When Israel was founded, there was hope among progressive Jews that the new country could rely on the best traditions of Judaism and teach the world how to navigate the shoals of bigotry and injustice, a vision that remains unfulfilled,…
Category: Obama Administration
Rebuffing Peace Chances in Syria
Exclusive: Official Washington’s neocon-dominated “group think” on Syria is that everything is the fault of President Assad and Russian President Putin, but the actual history shows many missed opportunities for peace because of the U.S. obsession with dictating “regime change”…
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…
The Mideast’s Humpty Dumpty Problem
Western powers most recently the United States have smashed up the Mideast so thoroughly that many of the options now under review in Official Washington go from bad to worse but almost certainly can never put the region back together…
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…
Fallout from the Gaza Blockade
Israel’s enforcement of its Gaza blockade has involved storming aid ships in international waters, including the 2010 assault on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara in which Israeli commandos killed nine people, a case that has now led to a lawsuit…
Secrecy and Hillary Clinton
Over-classification of documents is the weapon of choice wielded by the U.S. government to punish whistleblowers and keep the American people in the dark about its actions around the world. But the well-connected, like Hillary Clinton, get special forbearance, notes…
A Plea for Mideast Policy Realism
Over the past two decades, a neoconservative-driven foreign policy has led to strategic disaster after disaster, but neocon belligerence continues to dominate Official Washington, a dilemma that former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas W. Freeman addresses.
Will Obama Succumb to Pro-War Baiting?
The “you’re a weakling” baiting of President Obama to get him to attack the Syrian government is unrelenting, stretching from the neocon Right to some elements of the liberal Left. And, there are doubts he is strong enough to rebuff the warmongers…