President Obama’s plan to spend another half-billion dollars on Syria’s “moderate” rebels will add more fuel to the destructive violence just as the killing was finally dying down. It’s also hard to see how this investment will promote serious negotiations, notes ex-CIA analyst Paul R.…
Tag: Paul R. Pillar
Obama’s New ‘Bias for Action’
President Obama seems so shell-shocked from all the political and media criticism about his “weakness” that he is “doing something” by intervening in both the Syrian and Iraqi civil conflicts, a risky “bias for action” that can do more harm…
In Case You Missed…
Some of our special stories in May focused on the Ukraine crisis, the continuing fallout from neocon war strategies, and some inconvenient truths about Jesus.
The Folly of Making Iran an Enemy
Even when Iran is eager to cooperate with the U.S. on matters of mutual concern, Israeli leaders and American neocons insist on making Iran an implacable enemy, a rigid approach that does not serve U.S. interests, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R.…
Keeping Iran as a Bogeyman
Despite the disastrous Iraq War, the neocons never stopped pushing for violent “regime change” in any country that gets in their way or Israel’s. Now, neocons are getting downright hysterical over possible U.S. cooperation with one old target, Iran, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar notes.
Misreading Benghazi and Terrorism
The Republican case of a Benghazi terror “cover-up” never made much sense because President Obama immediately called it an “act of terror.” But now other parts of the GOP’s contorted narrative are collapsing as well, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R.…
How Iran Could Help on Iraq
If Official Washington were a place where sanity prevailed and true American national interests were protected, there would be calls for cooperation with Iran to address the crisis in Iraq, but that would upset a big part of the neocon agenda,…
Overreacting to the Iraq Crisis
The new hysteria gripping Official Washington is over the collapse of the Iraqi army in the face of an offensive by Islamic militants. But the threat is not as extreme as some opinion leaders are describing, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul…
Missing the Facts on Iran’s Nuke Talks
The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler often deviates from his purported role as “fact checker” to advance a political agenda, which often requires him to distort the facts or to ignore contrary evidence as he did recently regarding Iran’s nuclear talks,…
‘War on Terror’ and the Bergdahl Swap
After the 9/11 attacks, narrow “counterterrorism” operations gave way to the blunderbuss “war on terror,” opening the way to more traditional practices of war including prisoner exchanges, like the one for Sgt. Bergdahl, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar writes.