Category: Foreign Policy

Erdogan and the Ankara Bombing

Turkish President Erdogan is playing some dangerous games, aiding Sunni extremists in their war to topple the Syrian government and stirring up old hatreds against the Kurds. So, was last week’s murderous bombing in Ankara an outgrowth of those schemes…

The Kunduz Hospital Atrocity

The U.S. bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, blipped on and off the mainstream media’s radar, catalogued as just one more unfortunate mistake in the last 14 years of war. But there is probable cause to…

MH-17: The Dog Still Not Barking

Exclusive: The dog not barking in the Dutch report on the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is the silence regarding U.S. intelligence information that supposedly had pinned down key details just days after the crash but has been kept secret, writes…

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.

Ronald Reagan’s Bloody ‘Apocalypto’

From the Archive: As grotesque as it is to honor Christopher Columbus who set in motion a hemisphere-wide genocide against the indigenous population, it is also sickening to honor Ronald Reagan who aided and abetted genocide against Guatemalan tribes just last…

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.

How Do-Gooders Can Do Bad

“Human rights” organizations have become purveyors of bloody chaos as they advocate Western big-power military attacks on weak countries in the name of “responsibility to protect” one of several purportedly well-intentioned strategies gone awry as Coleen Rowley and Diana Johnstone describe.

The Afghan Lesson in Syria

Russian President Putin’s decision to escalate military support for the Syrian government brings to mind earlier interventions in Afghanistan that went badly but that cautionary history and the changed Syrian dynamic also raise the prospects for negotiations, says ex-CIA analyst…

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,…