PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Iranian General’s Intent
Given the gravity of last week’s drone assassination, the State and Defense Departments must prove their claims against Qassem Soleimani. AFAQ–TV, a satellite station broadcasting from Baghdad, ran a brief video clip last May of Ali Khamenei speaking to a small gathering….
The Revelations of WikiLeaks: No. 3—The Most Extensive Classified Leak in History
The “Iraq War Logs” disgorged an unprecedented profusion of documents, military reports and videos, reports Patrick Lawrence. For WikiLeaks, 2010 was an exceptionally eventful year. In April the transparency organization released “Collateral Murder,” the video of U.S. Army helicopters as they shot more…
Turkey Could Turn the Battle for Mosul into a Sectarian Bloodbath
We are now ten days into the Iraqi–led, U.S.–backed fight to retake Mosul, ISIS’s remaining stronghold in Iraq. Assuming a victory, will it look much different than a defeat? The most consequential aftermath is the political, diplomatic, and battlefield mess Turkish…
Obama Is Making Two Huge Mistakes in the War on ISIS in Mosul
The long-anticipated battle to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, is the biggest test to date for President Obama’s strategy against ISIS and other terrorist groups active in the Middle East. The chances of success are decidedly mixed. Paradoxically, the forces…
“This will stop only when the American people get fed up”: American exceptionalism, the New York Times, and our foreign policy after Barack Obama
Our smartest modern military historian explains to Salon what’s wrong about our adventures in the Middle East Part one of my interview with Andrew Bacevich, the soldier-turned-scholar who has just published “America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military…
“The scope of our failure”: The real story of our decades-long foreign policy disaster that set the Middle East on fire
The brilliant Andrew Bacevich tells Salon why our massive march to folly in Middle East has to be seen as one war I first interviewed Andrew Bacevich, the soldier turned scholar, after he spoke at the Hope Club, an old-line…
“Does anyone have a plan?” Here’s how we fix decades of overseas neo-conservative adventurism
We have accepted the horrors of American exceptionalism for too long. Here’s a progressive foreign policy blueprint “Tell me, what exactly is ‘an authentically progressive foreign policy.’” That is the request of a reader responding to last week’s column in the comment…
This is not a democracy: Behind the Deep State that Obama, Hillary or Trump couldn’t control
Foreign policy never really changes regardless of who holds the White House. This is why exceptionalism always wins There are two ways to consider the White House’s announcement last week that, no, American troops will no longer withdraw from Afghanistan…
Donald Trump’s biggest crime is his honesty: How he exposes the sickening rot at the core of the GOP
Republicans have spent decades dressing up fear as courage, pretending at seriousness while advancing hysteria. Many of us cast last week’s Republican debate in Cleveland as entertainment—I have heard the thought repeated many times—but this seems to me a cheap…
America’s immoral exceptionalism: The lie we keep telling ourselves about foreign policy and democracy
Americans are disgusted with all of these wars, but feel powerless to do anything about it The task of historians in our time is to unbury the buried. For journalists, it is to see that the truth of events is…
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