In the news section, Jason Ditz points to the recent World Bank report which considers a Palestinian state not viable because "the economy is currently not strong enough to support such a state." Here, Israeli policy ends up serving as strategy: the persistent...
Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy reports that top Senators, including those who support Romney, can't explain what his policy on Syria is...because he doesn't have one: "Mitt Romney believes the United States should pursue a strategy of isolating and pressuring the Assad...
Remember what would happen in school if the whole class essentially failed the calculus exams? The professor would grade the students on a curve. It was a way of pretending a D+ was an A- by changing the standards on which grades were based. Turns out, the Pentagon is...
Time for an embarrassing confession. Even though it's been out for months, and even though it's the first book I ever contributed content to, I had never read Why Peace. I mean not all the way through. I'd read my essay and a few others of people I knew, but its a...
John Reed, writing last week in Foreign Policy, describes Washington's militarized empire of bases in the Persian Gulf in all its gritty detail. The Obama administration has moved significant military reinforcements into the Persian Gulfin order to intimidate Iran and...
Rosa Brooks writes in Foreign Policy about our "socialist military." According to the Congressional Budget Office, the average member of the military is paid better than 75 percent of civilian federal workers with comparable experience. Members of the military and...
Via Andrew Sullivan: Assuming Mayer's account is correct, consider the implications of the country's main intelligence agency - an unaccountable group whose actions are secret mostly because they're illegal - bullying a new president into not applying the rule of law...
An excerpt of Noam Chomsky's latest contribution to TomDispatch: The concept of due process has been extended under the Obama administration’s international assassination campaign in a way that renders this core element of the Charter of Liberties (and the...
After a week of Syrian rebel gains - killing several top security officials and seizing control of multiple border outposts - the Obama administration is being more open about its policy of regime change in Syria. Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East...
This New York Times editorial laments the Obama administration's decision to prohibit lawyers representing Guantanamo detainees from visiting their clients, in a policy that "is imperiously punishing detainees for their temerity in bringing legal challenges to their...
