New U.S. plans for training security forces in four African countries recall similar programs around the world, which often ended in the hand-picked trainees slaughtering civilians or staging military coups, as ex-State Department official William R. Polk recalls.
In 2011, a coalition of U.S. neocons and “humanitarian” war hawks pushed for and got a military intervention in Libya with the goal of eliminating Muammar Gaddafi, but the ouster and murder of Gaddafi has only led to worse chaos…
The mainstream U.S. news media has taken great umbrage over President Obama’s defense of the more peaceful parts of his foreign policy, when he suggested lessons were not learned by the many pundits and pols who supported the disastrous Iraq…
Feb. 11 marks two important anniversaries in the Middle East: the ouster of the Shah of Iran in 1979 and the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011. But the question remains whether the U.S. has learned the right…
Exclusive: As a U.S. senator and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton often followed a neocon-style foreign policy, backing the Iraq War, teaming up with Defense Secretary Robert Gates on an Afghan War “surge,” and staking out an even more hawkish stance than Gates on…
A quarter century ago, the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, killed 270 people and later was pinned on a Libyan agent. In 2011, Lockerbie was used to justify a U.S.-backed war to oust Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, but the…
Egypt’s military coup meshed with the geopolitical interests of Saudi Arabia and Israel, but the toppling of the country’s first democratically elected government was driven by other factors, including the history of a politically powerful military, as ex-CIA analyst Paul…
The single-minded Republican drive to exploit the deaths of four U.S. diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 and use the tragedy to embarrass President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has obscured the more complex reality of what happened,…
This past weekend, when U.S. commandos captured suspected al-Qaeda leader Anas al-Libi living openly in Tripoli, it drove home the point that post-Gaddafi Libya has become home to many Islamic extremists, a reality that tarnishes what Official Washington likes to…
From the Archive: The U.S. capture of an alleged al-Qaeda terror leader in Libya underscores the failure of the major news media to give the public the full story during the military intervention that led to Muammar Gaddafi’s ouster and murder. Mainstream…