From the category archives:

Iraq

Packer liketh not the internet

by Philip Weiss16 November 2009

I caught a little of authors Chris Hedges and George Packer at the Miami Book Fair on C-Span yesterday.
Hedges is inspiring, an American transcendentalist for our age. His father was a minister and he has the bearing of a blue-eyed religious political savant. I disagree with most of what he says on analytic grounds–the America [...]

4 comments

If it was a war for oil, the US lost

by Jeffrey Blankfort15 November 2009

Although the Bush administration denied it, the conventional wisdom on the part of the anti-war movement was that the war on Iraq was launched in order for the US to take over Saddam’s oil supplies which would give Washington an even more dominant position in the region. That there was no concrete evidence that the [...]

142 comments

All those Muslim governments are corrupt

by Philip Weiss12 November 2009

Peter Galbraith, former U.S. ambassador and adviser to leading Democrats, Biden and Kerry, describes himself as an "unpaid ambassador of the Kurds" and helped broker the deal to get Kurds into the Iraqi government. Now he stands to gain more than $100 million from Kurdish oil profits.The Times catches up with what Bruce Wolman says [...]

12 comments

McCain was captured by ‘Jewish neocons’

by Philip Weiss12 November 2009

The Washington Post ticks me off. Here it makes a foodfight out of a serious battle between Joe Klein and the New Republic’s James Kirchick during a panel at the Jewish Federations General Assembly this week. You’d think the fact that Joe Klein agrees with Walt and Mearsheimer that neoconservatives put Israel first in their [...]

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J Street and the battle for the Jewish soul, or wallet, or status

by Philip Weiss29 October 2009

Want to know what it felt like at J Street? Here’s one of the best moments I witnessed at the conference. (For the whole panel it’s from, watch it here.) My video begins with a beautiful question from a J Street conferee who says in some distress what so many people in J Street’s rank [...]

37 comments

Whatever happened to the war for oil?

by Jeffrey Blankfort22 October 2009

Critics of the Iraq war who claimed that it was a war for Israel, engineered by the neocons in the Bush administration and promoted by their allies in the media, were routinely disparaged by the well known pundits of the US Left and the leading organizations of the anti-war movement that insisted that [...]

99 comments

Leslie Gelb admits he supported Iraq war for the sake of his career

by Philip Weiss12 October 2009

God bless Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations (and Glenn Greenwald for spotting his statement) for this wonderful confession in Foreign Policy:

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misunderstanding the ‘white left’ and PEP

by Jack Ross23 September 2009

Further argument about PEP, Progressive Except Palestine, the label used against liberals for their support for freedom in all places but Palestine. Jack Ross first, then Weiss, then Ross gets the last word.

First, I don’t mean to go in for gratuitous UN bashing, only understanding it honestly.  Most "isolationists" of the time actually supported the [...]

12 comments

‘NYT’ left out Kristol’s Israel-firstism (and what about those neocon women!)

by Philip Weiss22 September 2009

The Times ran a long flattering obit of the late Irving Kristol by a neolib, Barry Gewen. Kristol lived a long life, 89 years. Good for him. I hear he was charming, too. Here is something Gewen left out that I think is important, about Kristol’s transformation in the 70s. In 1973, as I’ve reported [...]

44 comments

What would I.F. Stone have said about neocons’ Israel-first agenda?

by Philip Weiss26 August 2009
Thumbnail image for What would I.F. Stone have said about neocons’ Israel-first agenda?

I’m reading DD Guttenplan’s meticulously-researched biography of journalist IF Stone out of interest in Jewish identity. Stone came out of Jewish culture; his worldview was that of the outsider critic, fearful of power, aligned with other Jewish intellectuals. Yet he also drew on an American populist tradition, [...]

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Harvard prof blasts neocons’ ‘extremist counterculture’

by Philip Weiss13 August 2009
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Author Rory Stewart is a star at Harvard’s Kennedy School, mentioned as a future Foreign Secretary in the UK. Here he is in the Kashmir Observer, putting the lie to the George Packer-Charles Ferguson claim that the Iraq invasion, which Stewart supported, would have succeeded if we just hadn’t disbanded the army.

My instinct is that [...]

12 comments

The new Jewish realist conventional wisdom, on dual loyalty and Iran

by Philip Weiss8 August 2009
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Let’s talk about the dual loyalty that support for Israel inevitably engenders in the bosom of an American Jew. This is the unspoken essence of Robert Kaplan’s statement in the Atlantic, that the US and Israel do not have identical interests with respect to Iran:

Israel’s supporters [this is a euphemism for American Jews in the [...]

4 comments

Matthews tiptoes past the neocons’ tribal politics yet again

by Philip Weiss5 August 2009
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Tonight Chris Matthews did a segment about a townhouse on Capitol Hill where many Christian congressmen live, conduct Bible studies, and then go out and make righteous laws. Journalist Jeff Sharlet was on to talk about his book on the group, The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, and he posited [...]

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Did Gaza ‘work’? (and so what if it did?)

by Philip Weiss3 August 2009
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Ruins of Science Building at Islamic University, Gaza, formerly containing only gene sequencing equipment in the Strip
Last week neocon Michael Totten said at Commentary that he Gaza slaughter worked. It made Palestinian culture change.

Hamas ramped up its own rocket war until fed-up Israelis gave Gaza the South Lebanon treatment this past December and January. Hamas [...]

9 comments

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