Tag Archive for ‘Foreign Policy’

Americans: Serfs Ruled by Oligarchs

Americans think that they have “freedom and democracy” and that politicians are held accountable by elections. The fact of the matter is that the United States is ruled by powerful interest groups who control politicians with campaign contributions. Our real rulers are an oligarchy of financial and military/security interests and AIPAC, which influences U.S. foreign policy for the benefit of Israel.

The Apologists

For 50 minutes, Obama sat mute, as a Marxist thug from Nicaragua delivered his diatribe, charging America with a century of terrorist aggression in Central America.

Can Uncle Sam Ever Let Go?

NATO has been irrelevant for two decades, since its raison d’etre—to keep the Red Army from driving to the Rhine—disappeared. Yet Obama is headed to Brussels to celebrate France’s return and the 60th birthday of the alliance. But why is NATO still soldiering on?

Israel’s American Chattel

Conservatives will say, of course, that Israel is the “only democracy in the Middle East.” The question whether Israel—or, for that matter, America—is a democracy is beside the point. The point is that Israel has shown that it can control not merely U.S. foreign policy but also U.S. intelligence policy.

The Long Retreat

But if victory over the Taliban has been ruled out by the United States, have the Taliban ruled out a victory over the American Empire to rival the one their fathers won over the Soviet Empire? What price are we prepared to pay, in “prolonged indecision,” to avert such an end to a war now in its eighth year? America had best brace herself for difficult days ahead.

Is Ehud’s Poodle Acting Up?

As Israel entered the third week of its Gaza blitz, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert regaled a crowd in Ashkelon with an astonishing tale. He had, said Olmert, whistled up George Bush, interrupted him in the middle of a speech and told him to instruct Condi Rice not to vote for a U.N. resolution Condi herself had written. Bush did as told, said Olmert. The crowd loved it. Here is the background.

An Unreflective Man

President Bush says it was freedom that prevailed when he rejected the pleas of weak-sister Republicans and backed the surge. But what spared us a debacle in Iraq was an infusion of 30,000 combat troops, an uprising against the murderers of al-Qaida and a U.S. decision to buy off the Sunni tribes, a strategy besieged empires have pursued for centuries.

What Became of Western Morality?

On the last day of the old year in the newsletter CounterPunch, two Israelis—Jeff Halper, who heads the Israeli peace movement ICAHD, and Neve Gordon, who is chairman of the department of politics and government at Ben-Gurion University—asked, “Where’s the Academic Outrage Over the Bombing of a University in Gaza?”

May We No Longer Be Silent

The title of my article comes from the sermon of the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., John Bryson Chane, delivered on Oct. 5, 2008, at St. Columba Church.

The bishop’s eyes were opened to Israel’s persecution of Palestinians by his recent trip to Palestine. In his sermon, he called on “politicians seeking the highest office in (our) land” to find the courage to “speak out and condemn violations of human rights and religious freedom denied to Palestinian Christians and Muslims” by the state of Israel.

Chane’s courage was to no avail. As Justin Raimondo reported on Antiwar.com on Dec. 27, when America’s new leader of “change” was informed of Israel’s massive air attack on the Gaza Ghetto, an area of 139 square miles where Israel confines 1.4 million Arabs and tightly controls the inflow of all resources—food, medicine, water and energy—America’s president-elect Obama had “no comment.”

Bush, Obama and the Gaza Blitz

Unwilling to control its fighters, who fired scores of missiles into Israel at the end of their six-month ceasefire, Hamas gave Israel the provocation it needed to deliver a savage blow to the Palestinian enclave in Gaza.

Saturday was the bloodiest day in the history of the Palestinian people since being driven from their homes in the War of 1948. One thousand were killed or wounded, as the Israeli Air Force conducted over a hundred strikes—on graduation ceremonies for Hamas fighters, police stations and storage sites for rockets.