There’s that lay definition of mental illness where you come to believe you’re the only sane person left in the room. I think that’s where I am right now.In last week’s address to State Department employees, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson...
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) published an op-ed in the New York Times yesterday taking Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to task for Tillerson's recent comment that our national security goals overseas may on some occasions preclude the export of our human rights values. In...
Washington, DC – On May 8, 2017 IRmep (Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy) Director Grant F. Smith filed an emergency motion (PDF) asking the US Court of Appeals for an injunction on the immanent transfer of US foreign military assistance to Israel.On May 5...
President Trump is off to Saudi Arabia and Israel later this month, with stops at the Vatican and at a NATO summit. Since the election, a once-critical Trump has flip-flopped on Saudi Arabia, now he's expected to provide further US assistance to the ongoing Saudi war...
Neocon Anne Applebaum has never seen a bed she did not expect to find an evil Russian lurking beneath. More than a quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War, she cannot let go of that hysterical feeling that, “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are...
"We have to fight them over there, so we won't have to fight them here." Was it George W. Bush? Nope. The statement goes all the way back to President Truman, who warned that if we didn't fight the Korean war we'd have to fight commies in Wichita. The whole idea of...
Memories of war are powerful and fragmentary. At a national level, we do best at remembering our own war dead while scarcely recognizing the damage to others. This is one cost of nationalism. Nationalism is violent, bigoted, and discriminatory. It elevates a few at...
This morning an agreement was reached at the Syria talks in Astana, Kazakhstan, to set up four "de-escalation" or "safe" zones inside Syria, where moderate rebels would be tolerated but extremists like al-Qaeda and ISIS and their various offshoots would not be...
I suppose it had to come to this, perhaps the intersection of absurdity and unreality expressed through a video game as the only true way to capture the essence of America’s 15 year+ was in Afghanistan. I must stress this is a real game. It is not satire or a joke....
At dusk I stood on a residential street with trim lawns and watched planes approach a runaway along the other side of a chain-link fence. Just a few dozen yards away, a JetBlue airliner landed. Then a United plane followed. But the next aircraft looked different. It...
