It was fitting that writer and critic Alexander Cockburn’s funeral should include a passage from Milton. For more than 50 years, Cockburn combined polished, erudite writing with fierce political insight in the tradition of the great 17th-century English polemicist. Cockburn died July 20th in Germany at age 71, following a two-year struggle with cancer. He was buried July 28th in his beloved Petrolia, California.
As with Iraq, Syria’s link to its past as the cradle of civilization is threatened.
Ploughshares shames nuke plant security.
Some in Japan still covet nuclear weapons.
Down the road only a few generations, the millennium of Magna Carta, one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights, will arrive. Whether it will be celebrated, mourned, or ignored is not at all clear.
Mohammad ElBaradei, former International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief, used to say using the so-called “carrot and stick approach” on Iran – simultaneous use of sanctions and incentives to induce cooperation – is doomed to fail, because “Iran isn’t a donkey”. Others would go further and say that Iran is a proud civilization, and an ambitious regional power, which will not give up an iota of its nuclear ambitions, no matter how painful the price.
Cypriot investigators believe the Lebanese they suspected of planning to harm Israeli tourists was acting alone, not working for Hezbollah.
Whatever our humanitarian concerns might be, real decisions about direct military intervention will be made with little regard for Syrian civilians, Syrian civil society, or Syria’s national survival – all of which will suffer consequences that could last a generation or more. A U.S./NATO air war against Syria would likely not end like Libya’s – with no western casualties and a quick exit. Given Syria’s military, especially air capacity, it will look far more like Iraq than Libya.
A recent sentence for members of a death squad is a major step backward in Peru’s tortured quest for truth and justice in human rights violations.
Just like with base closings, taking cuts out of the hands of Congress is the only, repeat “only” way to cut waste from our trillion dollar defense/militarism spending. Reading and hearing how The Complex screams, here are a few points about the distortions and half-truths being put out by it and by Big Government Conservatives–Republican congressional leaders, Neoconservatives, Heritage Foundation, National Review, Fox TV, Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Their big government program is unending wars, imperialist foreign policy, and ever expanding Homeland Security.