A major goal of this Asia trip, said National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, is to rally allies to achieve the "complete, verifiable and permanent denuclearization of the Korean peninsula." Yet Kim Jong Un has said he will never give up his nuclear weapons. He believes the survival of his dynastic regime depends upon them.... Read More
One of the interesting side benefits, if one might call it that, of the everlasting investigation into Russiagate is the window provided on the extreme corruption of U.S. politicians and government officials. It has become evident that anyone can seemingly buy political and media support for nearly anything as long as enough money is put... Read More
President Trump’s stance on conflict in the Middle East is a mixture of bellicose threats and demonisation of opponents combined with rather more cautious and carefully calculated action or inaction on the ground. Leaders in Baghdad, Damascus, Riyadh and Tehran face the same problem as those in Tokyo and London, uncertain where the rhetoric ends... Read More
To go home, I had to take a taxi to Saigon’s airport, fly to Hanoi, then on to Hong Kong, where during a 5 ½ hour layover I’d take a train to Central to hang out a bit, then back to the airport to fly to JFK, then hop on two trains just to get... Read More
Last Thursday, congressional Republicans unveiled their tax reform legislation. On the same day, President Trump nominated current Federal Reserve Board Governor Jerome Powell to succeed Janet Yellen as Federal Reserve chair. While the tax plan dominated the headlines, the Powell appointment will have much greater long-term impact. Federal Reserve policies affect every aspect of the... Read More
The phrase “angry white males” has been around awhile, but Donald Trump’s election has pushed it to the forefront. Indeed, at least for some, it is central to Trump’s election. As Steven M. Gillon put it in The Washington Post, “Donald Trump has tapped into this anger and manipulated it to his political advantage. The... Read More
On September 1, 1970, soon after President Nixon expanded the Vietnam War by invading neighboring Cambodia, Democratic Senator George McGovern, a decorated World War II veteran and future presidential candidate, took to the floor of the Senate and said, “Every Senator [here] is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave... This... Read More
Seventeen days after the Twin Towers fell in an apocalyptic mushroom cloud of smoke and ash, Congress passed with a single dissenting vote an “Authorization for Use of Military Force,” or AUMF, stating: Sixteen years later, in the wake of four American military deaths at the hands of an ISIS-affiliated terror group in the lawless... Read More
So President Trump’s chief of staff, former Marine Corps General John Kelly, praised Confederate General Robert E. Lee on Fox News: “Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man who gave up his country to fight for his state.” Those are accurate statements, so far as I know. They wouldn’t have been... Read More
The British Empire, which at the end of the 19th century ruled one quarter of the earth’s land surface, is long gone. But its robust successor and heir, the United States, has set about enlarging it. As I sought to explain in my last book ‘American Raj – How the US Rules the Muslim World,’... Read More
On the campaign trail coming up to the 2012 election, Republican hopeful Herman Cain confessed to not knowing who was the president of, quote, “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan.” I had a soft spot for Cain, although in retrospect it was probably just solidarity with a fellow 1945 baby and math geek, and desperation at the awfulness of the... Read More
"Meet you at Peace Cross." In northwest D.C. in the 1950s, that was an often-heard comment among high schoolers headed for Ocean City. The Peace Cross, in Bladensburg, Maryland, was a 40-feet concrete memorial to the 49 sons of Prince George's County lost in the Great War. Paid for by county families and the American... Read More
(Lumpen Capitalism refers to an economic system in which the financial and military sector exploits the state treasury and productive economy for the 1% of the population.) Introduction US journalists and commentators, politicians and Sinologists spend considerable time and space speculating on the personality of China’s President Xi Jinping and his appointments to the leading... Read More
On November 30, 2016, presumably right at the stroke of midnight, Google Inc. unpersoned CounterPunch. They didn’t send out a press release or anything. They just quietly removed it from the Google News aggregator. Not very many people noticed. This happened just as the “fake news” hysteria was being unleashed by the corporate media, right... Read More
The insouciant American electorate is so inattentive that it routinely elects enemies of civil liberty to represent the public in Congress. Last Wednesday Rep. Adam Schiff (D, CA), Rep. Trey Gowdy ( R, SC), Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D, CA), Sen. Mark Warner (D, VA), Rep. Jackie Speier (D, CA), Sen. Tom Cotton (R , AR... Read More
"Do you think his assessment is accurate?" was the subject line of an email I got from a good friend recently. The email referred to the article by Paul Craig Roberts "One Day Tomorrow Won't Arrive" which claimed that "the US military is now second class compared to the Russian military". The article then went... Read More
Dr. George Szamuely, a distinguished member of the Global Policy Institute of London Metropolitan University, is a British citizen and not a partisan of US politics. He has carefully investigated the so-called Russian dossier and reports that it was entirely the work of the Hillary Democrats. This fact was known at the beginning both to... Read More
CNN’s Jake Tapper wanted to know if there was anything that could have prevented the murderous rampage, in Manhattan, by a Muslim immigrant, who had been recruited to live in America for no good reason. Once upon a time that was known as a rhetorical question. To ask the question would have been to answer... Read More
[The following passages are excerpted from Hunter of Stories, the last book by Eduardo Galeano, who died in 2015. Thanks for its use go to his literary agent, Susan Bergholz, and Nation Books, which is publishing it next week.] Free By day, the sun guides them. By night, the stars. Paying no fare, they travel... Read More
I’m 73, which means that saying goodbye for the last time is increasingly a part of my life. Today, with the deepest regret, I’m bidding a final farewell at TomDispatch to one of the more remarkable writers I’ve known, Eduardo Galeano. I initially got involved with him in the early 1980s. I was a young... Read More
“Fake facts!” exclaimed a senior Iraqi official in exasperation as he pointed to photographs online allegedly showing the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in Kirkuk, orchestrating the Iraqi government retaking of the city last month. He said that in reality the picture, tweeted by a Kurdish leader as evidence of Iranian hegemony, dates from 2014. The... Read More
Earlier this week, the government revealed that a grand jury sitting in Washington, D.C., indicted a former Trump presidential campaign chairman and his former deputy and business partner for numerous felonies. Both were accused of working as foreign agents and failing to report that status to the federal government, using shell corporations to launder income... Read More
The Atlantic waters off Snead’s Ferry in North Carolina are shallow, maybe 125 feet to the continental shelf. Several wrecks lie on the bottom, mostly in advanced stages of disintegration, sunk by U-boats in the early years of the war. I know them well as for years I was a member of Capital Divers, out... Read More
A UK charity, The Sutton Trust, has urged universities to take in students with grades which are two levels below the usual entry requirements, arguing that some students are capable of doing well at university, but have low scholastic attainments because of environmental circumstances: being poor, being at a bad school, and having to look... Read More
Information has reached me from Italy, Germany and the UK that foreign-funded NGOs in Russia are collecting Russian DNA samples from all over Russia for the US Government. I have found English language verifiation of these reports. What is the reason for the US government’s interest in studying Russian DNA samples? What immediately leaps to... Read More
My title is an homage to Richard Perle et al’s famous 1996 paper outlining Israel’s geopolitical needs in the Middle East, which does indeed seem subsequently to have largely implemented by the U.S.) It’s telling that President Trump is under siege because of the alleged misdeeds, committed years earlier, of Paul Manafort, briefly Trump campaign... Read More
Livin’ In A World Of Fools. As I prepare to post this diary, on the morning of November 1st, the news is dominated by a terrorist attack in New York City. A crazy Muslim, admitted for settlement in the U.S.A. under the craziest of our crazy immigration laws, murdered eight people using a rented truck.... Read More
The defeat of the Kurds in Kirkuk is devastatingly complete. “We used to be in control here and now we are not,” says Aso Mamand, the Kurdish leader in the city, summing up the situation in a helpless and embittered tone as he describes the fall of Kirkuk and the nearby oilfields to the Iraqi... Read More
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is triumphant as he describes his country’s security forces driving out Isis from its last strongholds in western Iraq. “Our advances have been fantastic,” he said in an interview with The Independent in Baghdad. “We are clearing the deserts of them right up to the border with Syria.” Isis is... Read More
Most Americans have no idea of just how powerful Israeli and Jewish interests are. Two recent stories out of Kansas and Texas illustrate exactly how supporters of Israel in the United States are ready, willing and able to subvert the existing constitutional and legal protections that uphold the right to fair and impartial treatment for... Read More
Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia, was constructed during the years 1765 and 1773. It was designed by James Wren, a relative of Sir Christopher Wren, the most famous English architect. The colonial era, pre-Revolutionary War church, is a national historic landmark. It was my church when I lived in Old Town Alexandria, a colonial settlement... Read More
It was a 200-mile journey from Saigon to Dak Lak, a highlands province that saw much fighting during the Vietnam War. Just north of Saigon, I passed quite a few grand villas, with two dog statues on gate columns, though some owners outdid their neighbors by having lions instead. The further north I went, the... Read More
Honestly, if there’s an afterlife, then the soul of Osama bin Laden, whose body was consigned to the waves by the U.S. Navy back in 2011, must be swimming happily with the dolphins and sharks. At the cost of the sort of spare change that Donald Trump recently offered aides and former campaign officials for... Read More
Well over a year after the FBI began investigating "collusion" between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has brought in his first major indictment. Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort has been charged with a series of crimes dating back years, though none is tied directly to President Donald Trump or 2016.... Read More
I recently got to meet social psychologist Lee Jussim [Email him] of Rutgers University. Back in 2001 I had reviewed a book Dr. Jussim had written in collaboration with two other scholars, book title Stereotype Accuracy: Toward Appreciating Group Differences. My review was titled “Stereotypes Aren’t So Bad,” which is more or less the message... Read More
Does anyone in the Trump Administration have a clue about our Syria policy? In March, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson appeared to be finally pulling back from President Obama’s disastrous “Assad must go” position that has done nothing but prolong the misery in Syria. At the time, Tillerson said, the "longer-term status of President Assad... Read More
As the presstitute media has no allegiance to truth, one has to wonder if we can even believe obituaries. For what it is worth, perhaps nothing, the presstitutes report that three US aircraft carrier battle groups are off North Korea or on the way there. What for? Why are the morons in Washington following the... Read More
“They are very concerned about their adversary next door,” said General Raymond Thomas, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), at a national security conference in Aspen, Colorado, in July. “They make no bones about it.” The “they” in question were various Eastern European and Baltic nations. “Their adversary”? Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Thomas, the... Read More
Memo to Senator John McCain: Senator, the other day I noticed that, as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, you threatened to subpoena the Trump administration for information about the recent attack in Niger that killed four American soldiers. “There’s a mindset over there that they’re a unicameral government,” you said. “It was easier under... Read More
Before the idiots in Washington get us blown off of the face of the earth, the morons had better come to terms with the fact that the US military is now second class compared to the Russian military. For example, the US Navy has been made obsolete by Russia’s hypersonic maneuvering Zircon missile. For example,... Read More
China was blessed by two great leaders in the 20th century. Mao Zedong created modern China out of the wreckage of a nation devastated by war, western and Japanese imperialism, ferocious poverty and lack of national spirit. ‘Great Helmsman’ Mao made catastrophic mistakes that killed millions and was dotty at the end, but he put... Read More
Abroad, a week of elections. I counted three, each one interesting in an immigration patriot way: Czechia. On October 22, the Czechs had an election in their country, which so far as I am concerned is Czechia. This was a parliamentary election, to select members of the national legislature. The Czech head of state, the... Read More
Dear Readers, some of you are pushing me to continue with the Las Vegas shooting story while others are asking to know what to make of the release of files pertaining to President Kennedy’s assassination. I appreciate that you are interested and are unsatisfied with official explanations. My answer is that we already know, thanks... Read More
There is a growing mood of self-confidence in Baghdad which I have not seen here since I first visited Iraq in 1977. The country seemed then to be heading for a peaceful and prosperous future thanks to rising oil revenues. It only became clear several years later that Saddam Hussein was a monster of cruelty... Read More
News first broke about America's Niger misadventure on October 4. "The real news here is that the US has forces in Niger, where they're conducting covert operations," this writer tweeted out. "Hashtag America First." Official media ignored the ambush of the American Special Forces, until the story gained anti-Trump traction. No word came from John... Read More
"More is now required of us than to put down our thoughts in writing," declaimed Jeff Flake in his oration against President Trump, just before he announced he will be quitting the Senate. Though he had lifted the title of his August anti-Trump polemic, "Conscience of a Conservative," from Barry Goldwater, Jeff Flake is no... Read More
The NFL seems at a loss on how to deal with the current controversy over players (most of whom are black) knelling (“taking a knee”) during the national anthem. Every option is unappetizing. The League could, for example, order owners to bench protesters but this risks escalating the protests if non-protesters decide to show solidarity... Read More
A number of readers have turned out to be excellent research assistants. In response to my articles, “The American Left: RIP,” and the two follow-ups, “The Absurdities Mount” and “Goodbye Western Civilization,” readers have supplied the following. A white male professor of philosophy has discovered that in order to have an academic career in these... Read More
The latest big news out of the Ukraine Have you heard what the latest big news out of the Ukraine is? No? There is a mini-Maidan under way and Ukrainian nationalists seem to hope that Poroshenko will be kicked out before the end of the week. You did not know? Well, that is the real... Read More
A Truth Not Welcome: People do not like being with those different from themselves. Sometimes, briefly, we find it interesting, as in traveling, but for extended periods, no. This distaste pervades society, often unnoticed, with consequences. Instances of untogetherness: People cluster by intelligence. With high consistency, we choose mates of intelligence close to our own.... Read More