Antiwar.com Blog

Robert Dreyfuss, investigative journalist and author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam discusses the situation on the ground now in Iraq due to Bush’s policy of refusing to support any faction that actually want to form a multi-ethnic coalition due simply to the fact that the leaders who want to hold Iraq together are the same ones who want the U.S. out (Sadr and the Sunni insurgency) while supporting the Iran-backed factions (the Da’wa Party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq) who have no interest in making concessions to the Sunnis at all as more and more American troops keep showing up to do their job for them.

Also a bit of the history of American support for Islamic fundamentalism since World War II.

MP3 here.

For nearly fifteen years Robert Dreyfuss has worked as an independent journalist who specializes in magazine features, profiles, and investigative stories in the areas of politics and national security. In 2001, he was profiled as a leading investigative journalist by the Columbia Journalism Review, and two of his articles have won awards from The Washington Monthly. In 2003, Dreyfuss was awarded Project Censored’s first prize for a story on the role of oil in U.S. policy toward Iraq.He has appeared on scores of radio and television talk shows, including Hannity and Colmes on Fox News, C-Span, CNBC, MSNBC, Court TV, and, on National Public Radio, The Diane Rehm Show and Public Interest with Kojo Nnamdi, and Pacifica’s Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman.

Based in Alexandria, Va., Dreyfuss been writing for Rolling Stone for at least a decade, and currently covers national security for Rolling Stone’s National Affairs section. He’s a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect. His articles have also appeared in The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, Newsday, Worth, California Lawyer, The Texas Observer, E, In These Times, The Detroit Metro Times, Public Citizen, Extra!, and, in Japan, in Esquire, Foresight and Nikkei Business. On line, he writes frequently for TomPaine.com, and produced a popular blog for Tom Paine called The Dreyfuss Report.

Dreyfuss is best known for ground-breaking stories about the war in Iraq, the war on terrorism, and post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy. In 2002, he wrote the first significant profile of Ahmed Chalabi by a journalist, for The American Prospect. Also in 2002, he wrote the first analysis of the war between the Pentagon and the CIA over policy toward Iraq, which included the first important account of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. Other stories in The American Prospect included detailed accounts of neoconservative war plans for the broader Middle East. In 2004, he co-authored what is still the most complete account of the work of the Office of Special Plans in manufacturing misleading or false intelligence about Iraq, for Mother Jones, entitled “The Lie Factory.”

Before 9/11, Dreyfuss wrote extensively about intelligence issues, including pieces about post-Cold War excursions by the CIA into economic espionage, about the CIA’s nonofficial cover (NOC) program, and about lobbying by U.S. defense and intelligence contractors over the annual secret intelligence budget.

Among his many other pieces, Dreyfuss has profiled organizations, including the Democratic Leadership Council, the Center for American Progress, the National Rifle Association, the NAACP, the Human Rights Campaign, and Handgun Control. He has also profiled Vermont Governor Howard Dean, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, conservative activist Grover Norquist, House Ways & Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas, Senator John McCain, and, in 1999, Texas Governor George W. Bush. One of his most important pieces was the result of a weeks-long visit to Vietnam in 1999, where he wrote about the effects of Agent Orange dioxin in Vietnam since the 1970s. His stories on the privatization of Social Security and the politics of Medicare and Medical Savings Accounts have been widely cited.

Dreyfuss is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE). He graduated from Columbia University.

The Wartime Economist David R. Henderson explains the capitalist peace theory, Iran and opportunity cost, America’s relationship with China and the rising left-right-libertarian alliance against empire.

MP3 here.

David R. Henderson is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution and an associate professor of economics in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is author of The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey and editor of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, available online. His latest book, co-authored with Charles L. Hooper, is Making Great Decisions in Business and Life.

He has appeared on The O’Reilly Factor, the Jim Lehrer Newshour, CNN, and C-SPAN. He has had over 100 articles published in Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Red Herring, Barron’s, National Review, Reason, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Christian Science Monitor. He has also testified before the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. Visit his website.

Well, we’re four days into our quarterly fund drive – and it’s going lousy. I was planning to remind you how time is money… and how much time Antiwar.com saves you each day, collecting, reviewing, organizing, and updating hundreds of news items and opinion pieces … and how I bet you checked the site on Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s – and found new content, just like every other day… and how we bring you exclusive commentary from the likes of Justin Raimondo, Alan Bock, Doug Bandow, David R. Henderson, Charles Peña, Philip Giraldi, Nebojsa Malic, Ran HaCohen, and many more… and how there’s simply no other venue, online or in print or on-air, that even comes close to our level of focused coverage… and how I haven’t noticed any global outbreaks of lamb-lion love that might justify letting this site wither away – how, in fact, each day’s stories portend fresh horrors…

But that would be one bummer of a sermon, and anyway, I found this upbeat testimonial from Vanity Fair‘s James Wolcott to share instead:

Upon rising from my bed of nails (keeps me sharp–on the edge–where I gotta be) each morning, I begin my blog day with a high-impact megadose of Antiwar, the premiere site for tracking the dogs of war and their latest foamings and the softer mewings of the compliant press. Its prescience in identifying the neocon arguments for war against Iraq as specious, fearmongering, and a betrayal of this country’s ideals is there in the archives, and each day it refuses to flinch from the butcherhouse debauchery the Bush administration and the neocon architects have unleashed. The best thing about Antiwar is that it’s ecumenical in its anti-empire coverage, giving voice and space to opponents of the war whether they be libertarian, conservative, traditionally liberal, or far lefty. …

Antiwar is holding a fundraiser this week and I entreat you to cough up a little for the causes of peace, justice, truth, liberty, and good old American cussedness.

Listen to the man.

Gen. William Odom discusses the “worst strategic disaster in American history,” the war in Iraq: the view of most generals that the war is wrong, the failure of the politicians to see the consequences of their actions, the centrality of the neoconservatives and the Israel lobby in pushing for the Iraq invasion, the “surge,” Bush’s siding with the Iran factions even though the Iraqi Shia don’t want them, the crisis of Iraq’s four million refugees and it’s possible consequences, the tenuous alliance between Iraq’s Sunnis and al Qaeda, the fact that a September 11th worth of Iraqis die every month in that country, his view of George Tenet and Colin Powell’s failure to resign before the war and the possibility of war with Iran.

MP3 here. (18:47)

Lieutenant General William E. Odom, U.S. Army (Ret.), is a Senior Fellow with Hudson Institute and a professor at Yale University. As Director of the National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988, he was responsible for the nation’s signals intelligence and communications security. From 1981 to 1985, he served as Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, the Army’s senior intelligence officer.

From 1977 to 1981, General Odom was Military Assistant to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs, Zbigniew Brzezinski. As a member of the National Security Council staff, he worked upon strategic planning, Soviet affairs, nuclear weapons policy, telecommunications policy, and Persian Gulf security issues. He graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1954, and received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1970.

General Odom’s latest book, America’s Inadvertent Empire, co-authored with Robert Dujarric, was published in early 2004 by Yale University Press. His previous book, Fixing Intelligence For a More Secure America, was published in January 2003 (Yale University Press). His book, The Collapse of the Soviet Military (Yale University Press, 1998), won the Marshall Shulman Prize. General Odom has also written (American University Press, 1993); America’s Military Revolution: Strategy and Structure After the Cold WarTrial After Triumph: East Asia After the Cold War (Hudson Institute, 1992); On Internal War: American and Soviet Approaches to Third World Clients and Insurgents (Duke University Press, 1992); and The Soviet Volunteers (Princeton University Press, 1973). He coauthored Commonwealth or Empire? Russia, Central Asia, and the Transcaucasus with Robert Dujarric (Hudson Institute, 1995).

General Odom has published articles in Foreign Affairs, World Politics, Foreign Policy, Orbis, Problems of Communism, The National Interest, The Washington Quarterly, Military Review, and many other publications. A frequent radio and television commentator, he has appeared on programs such as “The PBS News Hour,” CNN, ABC’s “Nightline”, NBC News, C-Span, and BBC’s “The World Tonight.” He also is a periodic contributor to the op-ed pages of The NewYork Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and others.

Former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer discusses the open letter [.pdf] he and other former CIA officials wrote to George Tenet, the responsibility Tenet bears for the war and for failing to kill Osama bin Laden in the 1990’s, his excuse(?) that the “slam dunk” referred to lying us into war rather than the presence of WMD, Dick Durbin’s recent admission that he knew the war was based on lies and his responsibility for staying quiet, the Constitution’s requirement that Congress hold responsibility for declaring war, his belief that Osama is still alive, al Qaeda’s ability to quickly replace their leadership, Bush’s renewed invocation of Osama to justify the war in Iraq and threats against Iran and the fact that there was no pre-war link between Iraq and al Qaeda.

MP3 here. (17: 10)

Michael Scheuer is a 22-year veteran of the CIA and the author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror.

On Friday it was reported that Mohamed Dheere was appointed as the new mayor of Mogadishu by the US-backed Somali government. What’s interesting about this is that just last year, when the US decided to start funding warlords to pick fights with the Islamic Courts, Mr. Dheere was one of the warlords that was on the CIA’s payroll.

This is just the latest US link in a Somali government that is rapidly becoming an international embarrassment. I’m not going to rehash the backstory of the conflict: Scott’s recent Antiwar Radio interview with Chris Floyd does a far better job of that than I could in a single blog posting.

On the other hand, I was recently reading the transcript of the press conference in which Defense Department officials announced the creation of AFRICOM. The officials promise that America’s goals in Africa will be exclusively altruistic in nature, and I wonder if what’s occurred in Somalia, from American airstrikes on villages, to mass rendition of refugees to a nation with the dreadful human rights record of Ethiopia, and culminating with the installation of a CIA-funded warlord as the mayor of the capital city is an example of the sort of actions we can expect of AFRICOM in the coming years.

In 1983, the US founded CENTCOM to be the operational command for the Middle East and Central Asia. Since then, the US has fought three major wars and innumerable small skirmishes in that theater of operations. Can we expect more of the same from AFRICOM, and does its founding portend a massive increase in US military interventionism in Africa?

Only time will tell, but the Council on Foreign Relations recommended in a recent report that the US ramp up its involvement in Africa to secure its oil resources. Is it even possible that this agenda won’t lead to the same fiasco of a foreign policy that it has in the Middle East?