The United States has threatened to impose punishing sanctions on countries importing oil from Iran and only at the last minute on Thursday granted China a waiver from the penalties. But these third-party sanctions are likely illegal under trade laws,…
Category: Obama Administration
How Iran Might See the Threats
Exclusive: Hard-headed realism and outside-the-box thinking might be needed to avert another catastrophe in the Middle East, this time an Israeli attack on Iran and the unpredictable consequences. In that light, ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern imagines a bleak report that…
The Price of Political Purity
Special Report: Some activists on the Left are rejecting President Obama and the Democrats even if that means electoral victories for Mitt Romney, the neocons and the Tea Party. But Sam Brown, a veteran of a similar debate in 1968,…
Drawing Lessons from the Vietnam War
The Vietnam War may seem like ancient history to many Americans, but that destructive conflict holds important lessons for the present, especially the danger of “group think” driving foreign policy and the value of insights that clash with conventional wisdom,…
WPost’s ‘Fact-Check-Gate’
Exclusive: On Sunday, the Washington Post published a column accusing President Obama and his campaign of lying for calling Mitt Romney a “corporate raider” who outsourced jobs. But the writer, Glenn Kessler, now acknowledges that he was aware of new evidence…
Hounding Julian Assange
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has taken refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London rather than be extradited to Sweden to face sex-abuse accusations. But Assange’s ordeal reflects a larger and more troubling American hostility to truth-tellers who point the finger at…
What Russia Fears in Syrian Conflict
The U.S. government condemns Russia for blocking aggressive steps to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. But Moscow fears Sunni extremists in the Syrian opposition and recalls how the West’s tolerance of such radicals before — in Afghanistan and the Balkans — led…
WPost’s Kessler Earns 4 Pinocchios
Exclusive: Newspaper “fact-checking” is only valuable if the people doing it have the courage to apply careful journalistic standards to their criticisms, not simply show off an artificial “balance.” The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler is one “fact-checker” who ignores the…
Still Fighting Bush’s GWOT
President Obama rebranded the “global war on terror” the “war on Al Qaeda,” but his counterterrorism strategy hews closely to President George W. Bush’s, as the U.S. joins conflicts in Yemen and elsewhere that have little connection to the 9/11 attacks, as ex-CIA analyst Paul…
All for One
Much of the propaganda that inundates the world’s population is designed to justify animosities and conflicts, whether religious, racial or political. But there is a larger truth that also must be understood that we are all in this together, as…