What is “Why is the United States legally obligated to provide Israel with new military hardware whenever that nation feels a bit insecure?”
Yes, it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law! The Naval Vessel Transfer Act of 2008 amended the Arms Control Export Act of 1976 to require that any U.S. arms transactions in [...]

I can’t believe anyone believes the CIA when it says that Iran was working toward nuclear weapons for a while but now they’re not. This sounds like they got snookered on the front end and now they’re covering for it. “Oh, shit. They weren’t working on a bomb. What do we do now?” I wonder [...]

Blaming our country’s woes exclusively on the people who have most directly wrought them—Bush, Cheney, torture maven David Addington et al—becomes increasingly difficult in the face of the refusal by Democratic party leaders to confer accountability, let alone make any attempt to visit some sort of necessarily inadequate justice, upon the administration.
The party’s presidential [...]

The more we learn of the Bush administration’s proposed long-term security agreement with Iraq, the less sensible Iraqi acquiescence seems. In essence, it codifies the administration’s desire to turn Iraq into the world’s least seaworthy but largest, by many orders of magnitude, aircraft carrier. Under the Bush plan, the US would have massive, permanent basing [...]

Continuing on my quest to close enough browser tabs for my computer to regain some self-respect and nimbleness, here’s the second installment of stuff I either meant to write but never quite did, or did write but for some reason couldn’t bring myself to part with the web page I used for material. See here [...]

When last we noted the Bush administration’s appalling record on national security, a few items fell through the cracks. The story was on the economic resurgence of opium in Afghanistan following the US invasion that drove the Taliban out of power and ended the group’s short-lived but astonishingly effective ban on opium poppy cultivation. Since [...]

I haven’t paid much attention to Christopher Hitchens of late because, as prominent born-again wingnuts go, his value to the forces of darkness is much diminished. His latest Slate missive, though, in which he takes after the CIA for destroying the video of interrogations involving the torture of terrorism suspects and participating in the recently [...]

This is shaping up to be the strangest and most brutal presidential election any of us are likely to see. That’s with luck: there may be worse ones down the line, but if so we’ll all be too busy gathering roots and berries to care.
It’s hard to see any Republican candidate coming out of [...]

Yes, I think that yesterday we saw a potent manifestation of the contagion of our era, a mode of how to comport oneself with others that is modeled (MBA-style?) by Mr. Insolence-in-Chief himself. It had the stamp of a particularly neoconnish brand of disdainful arrogance. And it wasn’t coming from the upstart of [...]

Okay, too much silence around here might not be as spooky as too much silence about Iran, but enough is enough.
In the latest follow-up to all the stage-setting documented already below here in Montfort’s post on the administration’s warmongering toward Iran from about three weeks back, this morning’s salon.com has a few [...]

The latest signal came from George Bush, warning of a “nuclear holocaust” if Iran gets The Bomb (despite an IAEA report that Iran isn’t as much of a threat as Bush claims). There can’t be any more provocative words than “nuclear holocaust” to justify the purported prevention of one. Nor can there be any doubt [...]

The Washington Post’s lead editorial today asserts that Tehran is supplying “sophisticated bombs” that are killing American soldiers in Iraq.
After President Bush made the same accusation last year, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace said, on March 14, 2006, that he had no proof that the Iranian government was responsible for such attacks.
This year, on [...]

Hardly a day goes by when we don’t hear that Iran is supplying sophisticated IEDs — improvised explosive devices — to Iraqi insurgents. No one doubts that the Iranian government is perfectly willing to do whatever they think will advance their interests, including arming and otherwise supporting their allies in Iraq, but the story [...]

U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice appears to have reverted to her Cold War roots with her announcement last month, in tandem with fellow cold warrior and US defense secretary Robert Gates, that the US intends to sell some $20 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab [...]

Susie Madrak at Surburban Guerrilla neatly illustrates the educational clout blogs bring to the masses when she links to this post at Boing-Boing, which explains the genesis of the Bush-Cheney policy toward Iran. The vice-president, under the bedsheet, with a flashlight …

The Guardian published a story on Sunday detailing concern about Afghanistan among Britain’s military, [...]

Michael Chertoff says you should be afraid, very afraid. He’s right. Why? Because he’s our Homeland Security chief and he’s deranged.
A little less than a month ago, former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a scathing Washington Post op-ed piece taking the Bush administration to task for parlaying the genuine national distress immediately following 911 [...]

If at first you don’t succeed, lie, lie again…

The Bush administration has been pushing the envelope on arrogance and ignorance for more than six years now. One would think that their capacity for doing worse tomorrow than they did yesterday, and getting away with it, would have sunk in by now at least with the people who have been ringing the alarm bells [...]

The U.S. military’s demonstration of “Iranian” weapons in Iraq fails to convince…

Why is it that politicians and pundits continue to behave as though they can exert any influence upon George Bush and Dick Cheney? The pair have explicitly stated on any number of occasions that they are not only unwilling to take advice from anyone other than themselves, but that they regard ignoring Congressional strictures, let [...]

There’s a revealing tidbit in a “Sporting Scene” article in the current New Yorker that sheds some light on today’s front page Washington Post story about how the Bush administration wants American troops to start killing Iranians in Iraq…

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino came up with the quote of the young year when she told CNN that the Bush administration, in contrast to Iran, “are not the ones being meddlesome and troublesome in Iraq.” No doubt she’s sincere, because her head would explode if she weren’t, but this seems a good time to [...]

US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice granted an interview to three somewhat incurious New York Times reporters on Friday. During the course of it she implied that Iraq would be unsalvageable if Baghdad wasn’t under control by sometime this summer and, in bits and pieces, identified concerns about Iran that echo, sometimes almost verbatim, those [...]

By way of explaining how we arrived at the current state of affairs in Iraq, Tony Snow recently trotted out Tommy Franks’ remark about the invasion of Iraq having proved a “catastrophic success.” Bush’s New Way Forward in Iraq seems calculated, deliberately or not, to arrive at the inverse — a successful catastrophe [...]

“There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission … sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. “
It’s hard to choose exactly the right television reference for the administration’s New Way Forward — a very Soviet-sounding designation — in Iraq. [...]

From the Israeli perspective, the situation is dire. Sharon must have seen the writings on his wall and perhaps the vision finally felled the big man: the polyglot Zionist vision that found a reality in Israel is unsustainable in its present form and function. Something has to give, but all options appear to be open, including accelerating the pace of the creeping genocide in Palestine. Or perhaps Iran truly represents the next step from Iraq.

Michael Ledeen has the solution for Iraq: get US troops out of their latte shops and yuppie gyms, plus regime change in Iran and Syria. “[W]e may not need new troops,” he says, “just better use of the ones already there.”
The way we win in Iraq, according to Ledeen, is by convincing the Iraqis [...]

President Bush and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice have both been drawing hopeful analogies between Iraq and Vietnam. What Vietnam teaches us, they say, is that over time old enemies can reconcile and a war-torn nation can chart a happy future. This is both true and, in context, unbelievably bizarre.
To review: the US spent 15 [...]

George Bush has nominated yet another Iran-Contra figure, former CIA director Robert Gates, to replace Donald Rumsfeld. Gates served as deputy CIA director under William”Wild Bill” Casey for Ronald Reagan and was chosen in 1991 by the elder Bush to head the CIA. Although Iran-Contra prosecutors found Gates less than credible regarding his involvement in [...]

Happy neoconservatives are hard to find of late. Richard Perle and David Frum accuse the Bush administration of botching their program. Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and one of the most eloquent proponents of neoconservatism, has bailed on the movement altogether. But there is at least one optimist among the crowd: American [...]

The hardest part of writing about the Bush administration’s record on national security is knowing where to begin. The second hardest part is knowing where to end; it’s simplest just to let physical exhaustion be one’s guide. Today, we’re going to begin with the draft.
Very few people think the Bush administration will institute a military [...]

The Bush administration are pushing hard to portray the War on Terra® as an existential struggle greater than World War II. This isn’t the first time WWII analogies have cropped up. When the insurgency in Iraq began to flourish, Condoleezza Rice compared their activities to those of the fabled — literally — Werwolf resistance in [...]

This is a repost for technical purposes of earlier commentary on the new Iran initiative.

Foreign leaders make a fuss. The president makes a face. The secretary of state makes a complicated color-coded calendar. A new policy is born. If White House aides speaking anonymously to the New York Times are to be believed, that’s how the US came to decide talks with Iran, or at least the potential for talks with Iran, might not be such a bad idea.

Slate columnist Christopher Hitchens on Tuesday called University of Michigan professor Juan Cole an apologist for Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The basis of the claim was that Cole, in an email to a colleague, said that a phrase in a recent Ahmadinejad speech had been widely mistranslated as a call to wipe Israel off the map.

Chris Hitchens launched one of his patented “Sherman’s stagger to the sea” attacks on University of Michigan professor and sometime pundit Juan Cole yesterday. In it, he accuses Cole of poor scholarship, inflated academic credentials and being an apologist for the Iranian regime and in particular, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

US intelligence czar John Negroponte told an audience at the National Press Club Thursday that Iran is years away from obtaining nuclear weapons. Tuesday, US military czar Donald Rumsfeld told right-wing talk show host Laura Ingraham that he doesn’t trust US intelligence estimates on Iran’s nuclear program. Today, US presidency czar George W. Bush skirted the issue entirely to remind Americans once again that we invaded Iraq and exposed that country’s citizens to horrific violence from terrorists and others “so we do not have to face them here at home.”

The current staff moves of McClellan and Rove are a fig leaf for an increasingly concerned Republican majority facing re-election and a desperate attempt the change the subject away form Rumsfeld’s fate. It’s not sufficient to the task and the disorder won’t be sufficient to placate Americans or focus the attention off of the [...]

In March of 2005, BTC News succeeded in gaining access to the White House press room for Eric Brewer, who instantly became our senior White House correspondent. Since then, he has attended perhaps two dozen briefings and asked some of the best questions posed by anyone in the room, knocking White House press secretary Scott McClellan off balance and off message on a few occasions, and getting some actually revealing answers on a few others.

Although several of the retired US generals criticizing defense secretary Don Rumsfeld have been doing so for some time, a question arises with respect to the others: “Why now?”

Juan Cole becomes the first Bush administration commentator to wonder if the president will revive the right of powerful men to deflower maidens. It’s a logical progression but perhaps a bit premature, as it were. However, it appears as if at least one member, as it were, of the executive branch may have been thinking along those lines.

Yesterday, I suggested that a bombing campaign against Iran would satisfy the Bush administration need for vindication of their foreign policy delusions without requiring another messy ground war and occupation. Today, Agence France Presse reports that the April 17 issue of The New Yorker magazine carries a story on US plans for a massive bombing campaign against Iran, possibly including the use of nuclear weapons.

(Update corrects spelling of “Hersh”)

Yesterday, I suggested that a bombing campaign against Iran would satisfy the Bush administration need for vindication of their foreign policy delusions without requiring another messy ground war and occupation. Today, Agence France Presse reports that the April 17 issue of The New Yorker magazine carries a story on US plans for a massive bombing campaign against Iran, possibly including the use of nuclear weapons.

The Agonist’s Sean-Paul Kelley has responded to concerns about a US attack on Iran expressed here and by Steve Clemons at The Washington Note. Sean-Paul says that the concerns are overblown and that the rhetorical escalation from both sides is simply posturing in service of staking out their respective negotiating positions.

I hit enlistment age in the early 1970’s. If the Pentagon keeps extending its recruiting reach into middle age — it’s at 40 and rising — I may hit it again in the not too distant future. Absent some dramatic changes, it seems likely to me that we’ll see the return of the draft before the end of Bush’s term, assuming there is an end.

is involved in this administration’s Middle East adventures.
One result of the Iran-contra scandal was a decision by the C.I.A. that it could not trust Mr. Ghorbanifar. A 1987 Congressional report on Iran-contra said that after Mr. Ghorbanifar failed C.I.A.-administered polygraph examinations, the agency issued a rare “Fabricator Notice,” warning that he “should be regarded as [...]