Issue: Between Chomsky & Cheney

One certainly cannot fault George W. Bush for lacking what his father famously called “the vision thing.” Immediately after the September 11 attacks, the president announced a war on all terrorists “with global reach,” and warned state sponsors of terrorism “to stand with us or with the terrorists.” Two months after the attacks, Bush endorsed […]

In the 15th century, Venice was one of the world’s richest cities and ranked among the great powers because its navy controlled the Mediterranean and its merchants controlled the trade in goods, especially spices. Then Portuguese Captain Vasco da Gama arrived in India in 1498. By 1515, the Portuguese controlled the Straits of Hormuz, the […]

The walls and ceiling were painted black. Acid rock blared around the clock. It was cold in the tiled room, located in a building outside Baghdad International Airport, on January 1, 2004. But despite the chilly temperature, Mohamed (he asked me to use a fake name), a 36-year-old sound engineer from the al-Bunuk district of […]

Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national-security adviser and the author, most recently, of The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership, spoke with Michael Tomasky on January 31 about the Iraqi elections and plausible alternatives to neoconservatism. MICHAEL TOMASKY: Will the Iraqi elections validate the neoconservative view? ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: I don’t think it’s going to be validated […]

When asked in the first presidential debate of 2004 what constitutes the “single most serious threat to American national security,” there was a brief instant of agreement between President Bush and Senator Kerry. Both answered, “Nuclear terrorism.” The president repeated that he agreed with his opponent that the biggest threat facing the country is nuclear […]

In late January, after weeks of waiting for a sign that the Bush administration would lead a coordinated effort to try to prevent the dollar’s recent slide from turning into a full-fledged crash, the world finally seemed to get the message. “There’s nobody home on economic policy in America right now,” a frustrated Morgan Stanley […]

“And we have raised, from among them, leaders … ” — Koran, al-Sajdah, “The Prostration,” 32:24 Just before midnight one Friday last December, an Egyptian American professor of electrical engineering at West Virginia University, clad in a track suit and red-and-white checkered scarf, stepped through the green steel doors of our mosque in […]

Not since the Islamic revolution of 1979 has the Middle East witnessed a political upheaval of the magnitude of the Iraqi election held on January 30. The Shia majority has now come decisively to power in the new parliament, and it may make the Kurds its junior partner. The core of the new government consists […]