Foreign Policy Category Archive

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People march as they take part in an anti-war protest amid increased tensions between the United States and Iran at Times Square in New York, U.S., January 4, 2020. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz - RC279E94TY3V

Leading Neocon Directs Pentagon Middle East Planning

Philip Giraldi • May 21, 2020

• 1,700 Words • 105 Comments • Reply

The Global War on Terror or GWOT was declared in the wake of 9/11 by President George W. Bush. It basically committed the United States to work to eliminate all “terrorist” groups worldwide, whether or not the countries being targeted agreed that they were beset by terrorists and whether or not they welcomed U.S. “help.”... Read More

With WikiLeaks, Julian Assange Did What All Journalists Should Do

Patrick Cockburn • February 22, 2020

• 1,200 Words • 26 Comments • Reply

I was in Kabul in 2010 when Julian Assange and WikiLeaks first released a vast archive of classified US government documents, revealing what Washington really knew about what was happening in the world. I was particularly interested in one of these disclosures, which came in the shape of a video that the Pentagon had refused... Read More

No Pardons for Neocon War Crimes (Part 2)

Ilana Mercer • February 20, 2020

• 800 Words • 12 Comments • Reply

“HOW does America change if our intelligence agencies were more accurate in their assessment of Saddam Hussein’s chemical and nuclear weapons programs?” The question was posed, just the other day, in “Make America Competent Again,” by David French, at the Dispatch, a neoconservative website. The tract is an agony aunt’s meander that calls on shoring-up... Read More

Ike Was Right

Eric Margolis • January 18, 2020

• 700 Words • 25 Comments • Reply

Congress just passed a near trillion dollar military budget at a time when the United States faces no evident state threats at home or abroad. Ike was right. Illustrating Ike’s prescient warning, Brown University’s respected Watson Institute just released a major study which found that the so-called ‘wars on terror’ in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and... Read More

On Rogues and Rogue States

Old, New, and Improved

Fred Reed • December 10, 2019

• 1,600 Words • 346 Comments • Reply

I have just finished reading William Shirer’s Berlin Diary. (This may not fascinate you, but I am coming to something.) I first encountered it in high school. It is of course Shirer's account as a correspondent in Germany of the rise of the Nazis. Most of it is well known to the educated. The Nazis,... Read More

Iran May be the Only Winner in Iraq

Intelligence documents reveal how Tehran took advantage of US blundering

Philip Giraldi • November 28, 2019

• 1,300 Words • 11 Comments • Reply

The American invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of that nation’s government in 2003 has rightly been described as the greatest foreign policy disaster in the history of the United States. Eight thousand one hundred and seventy five American soldiers, contractors and civilians have died in Iraq since 2003 as well as an estimated 300,000... Read More

UK Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan Highlighted by War Crime Claims

Patrick Cockburn • November 18, 2019

• 700 Words • 5 Comments • Reply

The alleged bid by the British government and army to close down investigations into torture and murder in Iraq and Afghanistan appears to be the latest aspect of a widespread desire in in the UK to forget all about these failed wars. Joining the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 is commonly blamed on Tony... Read More

Plundering Iraq

Eric Margolis • November 16, 2019

• 700 Words • 19 Comments • Reply

Victor Hugo said of the devastated Balkans in the 19th century: ‘The Turks have passed by here. All is in ruins or mourning.’ Welcome to modern Iraq. The British were always masters of efficient imperialism. In the 19th century, they managed to rule a quarter of the Earth’s surface with only a relatively small army... Read More

Tulsi Gabbard Is Right, and Nancy Pelosi Wrong. It Was US Democrats Who Helped Cultivate the Barbarism of Isis

Jonathan Cook • October 21, 2019

• 2,100 Words • 103 Comments • Reply

There is something profoundly deceitful in the way the Democratic Party and the corporate media are framing Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria. One does not need to defend Trump’s actions or ignore the dangers posed to the Kurds, at least in the short term, by the departure of US forces from... Read More

War with Iran Would Become 'Trump's War'

Pat Buchanan • June 18, 2019

• 900 Words • 19 Comments • Reply

President Donald Trump cannot want war with Iran. Such a war, no matter how long, would be fought in and around the Persian Gulf, through which a third of the world's seaborne oil travels. It could trigger a worldwide recession and imperil Trump's reelection. It would widen the "forever war," which Trump said he would... Read More

Accusing Assange of Being a 'Narcissist' Misses the Point

Patrick Cockburn • April 13, 2019

• 1,200 Words • 40 Comments • Reply

“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” and “ha, ha, I hit them” say the pilots of a US Apache helicopter in jubilant conversation as they machine-gun Iraqi civilians on the ground in Baghdad on 12 July 2007. A wounded man, believed to be the Reuters photographer, 22-year-old Namir Noor-Eldeen, crawls towards a van. “Come... Read More

How the Islamic State's Brutal Project Was Finally Overthrown

Patrick Cockburn • March 24, 2019

• 900 Words • 9 Comments • Reply

Up to its dying days the self-declared Islamic State has retained the ability to top the news agenda, even as its fighters were losing their last battle for bomb-shattered villages in the deserts of eastern Syria. When their spokesman promised retaliation for the massacre of Muslims in the Christchurch mosques his threat was taken seriously.... Read More

Iraq: How We Were Lied Into War

Eric Margolis • March 23, 2019

• 700 Words • 19 Comments • Reply

Sixteen years ago, the US and Britain committed a crime of historic proportion, the invasion and destruction of Iraq. It was as egregious an aggression as Nazi Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland. Large numbers of Iraqi civilians died from 2003-2007. Iraq’s water and sewage systems were bombed, causing widespread cholera. The UN estimated 500,000 Iraqi... Read More

Whose Blood, Whose Treasure?

America's Senior Generals Find No Exits From Endless War

William J. Astore • March 19, 2019

• 2,500 Words • 57 Comments • Reply

“Veni, Vidi, Vici,” boasted Julius Caesar, one of history’s great military captains. “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton echoed that famed saying when summing up the Obama administration’s military intervention in Libya in 2011 -- with a small alteration. “We came, we saw, he died,” she said with a laugh... Read More

Veni, Vidi, Tweeti (I Came, I Saw, I Tweeted)

An Obituary for the Republic

Tom Engelhardt • February 14, 2019

• 2,500 Words • 4 Comments • Reply

What dreamers they were! They imagined a kind of global power that would leave even Rome at its Augustan height in the shade. They imagined a world made for one, a planet that could be swallowed by a single great power. No, not just great, but beyond anything ever seen before -- one that would... Read More

How the War Party Lost the Middle East

Pat Buchanan • January 1, 2019

• 900 Words • 56 Comments • Reply

"Assad must go, Obama says." So read the headline in The Washington Post, Aug. 18, 2011. The story quoted President Barack Obama directly: "The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way. ... the time has come for President Assad to step aside." France's Nicolas... Read More

Truth Is Evaporating Before Our Eyes

Does anyone notice?

Paul Craig Roberts • September 24, 2018

• 1,600 Words

On September 17, I posted my column, “Evidence is no longer a Western value.” I used as an example the blame that has been put on Russia for the shot down Malaysian airliner. No evidence whatsoever exists for the accusation, and massive evidence has been presented that the airliner was shot down by the neonazis... Read More

American Pravda: 9/11 Conspiracy Theories

Ron Unz • September 10, 2018

• 11,000 Words • 2,385 Comments • Reply

Back in 1999 I was invited to join Steve Sailer's HBD email group, where I encountered all sorts of interesting people. The participants were mostly intellectuals or journalists having sharply heterodox views about racial differences, especially those involving IQ and crime, and this was reflected in the somewhat euphemistic title, which stood for "Human Bio-Diversity."... Read More

Whose Wars?

Israel continues to wag the dog for Middle Eastern wars

Philip Giraldi • April 17, 2018

• 1,400 Words • 451 Comments • Reply

In March 2003, Pat Buchanan wrote a groundbreaking article entitled "Whose War?" in opposition to the Bush Administration fueled growing hysteria over Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction which was producing demands for an armed intervention to disarm him. Buchanan rightly identified a number of prominent Jewish officials and journalists closely tied to the... Read More

Trump’s Recycling Program

War Crimes and War Criminals, Old and (Potentially) New

Rebecca Gordon • March 29, 2018

• 2,900 Words • Leave a Comment

A barely noticed anniversary slid by on March 20th. It’s been 15 years since the United States committed the greatest war crime of the twenty-first century: the unprovoked, aggressive invasion of Iraq. The New York Times, which didn’t exactly cover itself in glory in the run-up to that invasion, recently ran an op-ed by an... Read More

John Feffer: Springtime for Despots

Tom Engelhardt • March 25, 2018

• 400 Words • Leave a Comment

Fifteen years ago last week, the U.S. invasion of Iraq began. It was to be beyond glorious. It was to signal the start of an unprecedented new era in which a single imperial superpower, left alone on the planet, would organize more or less everything to its own taste for the first time in history... Read More

James Carroll: An American Reckoning

Tom Engelhardt • March 8, 2018

• 300 Words • 3 Comments • Reply

Here’s a thoroughly humdrum figure from the post-9/11 world: this February an estimated 1,294 people were killed in Iraq and another 266 wounded, including ISIS militants, numerous civilians, Iraqi security forces, Kurds, and Turks. Few of them died in major combat, just low-level incidents, suicide bombings, and bodies found in mass graves. And keep in... Read More

We Should Listen to the Iraqi Parliament

Ron Paul • March 5, 2018

• 500 Words • 4 Comments • Reply

This month marks the 15th anniversary of the US war on Iraq. The “shock and awe” attack was launched based on “stove-piped” intelligence fed from the CIA and Pentagon through an uncritical and compliant US mainstream media. The US media was a willing accomplice to this crime of aggression committed by the George W. Bush... Read More

The 9/11 Hijackers Were Iraqis, Right?

Teaching in a Time of Wars

Rebecca Gordon • February 22, 2018

• 2,500 Words • 2 Comments • Reply

I was teaching the day the airplanes hit the World Trade Center. It was the second meeting of “The Communist Manifesto for Seminarians,” a course for my fellow graduate students. By the time I got to class, both towers had collapsed. A few hours later, Building 7 came down as well. We dispensed with a... Read More

There Is No Justice in Our World

Eric Margolis • February 17, 2018

• 700 Words • 20 Comments • Reply

A gathering of rich oil Arabs pledged $30 billion this week at a meeting in Kuwait to start rebuilding war-shattered Iraq. Sounds nice but these kinds of conclaves are notorious for offering big but delivering little. The event was billed as helping Iraq repair war damage caused by ISIS. In fact, most of the damage... Read More

The Wars No One Notices

Talking to a Demobilized Country

Stephanie Savell • February 15, 2018

• 2,200 Words • 75 Comments • Reply

I’m in my mid-thirties, which means that, after the 9/11 attacks, when this country went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq in what President George W. Bush called the “Global War on Terror,” I was still in college. I remember taking part in a couple of campus antiwar demonstrations and, while working as a waitress... Read More

The Light at the End of the Corner

A Trip Down Memory Lane, Pentagon-Style

Tom Engelhardt • February 13, 2018

• 2,600 Words • 6 Comments • Reply

If you’re in the mood, would you consider taking a walk with me and, while we’re at it, thinking a little about America’s wars? Nothing particularly ambitious, mind you, just -- if you’re up for it -- a stroll to the corner. Now, admittedly, there’s a small catch here. Where exactly is that corner? I... Read More

Andrew Bacevich: American Paths, Chosen and Not (1989-2018)

Tom Engelhardt • January 30, 2018

• 600 Words • 1 Comment • Reply

If I were to pick a single decision by an American president and his team in this century as our own August 1914, I would choose the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003. Of course, in that era of the “sole superpower,” there were no other great powers (as in the World War... Read More

On the Rehabilitation of George W. Bush

Say It Again: The Enemy of Our Enemy Is Still a War Criminal

Rebecca Gordon • November 21, 2017

• 2,900 Words • 116 Comments • Reply

He received a prestigious award from the West Point Association of Graduates. He published a “runaway” bestselling autobiography. Last February, a lavishly produced book celebrating his paintings of Americans who served in the military was, as Time put it, “burning up the Amazon charts.” Still, the liberal media wasn’t ready to embrace George W. Bush... Read More

Rebecca Gordon: the Annals of Rehabilitation

Tom Engelhardt • November 21, 2017

• 500 Words • 1 Comment • Reply

Who even remembers that, back in September 2002, Lawrence Lindsey, then President George W. Bush’s chief economic adviser, offered an upper limit estimate on the cost of a future war in Iraq at $100 billion to $200 billion? He also suggested that the “successful prosecution” of such a war “would be good for the economy.”... Read More

Erik Edstrom: Teaching Revisionist History 101 at West Point

Tom Engelhardt • October 22, 2017

• 500 Words • 2 Comments • Reply

Born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, a former businessman who had helped run companies into the ground, he was widely considered ill-prepared for the presidency, out of his depth, a lightweight in a heavyweight world. Still, having won the Republican nomination and then a uniquely contested election, once in the Oval Office... Read More

Duty, Honor, Atrocity

George W. Bush Receives a Character Award at West Point

Erik Edstrom • October 22, 2017

• 2,700 Words • 86 Comments • Reply

In George W. Bush’s home state of Texas, if you are an ordinary citizen found guilty of capital murder, the mandatory sentence is either life in prison or the death penalty. If, however, you are a former president of the United States responsible for initiating two illegal wars of aggression, which killed 7,000 U.S. servicemen... Read More

“Tell Me How This Ends?”

David Petraeus Finally Answers His Own Question

Tom Engelhardt • October 17, 2017

• 2,800 Words • 16 Comments • Reply

It took 14 years, but now we have an answer. It was March 2003, the invasion of Iraq was underway, and Major General David Petraeus was in command of the 101st Airborne Division heading for the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. Rick Atkinson, Washington Post journalist and military historian, was accompanying him. Six days into a lightning... Read More

Burning Raqqa

The U.S. War Against Civilians in Syria

Laura Gottesdiener • July 27, 2017

• 3,700 Words • Leave a Comment

It was midday on Sunday, May 7th, when the U.S.-led coalition warplanes again began bombing the neighborhood of Wassim Abdo’s family. They lived in Tabqa, a small city on the banks of the Euphrates River in northern Syria. Then occupied by the Islamic State (ISIS, also known as Daesh), Tabqa was also under siege by... Read More

Laura Gottesdiener: the Wrath of the U.S. Along the Euphrates River

Tom Engelhardt • July 27, 2017

• 500 Words • Leave a Comment

You would barely know it, living in this country, but the essence of modern warfare is what our military tends to call “collateral damage”: the killing or wounding of civilians, not combatants. The Global War on Terror -- more than 15 years later a no-name set of conflicts still spreading across the Greater Middle East,... Read More

Dilip Hiro: Two Impulsive Leaders Fan the Global Flames

Tom Engelhardt • July 6, 2017

• 500 Words • Leave a Comment

Every now and then something lodges in your memory and seems to haunt you forever. In my case, it was a comment Newsweek attributed to an unnamed senior British official “close to the Bush team” before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad,” he said. “Real men want to go... Read More

Karen Greenberg: A Planet's Future Threatened by the Fate of Its Children

Tom Engelhardt • June 15, 2017

• 700 Words • 1 Comment • Reply

In her first interview since President Obama commuted her 35-year sentence and she was released from the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Chelsea Manning explained to Nightline co-anchor Juju Chang why she leaked documents about America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We're getting all this information from all these different sources and it's just... Read More

Where Have All the Children Gone?

The Age of Grief

Karen Greenberg • June 15, 2017

• 2,200 Words • 1 Comment • Reply

“This is a war against normal life.” So said CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward, describing the situation at this moment in Syria, as well as in other parts of the Middle East. It was one of those remarks that should wake you up to the fact that the regions the United States has, since September 2001,... Read More

Comey and Mueller: Russiagate’s Mythical Heroes

Coleen Rowley • June 8, 2017

• 1,300 Words • 50 Comments • Reply

Mainstream commentators display amnesia when they describe former FBI Directors Robert Mueller and James Comey as stellar and credible law enforcement figures. Perhaps if they included J. Edgar Hoover, such fulsome praise could be put into proper perspective. Although these Hoover successors, now occupying center stage in the investigation of President Trump, have been hailed... Read More

The Government Has Known Since 2003 That the Failed ‘war on Terror’ Could Cause an Attack Like the One in Manchester

Patrick Cockburn • May 27, 2017

• 1,200 Words • 2 Comments • Reply

Jeremy Corbyn is correct in saying that there is a strong connection between the terrorist threat in Britain and the wars Britain has fought abroad, notably in Iraq and Libya. The fact that these wars motivate and strengthen terrorist organisations like al-Qaeda and Isis has long been obvious to British intelligence officers, though strenuously denied... Read More

American Anniversaries from Hell

What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

Tom Engelhardt • March 23, 2017

• 2,000 Words • Leave a Comment

It’s true that, last week, few in Congress cared to discuss, no less memorialize, the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Nonetheless, two anniversaries of American disasters and crimes abroad -- the “mission accomplished” debacle of 2003 and the 45th anniversary of the My Lai massacre -- were at least noted in passing in... Read More

President Blowback

How the Invasion of Iraq Came Home

Tom Engelhardt • March 16, 2017

• 2,600 Words • 10 Comments • Reply

If you want to know where President Donald Trump came from, if you want to trace the long winding road (or escalator) that brought him to the Oval Office, don’t look to reality TV or Twitter or even the rise of the alt-right. Look someplace far more improbable: Iraq. Donald Trump may have been born... Read More

Danny Sjursen: Surging to Failure

Tom Engelhardt • March 9, 2017

• 600 Words • 1 Comment • Reply

Every now and then, I think back to the millions of people who turned out in this country and across the globe in early 2003 to protest the coming invasion of Iraq. Until the recent Women’s March against Donald Trump, that may have been the largest set of demonstrations in American history or, at the... Read More

Our Age of Folly

Paul Craig Roberts • March 9, 2017

• 1,700 Words • 8 Comments

The United States has been growing progressively insane for a long time. For my generation, the realization descended upon us in the 1960s when the military/security complex convinced Americans that if we permitted Vietnamese nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh to unify Vietnam, the dominoes would fall until the Communist World Revolution had us in its... Read More

The Surge Delusion

An Iraq War Anniversary to Forget

Danny Sjursen • March 9, 2017

• 3,000 Words • 3 Comments • Reply

The other day, I found myself flipping through old photos from my time in Iraq. One in particular from October 2006 stood out. I see my 23-year-old self, along with my platoon. We’re still at Camp Buerhing in Kuwait, posing in front of our squadron logo splashed across a huge concrete barrier. It was a... Read More

How We Got Here

The Misuse of American Military Power and The Middle East in Chaos

Danny Sjursen • February 21, 2017

• 3,800 Words • 4 Comments • Reply

The United States has already lost -- its war for the Middle East, that is. Having taken my own crack at combat soldiering in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that couldn’t be clearer to me. Unfortunately, it’s evidently still not clear in Washington. Bush’s neo-imperial triumphalism failed. Obama’s quiet shift to drones, Special Forces, and clandestine... Read More

Fake News and War Party Lies

Pat Buchanan • December 2, 2016

• 900 Words • 47 Comments • Reply

"I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler's government -- by the planners of the New World Order," FDR told the nation in his Navy Day radio address of Oct. 27, 1941. "It is a map of South America as Hitler proposes to reorganize it. The geographical experts of Berlin,... Read More

Trump Ponders Petraeus for Senior Job

Ray McGovern • December 1, 2016

• 3,200 Words • 62 Comments • Reply

The news that President-elect Donald Trump called in disgraced retired Gen. David Petraeus for a job interview as possible Secretary of State tests whether Trump’s experience in hosting “The Celebrity Apprentice” honed his skills for spotting an incompetent phony or not. Does Trump need more data than the continuing bedlam in Iraq and Afghanistan to... Read More

The Legacy of United States Interventionism

What Iraq teaches us

Philip Giraldi • October 11, 2016

• 1,600 Words • 168 Comments • Reply

The following in an edited version of a paper I presented two weeks ago in a debate on the topic “When should the US use force abroad and what lessons should we learn from America’s use of force in Iraq and how should those lessons inform decisions on future military missions abroad?” There are really... Read More

Khizr Khan and the Triumph of Democratic Militarism

Ted Rall • August 2, 2016

• 1,000 Words • 72 Comments • Reply

Against the wishes of her New York Democratic constituents, Hillary Clinton voted with Senate Republicans to invade Iraq. (It was a pivotal vote. Without Democratic support, George W. Bush’s request for this war of aggression would have failed.) Humayun Khan, 27, was an army captain who got killed during that invasion. Eight years later, the... Read More

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"Iraq War" Items Across Entire Archive

Category Classics

China's Rise, America's Fall

Which superpower is more threatened by its “extractive elites”?

Ron Unz

• 431 Comments • Reply

9/11 Was an Israeli Job

How America was neoconned into World War IV

Laurent Guyénot

• 390 Comments • Reply

John McCain and the POW Cover-Up