Tom Hayden: Newcomers like Senator King worry that the Obama administration has “essentially rewritten the Constitution,” giving rise to a new Imperial Presidency, buffered by an expanded security state.
Who’s Been Naughty, Who’s Been Nice?
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Tina Dupuy: John McCain makes my naughty list because he spearheaded a nontroversy campaign to preemptively take down the highly qualified Ambassador Susan Rice for Secretary of State.
Broadwell Defended Petraeus’ Village Destruction Policy
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Gareth Porter: [dc]P[/dc]aula Broadwell, whose affair with Gen. David Petraeus brought his career to a sudden end last week, had sought to help defend his decision in 2010 to allow village destruction in Afghanistan that not only violated his own previous guidance but the international laws of war.
Washington Agog as Petraeus Caught with Pants Down
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Karen Finney: Whether or not an extramarital affair should be grounds for stepping down from a high-level post, it’s a tragic and potentially dangerous reality of hyper-partisan Washington that events are so easily perverted into partisan witch hunts.
How the U.S. Quietly Lost the IED War in Afghanistan
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Gareth Porter: The bigger reality is that the U.S. troop surge could not reverse the very steep increase in IED attacks and attendant casualties that the Taliban began in 2009 and which continued through 2011.
Time to Leave Afghanistan Now
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Joseph Palermo: At about $10 billion a month, and an increasing number of American casualties in an environment more volatile than ever, the American people need to take long, close look at whether staying in Afghanistan until December 2014 is worth it.
Army Officer’s Leaked Report Rips Afghan War Success Story
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Gareth Porter: “If the public had access to the classified reports,” Davis writes, “they would see the dramatic gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and what is true behind the scenes.”
The Case for Cutting and Running
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Tina Dupuy: The first thing worth noting is this treatment of war dead is absolutely against the Geneva Convention. The second thing is we threw out the Geneva Convention when we invaded Afghanistan.
Kabul Attack Continues Taliban Control of War Narrative
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Gareth Porter: This week’s Taliban attacks on multiple targets in Kabul, including the U.S. Embassy and U.S.-NATO headquarters, are the latest and most spectacular of a long series of operations that have given the insurgents the upper hand in establishing the narrative of the war as perceived by the Afghan population.
CIA’s Push for Drone War Driven by Internal Needs
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Gareth Porter: When David Petraeus walks into the Central Intelligence Agency Tuesday, he will be taking over an organisation whose mission has changed in recent years from gathering and analysing intelligence to waging military campaigns through drone strikes in Pakistan, as well as in Yemen and Somalia.
CIA: Business As Usual Under Petraeus
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Sherwood Ross: By now substantial majorities the American public, like their European cousins, want all their troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq, yet their elected officials betray the sound instincts of their citizenry.
Despite Surge, Taliban Attacks, U.S. Casualties Soared
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Gareth Porter: Data on attacks by armed opposition forces and U.S. combat casualties since the U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan was completed last summer provide clear evidence that the surge and the increase in targeted killings by Special Operations Forces have failed to break the momentum of the Taliban.
Obama Leaves Door Open to Long-Term U.S. Afghan Combat
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Gareth Porter: Obama’s speech announcing that the 33,000 “surge” troops in Afghanistan will be withdrawn by “summer” 2012 indicates that he has given priority to the interests of the military and the Pentagon over concerns by key officials in his administration over the impact of the war’s costs on domestic socioeconomic needs.
Ninety Percent of Petraeus’s Captured “Taliban” Were Civilians
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Gareth Porter: The timing of Petraeus’s claim of Taliban fighters captured or killed, moreover, indicates that he knew that four out of five of those he was claiming as “captured Taliban rank and file” were not Taliban fighters at all.
The Search for War
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Norman Solomon: In times of war, U.S. presidents have often talked about yearning for peace. But the last decade has brought a gradual shift in the rhetorical zeitgeist while a tacit assumption has taken hold — war must go on, one way or another.
New Politics, Patriotic Capitalism
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Brent Budowsky: This is the first in a series of columns that will propose that progressive populist Democrats and conservative populist Republicans unite behind new economic policies that I will call patriotic capitalism.
Elections a Setback for Peace
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Tom Hayden: The peace bloc – activist groups, anti-war Congress members, writers and artists, here and across the NATO – can exercise a massive drag against the war-making machine through 2012 as long as the wars remain deeply unpopular.
Continued Foibles in Iraq and Afghanistan
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Ivan Eland: In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has been blinded by desired TV images of having the locals sport blue thumbs—emphasizing democratic elections versus an increased appreciation for individual rights.
Woodward’s Exposé Documents What We All Suspected About the White House
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Ivan Eland: If it weren’t for the latest salacious bureau-gossip, the book would be rather boring—and tragic. Boring, not because the issues are uninteresting or because Woodward is a bad writer, but because the author records a dysfunctional White House internal decision-making process in which meeting after meeting features the same reasonable questions about the U.S. war in Afghanistan but in which nobody ever has very good answers to them.
The Taliban: Forced Into Negotiation While Winning?
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Ivan Eland: Although David Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan, recently peddled the notion that senior Taliban chieftains had made contact with senior Afghan government officials about the possibility of starting reconciliation talks, such talk of peace in our time is likely to be hype.
Bob Woodward and All the President’s Men
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Andrew J. Bacevich: Once a serious journalist, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward now makes a very fine living as chief gossip-monger of the governing class.
The Koran Burning-Islamic Center Brouhaha
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Ivan Eland:The intense coverage of the Islamic center at Ground Zero, and a bigoted Christian minister’s threat to burn the Koran, are jolting and saddening.
Playing With God: Terry Jones, Christian Radicalism and 15 Minutes of Fame
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Anthony Samad: Religion without sincerity, reason, or spirituality is not a good look no matter who wears this evil jacket. Evil things happen when people play with God and use political motives to desecrate his word.
General McChrystal, General Petraeus, and General Confusion
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Michael Hunt: This might be a good time to put a stop to general confusion and to that end assert firm civilian control, order the brass back to the Pentagon, and above all ask if the militarization of our society is consistent with our historic values.
Converting Military Restraint in Wars into an Effective National Strategy
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Ivan Eland: The US should attempt to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world by ending meddling in places such as Yemen and Somalia and withdrawing forces rapidly from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Unanimous Conformity in the Senate
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Norman Solomon: Every living senator voted Wednesday to approve Gen. David Petraeus as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. Call it the unanimity of lemmings – except the senators and their families aren’t the ones who’ll keep plunging into the sea.
The Second Coming of Petraeus
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Ivan Eland: With the justified firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his replacement with Iraq water-walker David Petraeus, it’s as if people are hoping for a second coming of Jesus in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the replacement may be similar to the second coming of the water-walking Joe Gibbs as coach of the Washington Redskins.
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