Tag: George W. Bush

A Band-Aid Approach to Fixing the V.A.

Despite promises from the Bush-43 administration that the Iraq War would pay for itself, the price tag keeps soaring with the predictable impact on V.A. hospitals struggling to care for wounded warriors. But the political solution has been to make…

Reaping the Seeds of Iraqi Hatred

The uproar in the mainstream U.S. news media over the barbarity of Islamic militants in Iraq downplays or ignores the brutality of the U.S. invasion and occupation that unleashed the ethnic and sectarian hatreds in the first place, as Danny…

Iraq’s Depleted Uranium Threat

Over the past two dozen years, the massive damage that the U.S. has inflicted on Iraq’s population, infrastructure and environment includes the residue from American “deplete uranium” weapons that can cause cancer and other illnesses, writes John LaForge.

America’s Blunderbuss Wars

U.S. policymakers and pundits proclaim that America’s role in the world is all for the good. But more objective observers see a pattern of clumsy and brutal interference that can touch off cascades of chaos and death, as ex-State Department official William…

Iraqis Are Not ‘Abstractions’

Exclusive: U.S. policymakers have long behaved like spoiled, destructive children treating Iraq as if it were some meaningless plaything. The game has been about who “wins” or “loses” in Washington, not who lives or dies in Iraq, a moral failure that ex-CIA…

Reviving the ‘Successful Surge’ Myth

Exclusive: The military offensive by Sunni extremists driving into the heart of Iraq has brought the neocons out of the shadows to blame President Obama, by arguing that they had “won” the war before Obama “lost” it, a deeply engrained false…

Forgetting Who Messed Up Iraq

Key U.S. political and media figures who were deeply implicated in the illegal invasion of Iraq are playing an audacious “blame game” over the current Iraqi security crisis, pointing at President Obama when they were the principal culprits, as Lawrence Davidson recalls.

Learning No Lessons About War

Americans like to think of themselves as a peace-loving people but their record has been one of war-making with the pace of interventions picking up in recent decades as the U.S. military and intelligence services are dispatched around the world, notes…

America’s Dangerous Mideast Illusions

America’s neocon-driven interventions in the Middle East have combined to create what is shaping up as a geopolitical disaster, with U.S.-backed “regime changes” contributing to victories by Saudi-funded Sunni extremists, as Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett explain.

Neocons Double-Down on Iraq/Syria

America’s neocons won’t let go of their Middle East delusions, now trying to leverage the worsening crisis in Iraq into an excuse to return U.S. forces to that tragic country while also escalating military involvement in Syria, a compounding of…