Homeland security: the lethal illusion

In defense of the indefensible.
If you go through life without making any enemies you’re doing something wrong. If you go through life making a lot of enemies you’re doing something worse.
For a long time, the US contented itself with one enemy, the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the CIA conducted covert operations such as rigging elections for [...]

Lingering bad aftertaste from Clinton’s Iran vote

Though it’s been almost three weeks, Hillary Clinton’s vote for the Kyl-Lieberman amendment still sours the stomach. In Sunday’s New York Times Week in Review, Helene Cooper terms it “more hawkish than even most of the Bush administration has been willing to venture so far.” The bill, of course, branded Iran’s 125,000-member Revolutionary Guard Corps [...]

Medals of honor, wars of no honor (part 2)

(Part 1 is here.)
Neglecting decorated members of the military who served in Iraq might strike a progressive or pacifist as a sign of opposition to our presence there. But the national indifference with which we treat Congressional Medal of Honor winners in general is actually a sign of a deep-seated malaise that, on the contrary, [...]

Post, Times condemn Peace Prize winner for making peace

Life as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate — especially if you’re not resting on your laurels — is not as awash in dignity and respect as you might think. Myanmar democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi (1991) has spent 10 of the last 17 years under house arrest. Jimmy Carter’s (2002) name has been dragged [...]

Medals of honor, wars of no honor

Part One of Two
(pictured to right: Audie Murphy)
In memory of Robert Wellen, who died September 23, 2007 — another World War II vet gone.
Neglecting decorated members of the military who served in Iraq might strike a progressive or pacifist as a sign of opposition to our presence there. But the national indifference with which we [...]

Mickey Mouse will have his revenge on Tehran

So the Senate caved into Boltin‘ Joe Lieberman’s request to attack Iran at will with a bipartisan vote of 76-22. Oh, I know, it’s non-binding and not an actual declaration of war, and they amended some of the language. But you should know how these things go by now. This has given [...]

A child’s guide to Iran-US relations

There’s no denying that Iran is an unsavory state. It funds Hezbollah. Its record on women’s rights is abysmal. It hangs citizens — including gay teens — in public. Also, new evidence suggests that not Libya, but Iran, was responsible for the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie.
But, contrary to the administration’s claims, [...]

The administration is coming at Iran from every direction at once

Nuclear weapons is just one among many reasons the US seeks to attack Iran.
Some of the threatening actions the administration is taking against Iran have been well-covered by the media. These include calling for another round of UN sanctions on Iran for continuing to enrich — at however slow a pace — uranium, charging Iran [...]

A South African’s experience of September 11th, 2001

I had been running the Western Cape branch of Business Beat, a Deloitte-sponsored business development initiative, for two years.  In 2001 it was decided that I needed a board.
The board’s first meeting was early afternoon on 11 September 2001.  The senior partner of Deloitte had been talking generally and introducing us to the expected oversight [...]

ElBaradei continues to roll up Bush’s rollout to war

Iran continues to make it difficult for the administration to mount an attack against it. Last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s el jefe Mohamed ElBaradei handed in his report on Iran’s nuclear program. Reuters summed up:
“Iran’s uranium enrichment program is operating well below capacity and is far from producing nuclear fuel in significant amounts.”
In [...]

VerseDay: two poems about war

“Arms and the man, I sing…” opens Virgil’s Aeneid.
This poem creates the model of the heroic figure using his battle skills to escape destruction, woo lovelies, and ultimately, found an Empire (well, found the blood line who later found an empire). In this heroic world, war is not about horror, blood, and loss - instead [...]

Olbermann: Bush caught in lie, playing the troops….

Will Iran’s good nuclear report card slow the march to war?

Even though Mohamed ElBaradei is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, he’s not resting on his laurels. Continuing in his role as the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, he handed in his report on Iran’s nuclear program to the IAEA’s Board of Governors yesterday.
Reuters got a hold of a copy and summed it up: [...]

Iran may be a once and future threat, but al-Qaeda is a clear and present danger

Speaking before an American Legion group yesterday, President Bush described Iran as the “world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.” Its pursuit of technology which could lead to nuclear weapons, he added, threatens to put the region “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.”
To most Americans this is just bluster. They can’t imagine that the administration, [...]

Scroguely Works: Five Moral Pieces

Five Moral Pieces by Umberto Eco, first published 2001, 128 pages, ISBN 978-0156013253
“The modern world looks at war through eyes different from those with which it looked at the problem early in the twentieth century, and if someone were to talk today of the beauty of war as the only form of world hygiene, he [...]