Robert Kuttner

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, have had a good week. Ten days ago, when American supply lines appeared dangerously strung out and Iraqi resistance formidable, criticism of the administration’s Iraq war became almost respectable. In last week’s New Yorker, Seymour Hersh quoted several generals accusing Rumsfeld of having bungled the war. […]

How does George W. Bush get away with it? His trademark is the use of liberal-sounding rhetoric — on health care, education, jobs, tax fairness, the environment — while his policies do the opposite. To watch his recent address on Medicare and Medicaid (which he wants to gut), you would think you were listening to […]

The war in Iraq might not be going quite as smoothly as the Bush administration hoped, but the war at home is going just swimmingly. War is silencing debate not just on the wisdom of Bush’s foreign policy but on a host of other issues that would normally be front-page news. You might have missed […]

What does an antiwar movement do with a war likely to be over in a matter of weeks? Plenty, it turns out. The antiwar movement is actually two rather different movements that partly overlap. One movement is in the streets and on the internet –often led by radicals, sometimes joined uneasily by liberals. The other […]

One likely piece of collateral damage from President Bush’s Iraq campaign could be British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Seldom has a U.S. president had a more loyal — some would say spaniel-like — ally, and seldom has such an ally been treated more like a dog. Tuesday night, Blair won a fiercely contested vote in […]

To view a PDF copy of the religious leaders’ advertisement — which appeared in major British newspapers today — click here. With war looming, the one man who might possibly cause George W. Bush to modify his course of action is British Prime Minister Tony Blair. It was Blair, you might remember, who persuaded Bush […]

Last Friday the Labor Department reported that the economy lost 308,000 jobs in February. More ominously, the number of long-term unemployed is at its highest level since 1992. Oil prices are skyrocketing. And a recent report in The Wall Street Journal makes clear that, unlike in the first Gulf War, oil producers are already pumping […]

War drums in the Middle East are providing the Bush administration with camouflage for domestic policies so dreadful that they could not withstand the scrutiny of front-page attention. Take Bush’s designs on Medicare. What the administration really wants is to privatize Medicare. This means that seniors would be herded into HMOs. The federal government’s annual […]

As America’s Vietnam expedition was becoming a quagmire in 1966, Vermont Senator George Aiken famously said that we should “declare victory and go home.” The war, of course, dragged on for several more years, and North Vietnam won. A third of a century later, Vietnam is a quasi-capitalist country, cultivating U.S. investment, consumer markets and […]