Official Washington loves departing Defense Secretary Robert Gates; politicians and pundits alike hang on his every word, applauding his “candor” and praising his “courageous” spending cuts. But military budget expert Winslow T. Wheeler says Gates’s record doesn’t match his press clippings.
Month: June 2011
Today’s Pentagon Papers Warning
The U.S. government has finally released the full Pentagon Papers describing how the American people were misled into the Vietnam War. The declassification comes four decades after most of the document was leaked by Pentagon insider Daniel Ellsberg, who today says similar…
Spain’s Growing ‘Indignation’ Protests
In protests from the Middle East to the American Midwest, people are confronting the question of whether societies should be organized for the benefit of the broad population or the wealthy elites. That question is being expressed perhaps most sharply in…
Israel’s Jewish Exodus
Hard-line Israelis reject the idea of reasonable compromises for peace, arguing that any significant concessions to Palestinian sovereignty would threaten Israel’s security or the Zionist cause, but Lawrence Davidson notes that demographic trends, including a growing Jewish exodus from Israel,…
Time to End the Afghan War?
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other Bush-43 holdovers are pressing President Barack Obama to delay a meaningful drawdown of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and continue the counterinsurgency war, but the Independent Institute’s Ivan Eland argues that a rapid withdrawal is…
How Pakistan Punked America
For most of the Cold War and during the “war on terror,” Pakistan has manipulated U.S. presidents as part of its own great game as the Islamic republic circumvented U.S. laws to build a nuclear arsenal and to support some…
Neocons Trade Medicare for War
Exclusive: The American neocons are again on the upswing as they undercut peace initiatives from the Obama administration and gain Republican support for maintaining massive Pentagon spending, in exchange for limiting senior citizens’ access to Medicare. As Robert Parry reports, the…
Trading Guatemala for Cuba
Two extremes of Latin American politics are represented by Guatemala and Cuba, the former a country where, in 1954, the CIA succeeded in overthrowing a government that offended Washington and the latter a nation that has resisted CIA covert operations…
Sexual Puritanism and Empire
As the ice caps melt and wars continue to kill, the U.S. news media remains obsessed with sex scandals, such as Rep. Anthony Weiner tweeting lewd photos of himself. But this persistent moral outrage is its own strange voyeurism, not just a distraction…
Petraeus Pads Success Against Taliban
Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan who is seen as a shoo-in to become the next CIA director, appears to have wildly exaggerated the number of Taliban fighters captured last year by padding the totals with Afghans…