The man who knew too much. "He was the CIA's expert on Pakistan's nuclear secrets, but Rich Barlow was thrown out and disgraced when he blew the whistle on a US cover-up. Now he's to have his day in court."
posted by homunculus
on Oct 13, 2007 -
21 comments
Iraq: The War of the Imagination. "Anyone seeking to understand what has become the central conundrum of the Iraq war—how it is that so many highly accomplished, experienced, and intelligent officials came together to make such monumental, consequential, and, above all, obvious mistakes, mistakes that much of the government knew very well at the time were mistakes—must see beyond what seems to be a simple rhetoric of self-justification and follow it where it leads: toward the War of Imagination that senior officials decided to fight in the spring and summer of 2002 and to whose image they clung long after reality had taken a sharply separate turn." By
Mark Danner.
[Via Tomdispatch.]
posted by homunculus
on Nov 23, 2006 -
83 comments
Few things are more
sacred to Canadians than the nation's medicare system. After years of health spending cutbacks by conservative politicians,
debate rages over whether private providers should now be
allowed to compete with the public system. In British Columbia, where the government is shovelling tax dollars into the 2010 Olympics, patients are being
left to die in emergency rooms and long-term care facilities due to
overcrowding and
understaffing. Is it too late to save public health care? Should it be saved?
posted by 327.ca
on Apr 27, 2006 -
89 comments
Earth-friendly evangelicals have been in the news a
lot lately. Are they related to the
Crunchy Cons (or
Green cons?!?)? Maybe they're all just afraid of the wrath of
grandma...[first link requires nyt account, or a library card]
posted by ericbop
on Mar 14, 2006 -
3 comments
A lapsed neocon speaks out: The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them.... After the fall of the Soviet Union, various neoconservative authors like Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Robert Kagan suggested that the United States would use its margin of power to exert a kind of "benevolent hegemony" over the rest of the world, fixing problems like rogue states with W.M.D., human rights abuses and terrorist threats as they came up. Writing before the Iraq war, Kristol and Kagan considered whether this posture would provoke resistance from the rest of the world, and concluded, "It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power." ... We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world.
posted by caddis
on Feb 18, 2006 -
57 comments
Debating A Neocon, etc. "Editors’ note: The following exchange is significant for its discussion of how the world order functions today. Particularly interesting is the debate over the significance of neoconservative ideology within the ruling class and whether such a thing as 'Islamic fascism' exists."
posted by davy
on Jul 13, 2005 -
23 comments
Know Your NeoCons. Already the name "NeoCon" is used as an invective from the Left. But who are they? Here are some of their faces, brief biographies, and information about what a NeoCon is, at least as how they define it.
posted by kablam
on Sep 4, 2003 -
27 comments
Pay No Attention tothemenbehindthe Curtain. You maybe read about PNAC
here, wherein numerous members of the current administration wrote down their grand plans for an American-led NWO. Pretty heady stuff, with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz writing to Clinton in
1998 that "the only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction." Umm, that is... move along, citizen. Nothing to see here (thank goodness for Google's
cache).
posted by RKB
on Jul 12, 2003 -
42 comments
Is hypocrisy essential to the New World Order?
Whilst I appreciate the seductive insights and plausible analysis offered by Lee Harris in
this lengthy and generally intelligent essay, I worry that the linking of themes in the intellectual form here merely provides, if not more ammo to the hawks in GWB's Cabinet, the justification for his unending 'war on terror'. There's thinly veiled xenophobia, I'm sure; but also some self-limiting principles compatible with a new kind of 'liberal hegemony' - called 'neo-sovereignty', viz.,
"It (neo-sovereignty) will only be viable if the U.S. scrupulously refuses to intervene in the self-determination of any state except for the purposes of maintaining the double standards in respect of nuclear weapons... At the heart of the dialectically emergent concept of neo-sovereignty is precisely the double standard that Mr. (Richard, the Chief Arms Inspector of the United Nations)
Butler denounced - a double standard imposed by the U.S. on the rest of the world, whereby the U.S. can unilaterally decide to act, if need be, to override and even to cancel the existence of any state regime that proposes to develop WMD, especially in those cases where the state regime in question has demonstrated its dangerous lack of a sense of the realistic." [More inside]
posted by dash_slot-
on Mar 11, 2003 -
30 comments
Rush Limbaugh has gone deaf. While he can recognize sound, he cannot understand it, including callers to his radio show. He's working around it now (somehow), but may have to change his format in the near future. Rush's site is being hit hard, but you can find a transcript
of his monologue here.
posted by ewagoner
on Oct 8, 2001 -
85 comments
