Iraq, a sovereign country, in 2003. Joe Biden voted for that war. Many children and civilians were killed as a result. The rationale for the invasion was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He didn't and George W Bush knew it. The invasion and consequent death and destruction in Iraq was based on a lie. The Guardian reported:
"Two decades ago, the United States invaded Iraq, sending 130,000 US troops into a sovereign country to overthrow its government. Joe Biden, then chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, voted to authorize the war, a decision he came to regret.
"Today another large, world-shaking invasion is under way. Biden, now the US president, recently traveled to Warsaw to rally international support for Ukraine’s fight to repel Russian aggression. After delivering his remarks, Biden declared: “The idea that over 100,000 forces would invade another country – since world war II, nothing like that has happened.”
"The president spoke these words on 22 February, within a month of the 20th anniversary of the US military’s opening strike on Baghdad. The White House did not attempt to correct Biden’s statement. Reporters do not appear to have asked about it. The country’s leading newspapers, the New York Times and Washington Post, ran stories that quoted Biden’s line. Neither of them questioned its veracity or noted its hypocrisy."
The Iraq war and the war in Ukraine are similar in that a sovereign country was invaded on false pretenses. The difference is that Iraq was no threat to the US. Ukraine is within what Russia would consider its "sphere of influence," much like Cuba is within the US' sphere of influence. The invasion of Cuba by the US turned out not to be too successful. However, Cuba has been punished by the US for going on 70 years because it had the impertinence to ally itself with the Soviet Union. By the same token Russia considered it a threat if Ukraine allied itself with NATO. The war could have been prevented if NATO had given any credence to Russia's concerns in pre-war negotiations.
"While Washington forgets, much more of the world remembers. The flagrant illegality of bypassing the United Nations: this happened. The attempt to legitimize “pre-emption” (really prevention, a warrant to invade countries that have no plans to attack anyone): this mattered, including by handing the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, a pretext he has used. Worst of all was the destruction of the Iraqi state, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,600 US service members, and radiating instability and terrorism across the region.
"The Iraq war wasn’t the only law- or country-breaking military intervention launched by the US and its allies in recent decades. Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya form a tragic pattern. But the Iraq war was the largest, loudest and proudest of America’s violent debacles, the most unwarranted, and the least possible to ignore. Or so it would seem. Biden’s statement is only the latest in a string of attempts by US leaders to forget the war and move on."
Today Fareed Zakaria said, "America's unipolar status has corrupted the country's foreign policy elites." American foreign policy too often consists of making demands and issuing threats and condemnations. There is very little effort to try to understand the other side, never giving any credence or credibility to it. Fareed's column in the Washington Post is "America’s foreign policy has lost all flexibility." America's foreign policy is sclerotic, the policy of an aging empire. Meanwhile the rest of the world has moved on.
Dennis Kucinich makes the Comparison. How soon we forget about the Iraq and Vietnam Wars. Now the warmakers are at it again using Ukraine as a proxy. Read Kucinich's analysis and weep.
IRAQ PLUS 20 - Lies as Weapons of Mass Destruction
Lies and the Spreading of Fake Information - Photo by Kentoh
Twenty years ago this month, America was led into a $5 trillion war. It cost the lives of more than a million Iraqis and thousands of U.S. soldiers. The Iraq War was based on the transparent lies of leaders whose judgment was hijacked by neoconservative ideologues. The neocons see America as the center of the universe, from which we must rule the world and seize its resources. When that is one’s starting point, diplomacy is archaic.
Events after 9/11 were deliberately twisted by the mad martinets of the Project for the New American Century, those monomaniacal specimens locked in the amber of a Post WWII, unipolar era.
It was those same neocons who impressed upon us their preconceived but instrumental narrative that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein (who had nothing to do with 9/11) was the great evil in the world, requiring he and his nation be destroyed.
Once accomplished, the neocons leapt over the wreckage they have created. On to the next conjured enemy. Empire, always empire: Bleed Russia, using the brave Ukrainians as a pawn, then pivot to China, war in no less than three years!
The western media, with few exceptions (Pentagon Papers and Watergate), have been dutiful spear-carriers for the U.S. government. Those who raised questions about the perilous path in Iraq 20 years ago were condemned as useful idiots, censored and cancelled. It is happening again, this time with the lock-step march toward war with China. Ukraine is being sold out. It has never been about freedom. It has been about controlling an energy market.
Post-hoc analysis of war is always painful. “If I only knew then what I know now, I would not have supported the war,” is a favorite apologia of some of the more stalwart supporters of invading Iraq. I was a member of the United States Congress from 1997-2013. Over a period of a dozen years, I delivered at least 341 speeches on the floor of the House in opposition to the Iraq war, which I saw as a criminal misuse of power. I knew then and I know now.
Just as we ignored diplomacy in Iraq, America has refused diplomacy that could have prevented bloodshed in Ukraine, choosing instead to pursue a geopolitical fantasy of deposing Putin with the help of Europe.
The U.S. is escalating with Russia at this writing, as a U.S. drone and a Russian fighter jet collided above the Black Sea. The U.S. has been practicing missile launches in the direction of St. Petersburg, sending B-52s over the Baltics towards Russia. Simultaneously the U.S. ratchets up aggression against China, as we threaten to make Taiwan our next Ukraine.
Iraq stands as an important tale of U.S. government arrogance, deception and depravity and the increased danger when there is a media buy-in. The cavalcade of Iraq chaos recited in the timeline below, demonstrates that the perils of prevarication are extreme and the consequences earth shattering.
Please tell me it can’t happen again…!
Twenty years ago, America descended into war, pronouncement by pronouncement. Read the words below, and the certainty with which those who took us to war expressed themselves as they led us blindly into a maelstrom of deceit and mass murder rocking the cradle of civilization. Tell me it can’t happen again.
In the days following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as intelligence agencies stumbled and dissembled in often chaotic private briefings with members of Congress, I heard rumors around Capitol Hill that Iraq was going to be made to pay the price for the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Iraq? What did Iraq have to do with 9/11? Nothing. But it had everything to do with dying embers of a unipolar world.
Through the following year, the highest U.S. administrative officials made concerted efforts to conflate Iraq with 9/11 and to make claims that were unsubstantiated or and even rejected by intelligence agencies.
This timeline and quotes are by no means complete. But they are characteristic of the much-publicized accusations made against Iraq that led to the March 19, 2003 United States attack on that nation and its people.
Read this and weep, not just for the Iraqi people, but for our own children and grandchildren:
1/29/02: [States such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea] “and their terrorist allies constitute an Axis of Evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world, by seeking weapons of mass destruction. These regimes pose a grave and growing danger.” --President Bush, State of the Union address.
2/2/02: “His [Saddam Hussein’s] regime has had high-level contacts with al Qaeda going back a decade and has provided training to al Qaeda terrorists.” -- Vice President Cheney, Speech to Air National Guard Senior Leadership.
3/17/02: “We know they [Iraqis] have biological and chemical weapons.” -- Vice President Cheney, Press Conference with Crown Prince of Bahrain.
3/19/02: “…and we know they are pursuing nuclear weapons.” -- Vice President Cheney, Press Briefing with Israeli Prime Minister Sharon in Israel.
3/24/02: “He [Hussein] is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time…” -- Vice President Cheney, CNN Late Edition.
3/24/02: “The notion of a Saddam Hussein with his great oil wealth, with his inventory that he already has of biological and chemical weapons… is I think, a frightening proposition for anybody who thinks about it.” -- Vice President Cheney on CBS’ Face the Nation.
5/19/02: “We know he’s got chemicals and biological (sic) and we know he’s working on nuclear.” -- Vice President Cheney, NBC’s Meet the Press.
8/26/02: “We know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons…Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. He is amassing them to use against our friends, our enemies and against us.” -- Vice President Cheney to the VFW 103rd Convention.
9/8/02: “We know he has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon… The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” -- President Bush’s National Security Adviser, Dr. Condoleeza Rice. CNN with Wolf Blitzer.
9/8/02: “…he [Saddam Hussein] has indeed stepped up his capacity to produce and deliver biological weapons, that he has reconstituted his nuclear program to develop a nuclear weapon, that there are efforts under way inside Iraq to significantly expand his capability.” -- Vice President Cheney, NBC Meet the Press.
9/8/02: “He is, in fact, actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.” -- Vice President Cheney, NBC Meet the Press.
9/12/02: “Saddam Hussein’s regime is a grave and gathering danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence.” -- President Bush to UN General Assembly.
9/16/02: “Iraq continues to defy us and the world, we will move deliberately, yet decisively, to hold Iraq to account….” -- President Bush, speech in Iowa.
9/19/02: No “terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people than the regime of Saddam Hussein and Iraq.” -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Statement to Congress.
9/28/02: “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al Queda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.” --President Bush, Weekly Radio Address to the Nation.
10/2/02: “The regime has the scientists and facilities to build nuclear weapons, and is seeking the materials needed to do so.” -- President Bush from the White House.
10/5/02: “In defiance of the United Nations, Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons.” -- President Bush speech.
Early on October 2, 2002, President Bush, surrounded by leaders of both political parties, including Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt, a future presidential candidate, announced White House-prepared legislation to be brought to Congress entitled “Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002.” (Also known as the Iraq War resolution.)
When I first read the text of the Iraq War Resolution, I was incredulous.
So, this was the factual narrative the White House intended to pursue to attempt to persuade Congress to authorize a military attack on Iraq?
I immediately went to work, dissecting the claims made in the war resolution, quickly reviewing massive notebooks I had prepared since 9/11, jammed with internal congressional reports, private notes written after intelligence briefings, media accounts, and even reports from Iraq arms inspectors. I saw no evidence from the National Intelligence Estimate, the Central Intelligence Agency or the Defense Intelligence Agency that Iraq posed the kind of threat the Bush Administration was projecting.
The truth was, no matter what the Bush Administration and Congressional leaders said, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Iraq had nothing to do with al Qaeda’s role. Iraq did not have the intention to attack the United States. Iraq, with a military budget about 1% of the U.S. Pentagon expenditures, did not have the capability to attack our nation. Most significantly, it was fairly easy to determine that there was absolutely no proof that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and, as such, was not preparing to use them against our nation.
I wrote a report on my congressional letterhead categorically discounting the Iraq Resolution’s cause of war, and, on October 2, 2002, I went to the floor of the House of Representatives and, through the next week, personally placed my analysis in the hands of about 250 members of the House, of both the Democrat and Republican parties, with a request that it be read before the vote.
Despite my efforts and that of several of my colleagues in the House, the legislation passed the House on October 10, 2002, by a vote of 296-133. Most significantly, an overwhelming number of Democrats voted against going to war in Iraq, 126 nays to 81 yeas. Fully 60% of House Democrats rejected the war. Only six Republicans, including Ron Paul voted “no.” Bernie Sanders, Independent, also voted “no.”
House Democratic Whip, Nancy Pelosi voted “no,” having issued a statement that included these telling lines: “Because I do not believe we have exhausted all diplomatic remedies, I cannot support the Administration’s resolution regarding the use of force in Iraq.”
Late that evening, the US Senate approved the Iraq War Resolution by a vote of 77-23, with all Republicans voting “yes.” Noteworthy Democratic votes for the Iraq War Resolution included Senators Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Harkin and Kerry, all of whom were past or future presidential candidates. Those senators voting “no” included Feingold and Wellstone as well as one-time presidential candidates Graham and Ted Kennedy, with whom I worked closely during the run-up to the vote.
On October 16, 2002, flanked by Secretary of State Powell and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, President Bush signed the resolution into law, with then senator and future president, Joe Biden, standing close by.
Thus as the United States began preparing to use the full might of its military against Iraq, a horrific realization settled into my heart that the lives of millions of innocent Iraqis were being put at risk, based on fiction promoted by the White House, proliferated by the media and swallowed whole by most congressional leaders. America’s sons and daughters were going to be sent abroad to kill or be killed in pursuit of a mission that was not supported by intelligence agencies and despite easily ascertainable facts and common sense.
After Congress passed the Iraq War Resolution, the Administration accelerated its effort to cement public approval and international participation in the coming war, focusing on a narrative that Iraq was obtaining uranium for enrichment, preliminary to the building of a nuclear weapon.
10/30/02: “…but the danger is so great, with respect to Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction and perhaps terrorists getting hold of such weapons that …. the President is prepared to act with likeminded nations.” -- Secretary of State Colin Powell, interview with Ellen Ratner, Talk Radio News.
11/20/02: “Today the world is also uniting to answer the unique and urgent threat posed by Iraq. A dictator who has used weapons of mass destruction on his own people must not be allowed to produce or posses those weapons. We will not permit Saddam Hussein to blackmail and/or terrorize nations which love freedom.” -- President Bush to Prague Atlantic Student Summit.
1/20/03: “The [Iraqi] report also failed to deal with issues which have arisen since 1998, including attempts to acquire uranium and the means to enrich it.” --President Bush, letter to Vice President Cheney and the Senate.
1/28/03: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.….Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production…. [Saddam Hussein]…could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own…” -- President Bush, State of the Union Address.
2/5/03: “Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence… Most US experts think [these tubes] are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium…” -- Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations.
2/5/03: “But the risk of doing nothing, the risk of the security of this country being jeopardized at the hands of a madman with weapons of mass destruction far exceeds the risk of any action we may be forced to take.” -- President Bush to the National Economic Council at the White house.
2/6/03: “All the world has now seen the footage of an Iraqi Mirage aircraft with a fuel tank modified to spray biological agents over wide areas… A UAV launched from a vessel off the American coast could reach hundreds of miles inland.” --President Bush, Statement from the White House.
3/6/03: “With every step the Iraqi regime takes toward gaining and deploying the most terrible weapons, our own options to confront that regime will narrow. And if an emboldened regime were to supply these weapons to terrorist allies, then the attacks of September 11th would be a prelude to far greater horrors.” -- President Bush, Statement in National Press Conference.
3/16/03: “We believe he [Saddam Hussein] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” -- Vice President Cheney, Meet the Press.
3/18/03: “Reliance by the United States on further diplomatic and other peaceful means alone with neither (A) protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq nor (B) likely lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq…” -- President Bush letter to Congress.
3/21/03: “I directed U.S. Armed Forces, operating with other coalition forces, to commence combat operations on March 19, 2003.” -- President Bush, in a letter to Congress.
Next Week - Part Two: The Consequences of the Iraq War and the Lessons Learned
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Remember when George W Bush took over the Presidency because the Supreme Court sided with him in his lawsuit to get the vote counting stopped? If it had continued Gore would have won the Presidency in 2000. If Gore had become the rightful President, there probably would not have been the disastrous and illegal Iraq wars. As is evident now Saudi Arabia was more to blame for 9/11 than Iraq or Afghanistan, but Bush wanted to be a war time President. The US government, during the George W Bush administration, kept documents secret that would have implicated Saudi Arabia as the sponsor of the 9/11 attack that killed 3000 Americans. Families of the 9/11 victims have had to retrieve documents from the British government that implicate Saudi Arabia whom they now blame for 9/11 and are suing for compensation.
In 2000 conservative justices on the Supreme Court voted to stop the counting of votes in Florida overruling the Florida Supreme Court. Wikipedia reported:
"Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), was a decision of the United States Supreme Court on December 12, 2000, that settled a recount dispute in Florida's 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. On December 8, the Florida Supreme Court had ordered a statewide recount of all undervotes, over 61,000 ballots that the vote tabulation machines had missed. The Bush campaign immediately asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the decision and halt the recount. Justice Antonin Scalia, convinced that all the manual recounts being performed in Florida's counties were illegitimate, urged his colleagues to grant the stay immediately. On December 9, the five conservative justices on the Court granted the stay for Bush, with Scalia citing "irreparable harm" that could befall Bush, as the recounts would cast "a needless and unjustified cloud" over Bush's legitimacy. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that "counting every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable harm.""
Media organizations later analyzed the ballots and found that, under specified criteria, the originally pursued recount of undervotes of several large counties would have confirmed a Bush victory, whereas a statewide recount would have revealed a Gore victory. So Gore actually won the 2000 election. There would have been no illegal invasion of Iraq, and the US would have been well on the road to combating climate change because that was Gore's primary issue. How history might have been changed, if only ... So Trump probably figured, among his other plans to overturn the Biden victory in 2020, that the Supreme Court would probably be on his side in overturning the election since he had appointed 3 conservative justices to the Supreme Court, and the Court had essentially overturned the 2000 election in favor of George W Bush. However, Trump never got to the point of approaching the Supreme Court as Bush had done because Pence went ahead after the insurrection and presided over the vote count which assured that Biden had won the election. If the insurrectionists had sufficiently interrupted the proceedings on January 6, Trump's lawyers might then have petitioned the Supreme Court to rule in favor of Trump especially since the Court was overwhelmingly conservative, three of the Justices having been appointed by Trump himself. We'll never know, but what is clear is that Trump attempted a coup on January 6. It just didn't come off quite as he had planned.
UN Secretary General: "There is no way a war can be acceptable in the 21st century"
by John Lawrence
Really, Mr. Guterres? Did you forget about the Iraq war that killed over a million Iraqis, approximately 100,000 of them civilian? In the 21st century? That war, by the way, was based on the lie that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction which the Bush administration knew he didn't have. And as far as a dictator goes, did George W Bush have a declaration of war from Congress? No, he did not. There was a resolution ginned up by the Bush administration that was used as an excuse for the invasion of Iraq. As far as war crimes, this war in Ukraine is getting all sorts of scrutiny by the media that the Iraq war didn't get. The fact is that in modern wars more civilians are being killed than military. That's an unfortunate fact of urban combat. It's not like the Napoleonic wars or even the US Civil War in which armies lined up on fields far away from cities and fought it out. The Battle of Gettysburg took place in a rural setting. Pickett's charge was across a hay field not an urban boulevard. The only difference in terms of time period between the Iraq war and the Ukraine war is that we are much more aware now that global warming is upon us destroying lives and livelihoods. So we don't need another war to do that. Probably much more real estate and many more lives will be destroyed this year by the effects of global warming than by the Russian military.
So the west wants to get off of Russian oil? Then why aren't they building green infrastructure and converting to non polluting energy as quickly as possible? The answer is that the fossil fuel corporations are lobbying hard to get us not do that. And they have billions of dollars to spend to get their way whereas the green protest movement has pennies to spend by comparison. The renegade Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, themsleves have profited by Big Oil's huge donations to their campaign funds. But for them we could have had a substantial effort to rebuild American infrastructure along non-polluting lines. But Joe Biden presented himself as not someone who wanted to go full steam ahead to get off of fossil fuels. No, he wanted to do it in a more moderate way, a way that did not inconvenience the American people in any way. They could still have all the toys and appurtenances they were used to. As opposed to the progressive wing of the Democratic party which wanted to go full steam ahead to green the economy. So the Big Oil executives are on the same page with the Russian government. Both could care less about global warming because both are profiting immensely from the sale of fossil fuels.
So why is there not a concerted western effort to get the poor and elderly civilians out of the war zone where they are sitting ducks? The young and the rich have already got out. Only the poor and elderly remain. There is plenty of money for weaponry that the US and other NATO nations are sending into Ukraine. No effort, diplomatic or otherwise, is being made to get the poor and elderly civilians out. There have been some humanitarian corridors, but the poor and elderly don't have the money to support themselves even if they got out. Someone else would have to pay for their transportation and for their support even if they got out. Why isn't that forthcoming? Does NATO want them still sitting there in the war zone as a deterrent to the Russian army? That's nonsense and suicidal. There needs to be direct talks between Ukraine, the west and Russia about getting those civilians out. Then the two armies can fight it out. Instead, western media bemoans the fact that civilians are being killed while doing nothing to get them out. I repeat only the rich and the young, those with the means to pay, and probably pay bribes, are getting out of Ukraine and are able to support themselves outside of Ukraine. Money should be forthcoming from NATO to get the rest of the civilians out of there. They are effectively being used as human shields. I have not heard Biden or anyone else speak of money being set aside for this purpose. Only more money for weapons.
A lot of people still believe the Big Lie - that Joe Biden didn't legitimately win the election. What isn't talked about is all the other Big Lies which the Republican party has been telling their constituents for years: the Big Lie that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, the Big Lie that Obama was born in Kenya, the Big Lie about selling arms to Iran to benefit the Contras, the Big Lie represented by the Gulf of Tonkin resolution which escalated the Vietnam war (OK that was Johnson, a Democrat), the Big Lie that Hillary was responsible for the death of White House attorney Vince Foster, the Big Lie that Hillary ran a child sex ring in a pizza restaurant and much more. There are more Big Lies, most of them associated with Republicans, especially Republican Presidents George W Bush, Ronald Reagan and Dick Nixon (his Big Lie was "I am not a crook.").
Lying is part and parcel of the way Republicans do business. How else to get a bunch of people to vote against their own real interests? Republicans have trained their base to respond favorably to them based on lies. Lies are usually juicier than the truth. The truth is often very mundane and quotidian. The truth is that Hillary was a very experienced and capable public servant. That's not too exciting. And then there was George H W Bush's dog whistle racist campaign ad about Willy Horton, a murderer who escaped prison on a week-end pass devised by his opponent Michael Dukakis. Racism probably won Bush the Presidency.
George W Bush was determined to invade Iraq. He went out of his way to no avail to pin 9/11 on Saddam. When no evidence could be found of this, he fabricated evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. In The Untold History of the United States, the authors write:
"Lacking evidence, they manufactured their own. Cheney and Libby pointed repeatedly to a meeting in Prague between the hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official, even though Tenet had proved that Atta was in the United States at the time of the alleged meeting, living in Virginia in the shadow of CIA headquarters. ...
"Using this kind of notoriously false information, the administration challenged the findings of CIA analysts and UN weapons inspectors and tirelessly made its case for invading Iraq. "We know they have weapons of mass destruction," Rumsfield insisted. "There isn't any debate about it." In early October 2002, Bush, echoing a similar warning from Rice a month before, announced, "we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." But no one could outdo Cheney when it came to outright fabrications and dire prognostications:
"'The Iraqi regime has ... been very busy in enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents, and they continue to pursue the nuclear program. ... Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror and a seat at a top [sic] 10 percent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies, directly threaten America's friends throughout the region and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail. Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction; there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, our allies and us.'"
Of course after the invasion no weapons of mass destruction were actually found. Recently deceased and highly decorated General Colin Powell was sent forth to argue about the existence of WMD in Iraq. The authors continue:
"But the most ignominious moment came on February 5, 2003, when Secretary of State Colin Powell, the most respected and trusted member of the administration, went before the United Nations and made the case for war. Bush had handpicked Powell for the job. "You have the credibility to do this," he told Powell. "Maybe they'll believe you." ...
"It was a thoroughly shameful performance that Powell later called a low point in his career. ... Members of the intelligence community were outraged over Pentagon neocons' hijacking, distorting and fabricating intelligence. When the nonexistent WMD failed to materialize, New York Time columnist Nicholas Kristof described them as "spitting mad" and eager to have their say. One lashed out, "As an employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency, I know that this administration has lied to the public to get support for its attacks on Iraq."
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said, "As we know today, the Bush administration's reasons for the Iraq war were based on lies."
George W Bush's Big Lie cost a lot of American and Iraqi lives. So far Trump's Big Lie has cost the lives of relatively few Capitol policemen. But the stage is set for an assault on American democracy itself. The perpetration of Trump's Big Lie is being carried on by his henchmen in Congress and in the media. Their use of symbols such as flags in the January 6 insurrection is reminiscent of all the flags, symbols and pageantry of Nazi Germany, much of which was designed by Hitler himself who was an artist who failed to gain entrance to the Munich University before aspiring to world domination. The cries of "We're Number 1" by the insurrectionists and other bellicose Americans are echoes of their predecessors' cries of "Heil Hitler."
Whoever Thought It Would Be This Difficult to End a War? A Good Reason Not to Start One.
by John Lawrence
Not Like the old days when you had a ceasefire, signed a peace treaty and everyone went home respectfully. George W Bush started two wars, the first of which - the Iraq war - was based on the lie that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction which he wasn't, and that he had something to do with 9/11 which he didn't. The second war in Afghanistan had some dubious plausibility that Osama bin Laden was stationed there. The fact of the matter is that you didn't need a land invasion of a country to get Bin Laden which Obama amply proved by sending in special ops forces to get him. Now we are faced with the messy and sticky problem of extracting ourselves from Afghanistan. Once done, Biden will be remembered for having the guts to actually do it. The messiness will be forgotten except for right wing pundits who will attempt to keep it alive.
Another question: why are approximately 20 high schools students from El Cajon, CA, where I happen to live, allowed to travel to a war zone to visit relatives? Aside from that the major question is can the Taliban really govern Afghanistan? Oh what tangled webs we weave! Afghanistan has been sucking at the American teat for 20 years. Now that we're soon to be gone, where will the money come from, the money that has kept the country running for 20 years? Or will Afghanistan become another basket case like so many Third World countries? Will China and Russia step in to throw them a lifeline? The Taliban are finally wising up that all the talent has been leaving the country on American evacuation flights. It seems like a large percentage of the Afghan population has been helping the Americans so we feel a moral obligation to get them out. But do the Taliban really want to kill them or do they just want their services as doctors, professors and other professionals? Do they really want to roll the clock back 500 years or are they smarter than that?
Meanwhile, the US just wants to get back to normal: overconsumption. We want a large share of the world's resources so we can overconsume and continue to pour carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. The largest percentage of greenhouse gasses already in the atmosphere was put there by Americans. We just want to get back to normal and continue doing so. Just think of the consequences if we didn't continue to overconsume: our GDP would decline. Less consumption equals lower GDP. It's as simple as that. To reorient our society so that we underconsumed so that the rest of the world had enough food to eat and a roof over their heads is something that we as Americans have been programmed not even to consider in going about our daily lives. Our freedom, primarily, is the freedom to consume. That is about 50% of our population, those invested in the stock market and enjoying generational transfers of real estate assets, has the freedom to consume while about 50%, those doing the menial but necessary jobs are living paycheck to paycheck. Even college graduates, single mothers primarily, are still sleeping on their parents' couches because you can't make it on one salary in today's America particularly if you still have a lot of student loan debt to pay off.
Trump's base are those who not only say to hell with considering the planet as a whole or those in other countries, they say to hell with other Americans who disagree with their right not to get vaccinated and who might die from their very germs. How selfish can members of the human race be? What is civic duty if not pulling together and doing what's necessary to defeat our arch enemy: COVID? Especially when vaccinations are free. They'll even pay you to get one. Now we've reached the pass where you have to pay Americans to fight. Actually, we reached it years ago when they ended the draft.
U.S. President George W. Bush delivers a speech on Iraq from the porch of the Oval Office at the White House on July 31, 2008 in Washington, D.C. President Bush said he was hoping for further troop withdrawals from Iraq, praising security gains and mentioned cutting the length of combat tours for U.S. forces in the country. (Photo: Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images)
But George Bush was fighting a war for oil and empire, and victory would pose a huge tactical difficulty: with no enemy to fight he would have to demobilize his forces in the Mideast and bring them home.
At a U.S. Special Forces camp near Kandahar, Afghanistan, on December 5, 2001, the Taliban offered an unconditional surrender. Furthermore, they would disband and disarm: a military force would no longer exist.
George W. Bush ignored the offer and continued attacking the Taliban until the end of his term. If only in self-defense the Taliban fought back, eventually regaining the battlefield initiative. Barack Obama fought the Taliban for eight years more. Donald Trump did so for the next four.
George Bush launched a war for oil and empire, invading two sovereign nations without provocation. He violated international law.
Twenty years later, after the squandering of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, President Biden withdrew American troops from Afghanistan—and drew angry criticism for the chaotic exit that followed.
How perverse we have become. We chastise President Biden for a messy ending of the war in Afghanistan and fail to indict George Bush for its illegal beginning.
George Bush launched a war for oil and empire, invading two sovereign nations without provocation. He violated international law.
Within ten days of taking office the Bush Administration formalized a decision to invade Iraq. Long before 9/11 the attack on Afghanistan was scheduled. Neither proposed incursion had the slightest thing to do with terrorism: the objectives were preemptive access to Iraqi oil and a pipeline right-of-way across Afghanistan for the Unocal Corporation. 9/11 offered a spectacular and fortuitous covering alibi; President Bush declared a "war on terrorism" and launched his premeditated wars.
Osama bin Laden was portrayed as an iconic terrorist, to be apprehended for his orchestration of 9/11. But George Bush from his first day in office, January 20, 2001, could have negotiated with the Taliban to assassinate Osama bin Laden or to surrender him into U.S. custody. That was the standing offer the Taliban tendered in late 2000, seeking to retain U.S. favor after bin Laden bombed the U.S.S. Cole. The Bush Administration refused the offer, four times prior to 9/11 and once more five days later.
Saddam Hussein was said to be an intolerable terrorist threat, too. "Regime change" was necessary to remove him from power. In February of 2003, Saddam Hussein offered to enter voluntary exile in Turkey, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia. Here was "regime change" handed on a platter to George Bush, but a peaceful one. The offer was brushed aside.
George Bush needed terrorists, alive, at large, and in residence in Afghanistan and Iraq, to make his "war on terrorism" credible.
The pipeline project was the first order of business. On October 7, 2001, the invasion of Afghanistan was underway, but the billions of barrels of Iraqi oil were never far from mind. Seven weeks later, on November 27, 2001, the President ordered his Defense Department to plan the invasion of Iraq. (That was eleven months before Congress would authorize it.)
The aggressions were titanic failures. Yes, a few American oil companies operate in Iraq today, but they are barely visible among scores of other firms from Egypt, Italy, Japan, France, Austria, the UK, Canada, Hungary, India, Norway, and the holders of the largest contracts by far, Russia and China.
Afghanistan lies in a state of seething chaos. There will be no American pipeline across the country: twenty years of staggering costs in lives and treasure for nothing. Those costs might have been avoided: violence in Afghanistan could have ended two months after George Bush turned it loose.
Anand Gopal, an American journalist, tells the story with unusual authority. He moved to Afghanistan in 2008, learned the language, and for four years he traveled the country freely.
His book appeared in 2014: No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes.
It relates the Taliban's surrender:
His back to the wall, Mullah Omar [leader of the Taliban] drew up a letter to Hamid Karzai, acknowledging his selection as interim president. The letter also granted Omar's ministers, deputies, and aides the right to surrender.
On December 5 [2001] a Taliban delegation arrived at the US special forces camp north of Kandahar city to officially relinquish power...[The Taliban]...pledged to retire from politics and return to their home villages. Crucially, they also agreed that their movement would surrender arms, effectively ensuring the Taliban could no longer function as a military entity. There would be no jihad, no resistance from the Taliban to the new order.
Another description of the surrender, differing little, appeared seven years later:
It took barely two months after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 for the United States mission to point itself toward defeat.
"Tomorrow the Taliban will start surrendering their weapons," the Taliban's spokesman Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef announced on December 7, 2001. "I think we should go home." But the United States refused the group's surrender, vowing to fight on to shatter the Taliban's influence in every corner of the country.
Accepting the surrender would have denoted a great victory in the "war on terrorism." But George Bush was fighting a war for oil and empire, and victory would pose a huge tactical difficulty: with no enemy to fight he would have to demobilize his forces in the Mideast and bring them home. That he could not tolerate: the great prize, the Iraqi oil, had yet to be won, so the fighting in the Mideast would have to be sustained—as a "war on terrorism"—until the invasion of Iraq could be planned, authorized by Congress, and sold to the American people. The Taliban's offer was simply dismissed, and the fighting continued—for twenty years.
And now President Biden has called a halt in Afghanistan, in humiliating defeat. The Taliban, who once offered to disarm and disband, have taken control of Afghanistan. The national media acknowledge the defeat, but trumpet "the end of America's longest war" as recompense. That is grossly misleading: American military violence rages on in the "war on terrorism." U.S. combat troops remain stationed in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Kenya, Somalia, Yemen, Jordan, Kuwait, Djibouti, Qatar, the UAE, Turkey, the Philippines, and Cyprus, and we conduct counterterrorism operations in 61 additional countries around the world.
This madness is the legacy of the Bush Administration, and successive presidents have done nothing to end it. Withdrawing troops from Afghanistan is a no-brainer tactical retreat, but George Bush's bogus war plunges mindlessly ahead.
President Biden, carpe diem. Call the "war on terrorism" for the fraud it is and end it. Bring all the troops home, from everywhere.
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Richard W. Behan is a retired professor of natural resource policy at the University of Montana.. Through 2009 he contributed 40-some essays to various internet websites, critical of the the Bush Administration's criminality. The nature of George Bush's wars has become a political issue once more, prompting him to take to the keyboard again. He can be reached at [email protected]
I just listened to the Reverend Al Sharpton's rousing eulogy for George Floyd. He said we want justice for George Floyd. All over the world people want justice for George Floyd. Even in bombed out Syria, an artist painted a wall honoring George Floyd. That's significant. It's not justice for George Floyd here in America. It's justice for George Floyd all over the world. That means justice for George in the Middle East, justice for George in Iran, justice for George Floyd in China, in Russia. So what would justice be? Reverend Al quoted Ecclesiastes, "For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest. A time to kill and a time to heal." So what would this justice be?
For sure criminal justice system reform. Let's start with a national ban on carotid restraint, a national ban on the knee-to-neck restraint. Yes, but that's not enough. I feel that all this protest energy might just be dissipated unless there are concrete demands on the system. Where is Bernie Sanders when we need him now? He had concrete demands: a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, forgiveness of student loan debt. Most of the protesters both black and white are millenials, the most screwed generation in American history. But who among them would most benefit from these progressive demands? African Americans. They are the Americans who not only suffer from the criminal justice system and the law enforcement system, they are the ones who most suffer from poverty as it was made clear George Floyd's family did. Reforming the criminal justice system is not enough. Reforming the economic system is necessary to redress the grievances of first slavery, then Jim Crow and now the videotaped deaths of so many black people that generated the Black Lives Matter movement.
Black Lives Matter in terms of equal economic justice and millenial lives, both black and white, weighed down with student loan debt that can't be discharged in bankruptcy, matter as well. A country which supports a bloated military bureaucracy that consumes a trillion dollars a year while there is 20% unemployment represents a knee on all our necks. Justice for George Floyd has to extend to justice for all those innocent lives lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Syria. Justice for George Floyd is justice for the 70 million people, half of them children, in refugee camps. Justice for George is justice for all the poverty stricken in favellas and barrios who can't socially distance. Justice for George Floyd is American acceptance of the United Nations 1948 Declaration of Human Rights which include economic as well as political rights.
Justice for George Floyd is justice for people all over the world: black, white and all shades in between. Justice for George Floyd is justice for people without regard to race, religion or national residence. Justice for George Floyd is electing leaders of our country who will make friends instead of enemies, who will convert swords into plowshares, who will create peace and justice in the world.
Worse than the killing of one Iranian General (along with 10 of his cohorts) and the lobbing of missiles into an American air force base in Iraq (which killed no Americans) was the shooting down of a plane in Tehran with the loss of 176 lives - men, women and children. This was the worst tragedy of this little skirmish between the US and Iran, but it exemplifies the reality that the worst casualties of war are always innocent civilians. It was an accident, but there are always these types of accidents when hostilities dictate that some hostile action be taken to take out one bad guy. Whether or not Qasem Soleimani was a bad guy, the tragedy of the entire situation was the loss of innocent life.
Getting in bed with Saudi Arabia (the killer of Jamal Khashoggi) determines that we must be enemies with Iran because the enemy of my friend is my enemy. Without considering the human rights implications, President Nixon made a deal with the devil in 1971 in order to make the US dollar the world's reserve currency. He allied the US with Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia controlled the world's oil supply at that time. Henceforth, Saudi Arabia would only accept payment for oil in US dollars. This made the US and Saudi Arabia the equivalent of Ugolino della Gherardesca and Archbishop Ruggieri in Dante's Inferno. Ugolino's punishment involves his being entrapped in ice up to his neck in the lowest circle of Hell with his betrayer, Archbishop Ruggieri, who left him to starve to death. Ugolino is constantly gnawing at Ruggieri's skull.
Saudi Arabia is constantly gnawing at the US' neck, figuratively of course. All but one of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi citizens. Osama bin Laden was a Saudi citizen. By contrast Iran or its citizens have never done anything equivalent to the US. True in 1979 they captured fifty-two American diplomats and citizens who were held hostage for 444 days by a group of Iranian college students who took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. This was in retaliation for the US supported coup in 1953 which eliminated the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and installed the ruthless Shah of Iran. Again it was all about the oil. Mosaddegh nationalized Iran's oil. The Shah undid that to the delight of the US and British oil interests. Oil has been the cause of much war, and now it is the cause of global warming which is destroying the earth.
Perhaps if the US admitted the fact that it overthrew a democratically elected leader in Iran and apologized for that initial sin, things could become a lot better in terms of relations between the two countries. Despite the hostility between the two countries, George W Bush lied the US into war in Iraq which effectively brought Iraq into Iran's sphere of influence because the majority of Iraqis have the same religion as most Iranians - Shiite Islam. All of the treasure and loss of life produced the exact opposite of the outcome the US wanted. War has a way of coming back and slapping the perpetrator in the face. The result of US wars in the Middle East has been to increase Iranian influence there, not the result the US wanted.
The loss of the Ukraine bound plane in Tehran brings to mind another military blunder when in 2004, General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, was asked about a report that his troops had taken out a wedding party in western Iraq, including the wedding singer and his musicians, killing 43 people, 14 of them children. He responded: “How many people go to the middle of the desert… to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?” Figures by the Iraq Body Count project indicate that, from 20 March 2003 to 14 March 2013, of 174,000 casualties only 39,900 were combatants, resulting in a civilian casualty rate of 77%. War is bad enough for the people doing the actual fighting, but it is many times worse for innocent men, women and children.
The assertions being repeated today seem based on apparently groundless claims from twelve years ago by the same people who said Iraq possessed weapons, weapons programs, and weapons systems that were such a grave threat that they ignited the U.S.-Iraq war.
Members of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) march during the annual military parade marking the anniversary of the outbreak of the devastating 1980-1988 war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, in the capital Tehran on September 22, 2018. (Photo: STR / AFP /Getty Images)
The skepticism expressed by some leading Democrats and the mainstream media regarding the U.S. assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani has been refreshing, after decades of bipartisan support for disastrous U.S. policies in the region.
These critiques, not unreasonably, have acknowledged Suleiman’s nefarious role in advancing Iran’s geostrategic reach in the Middle East supporting extremist militia, exacerbating sectarianism, and suppressing progressive democratic movements.
However, the claim that Soleimani and the Iranian government are somehow responsible for the deaths of “hundreds of Americans” in Iraq—which has been repeated by leading Democrats and the mainstream media—appears to be groundless.
There have not been significant U.S. casualties in Iraq since around 2007, when charges of Iranian involvement in attacks against U.S. forces first surfaced. Virtually all attacks against U.S. forces since the 2003 invasion had come from Baathist, Sunni, and other anti-Iranian groups. Of the more than 10,000 suspected insurgents arrested in U.S. counter-insurgency sweeps prior to the first U.S. withdrawal in 2011, the relatively few foreigners among them were Arabs, not Iranians.
The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, compiled by America’s sixteen intelligence agencies and issued in February 2007, downplayed Iran’s role in Iraq’s violence and instability. Yet it was at this point that the George W. Bush Administration began making the case that Iran had become the principal foreign threat to U.S. forces in Iraq.
The Bush Administration’s case was based primarily on assertions that bomb fragments, such as those displayed by U.S. military officials in a press conference in Baghdad on February 11 of that year, were of Iranian origin. But they never showed any proof making this linkage.
U.S. officials originally claimed to have documents, computer files, confessions by captured Iranians, and evidence that Iranian officials were caught with explosives. None of this was ever made public, however, raising doubts as to whether such evidence even existed in the first place.
They then insisted that Iran was responsible for the increased sophistication over the past several months of what are known as “improvised explosive devices” (IEDs), which were being used by Iraqi insurgents against U.S. and Iraqi military convoys. But the increased sophistication is not necessarily a result of outside aid. In virtually every conflict, particularly those involving irregular warfare, each side constantly seeks to improve the accuracy and lethality of its weapons in the course of the struggle.
Of particular concern to U.S. officials were the alleged increase in attacks by IEDs using “explosively formed projectiles” (EFPs), which U.S. officials claimed had killed 170 U.S. and allied soldiers.
While the Bush Administration insisted the machine-tooling was so sophisticated it could only have been manufactured in Iran, British government scientists found that the devices could have simply been “turned on a lathe by craftsmen trained in the manufacture of munitions” and were not that different than munitions manufactured elsewhere.
The pre-invasion Iraqi army and the munitions industry that supported it certainly possessed enough resident technical expertise to produce the material that the insurgents are using. Indeed, it is rather bizarre that the same U.S. administration that insisted just four years earlier that Iraq was technologically advanced enough to produce long-range missiles and was on the verge of developing an atomic bomb would then be incapable of developing an effective roadside bomb without direct support from its neighbor Iran.
Furthermore, so many metal tubes and explosives were stolen from Iraqi army stockpiles during the chaos following the 2003 U.S. invasion, the insurgents presumably possessed enough material to manufacture their own IEDs for decades. And even if the pieces of weaponry displayed by U.S. military officials came from Iran, there is a huge black market in various explosive devices in Iraq. So it would not be surprising to find components from any number of countries, including those of recent manufacture.
Even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine General Peter Pace, admitted that there was no proof that the Iranian government was supplying Iraqi insurgents with the lethal weaponry. The British government withdrew similar charges they made in 2005, and the Iraqi government has also denied U.S. accusations of an Iranian connection.
"The claim that Soleimani and the Iranian government are somehow responsible for the deaths of “hundreds of Americans” in Iraq appears to be groundless."
In short, the assertions being repeated today seem based on apparently groundless claims from twelve years ago by the same people who said Iraq possessed weapons, weapons programs, and weapons systems that were such a grave threat that they ignited the U.S.-Iraq war. It was this invasion, of course, that led to the rise of pro-Iranian sectarian parties and militia and the resulting Iranian influence in that Arab country.
Segments of the Iranian government and religious hierarchy certainly have been providing training, arms, as well as financial and logistical support to Iraqi Shia political groups and their militias. Soleimani was a key figure in that effort. They were highly effective, if sometimes ruthless, fighters in the war against ISIS, often in conjunction with U.S. forces.
In addition, some of these militias directed death squads against the Sunni Arab community in Iraq during the height of the country’s sectarian violence between 2006 and 2008. More recently, the militias have been targeting pro-democracy anti-corruption protesters. The proxies are brutal and it’s not surprising that so many Iraqis want the Iranians out.
However, these Shia parties are part of Iraq’s elected coalition government and the militia are state-sanctioned, making them technically part of the Iraqi armed forces. And it’s more than ironic for the United States to insist that Iran has no right to interfere in the internal affairs of their next-door neighbor that the United States invaded, occupied, engaged in a bloody counter-insurgency war, and, where nearly seventeen years later, it continues to station thousands of troops.
Rather than recognizing that Iran is simply seeking to take advantage from the dramatic U.S.-instigated changes in the political and strategic situation on their western flank (as would any regional power in a comparable situation), Bush—and now Trump, with the backing of many Democrats—has tried to depict Iran’s role as something far more sinister: yet another front of “the war on terrorism,” making an aggressive U.S. response a matter of “self-defense.”
Although Iranian policy has certainly contributed to the suffering of the Iraqi people, it pales in comparison to the damage inflicted upon that country by the United States. And, if those in Washington, D.C., really want to protect American soldiers from pro-Iranian militia, they simply need to do what the Iraqis and a lot of others have been demanding: Get them out of Iraq. Now.
Stephen Zunes is a Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, where he serves as coordinator of the program in Middle Eastern Studies. Recognized as one the country’s leading scholars of U.S. Middle East policy and of strategic nonviolent action, Professor Zunes serves as a senior policy analyst for the Foreign Policy in Focus project of the Institute for Policy Studies, an associate editor of Peace Review, a contributing editor of Tikkun, and co-chair of the academic advisory committee for the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.
