Category: Campaign 2016

Presidential Success or Failure

There are two kinds of presidential foreign policy decisions, one operational like the raid to kill Osama bin Laden, which can go right or wrong almost by chance, and the other strategic like the invasion of Iraq that can be…

Hillary Clinton’s Failed Libya ‘Doctrine’

From the Archive: As the long-running Benghazi investigation returns to center stage with another round of Hillary Clinton’s testimony, the former Secretary of State’s larger failure remains obscured how she once envisioned the bloody Libyan “regime change” as the start…

The More Complex Truth of Benghazi

From the Archive: More than three years after the Benghazi attack, which claimed the lives of four Americans, Republicans again are grilling former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the hyper-politicized inquiry that has obscured the more complex reality of…

Kicking War Cans Down the Road

Exclusive: By playing along with Official Washington’s false hopes and its endless chest-thumping President Obama has trapped himself into a pointless war policy in the Middle East, now deciding to pass America’s failing Afghan War onto his successor, notes Jonathan Marshall.

Needling Obama for More Wars

Exclusive: Rather than encourage a healthy, wide-ranging debate on world affairs, the mainstream U.S. news media prevents any serious deviation from Official Washington’s war-loving “group thinks,” a task undertaken by CBS’ Steve Kroft in a hostile interview with President Obama, reports Robert Parry.

How CNN Shapes Political Debate

Exclusive: CNN was happy to add a right-wing questioner for the Republican debate but won’t add a progressive for the Democratic debate, another sign of how the “mainstream media” shapes what’s acceptable in political discussion, a lesson that ex-CIA analyst…

Obama’s Two-Faced Foreign Policy

Exclusive: President Obama’s Syrian strategy is getting roundly denounced as incoherent, which while true is really a reflection of his failure to fully break with neocon-style interventionism even when he realizes the futility of the strategy, writes Robert Parry.

CNN’s Double-Standards on Debates

For decades, mainstream U.S. news outlets have bent over backwards to appease conservatives and avoid the stigma “liberal media,” but there has been no similar accommodation for progressives, as Jeff Cohen notes about CNN’s handling of the upcoming Democratic debate.

Collateral Damage/Stuff Happens

President George W. Bush (and his successor Barack Obama) have lamented “collateral damage” in Afghanistan and Iraq and Jeb Bush shrugs off a domestic mass shooting as “stuff happens” but the tragedies have a common denominator: glorification of war and cultural acceptance of violence,…

What Are the Syrian Options?

Official Washington is in a blind rage over Russia’s military intervention in Syria in support of the Assad regime, but the changed dynamic may offer useful options if U.S. policymakers can just look clearly at the crisis, as ex-CIA official…