RSSArchive for October, 2008
U.S. Getting Real on Hamas?
Hamas leader claims indirect contact from Washington. About time, too!
Iraq: Why the End is in Sight
The war in Iraq is drawing to a close — and hardly on the terms of those who initiated it. It’s end is being hastened by Iraqi democracy, and by the retrenchment of U.S. power globally, accelerated by the sharp economic downturn
Embedded with the Jihadis
My crazy friend Nir Rosen goes on embed with the Taliban, and finds out just why the U.S. can’t win in Afghanistan
Why Joe Strummer Was a Socialist
Hint: It had nothing to do with bailing out banks
The Liverpool-Iraq Connection
Both Liverpool FC and Iraq were acquired with borrowed money
Never Mind the Dow, Here’s the Economy!
Restoring confidence in the credit system may prevent a cataclysmic meltdown in the U.S. economy, but it won’t fix the long-term decline based on fundamental ailments that the bubble-driven stock market and real estate booms of the past decade have simply deferred. Instead of manically watching the Dow yo-yo from day to day, we should simply recognize that it has been vastly overvalued for some time. Until such time as America’s economy (the real economy, not the fetish market of financial services) has been restored to some semblance of health — a generational project, unfortunately, given the devastation wrought by a generation of Reaganomics and, it must be said, by its “New Democrat” imitators — any dramatic recovery in the Dow will be brittle, based on false confidence or some new “bubble.”
…fixing America’s economy will require not only jettisoning the Reagan dogma of deregulation, shrinking government, and tax cuts as the cornucopia of economic growth, but also the Clinton legacy that turned the Democratic Party into as much of a friend to Wall Street as the Republicans had traditionally been. Wall Street is not the economy, and the last two decades have shown that the stock market can be hale and hearty even when the economy is being steadily denuded. It’s on fixing the real economy that voters should be forcing politicians to focus.
Israel Gets Real on Iran
Trita Parsi: In public, Israeli leaders have spoken in apocalyptic terms of Iran’s nuclear program, but among themselves, they know better.
What the Palestinians Can Learn from Mandela
John Carlin’s extraordinary new book reveals how Mandela’s genius lay not in forgiving his enemies but in disarming and outmaneuvering them, while never compromising on his demand for justice
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Glancing Headers
World Cup 2010
For a variety of reasons, I ended up watching the World Cup Final on a TV tied to a tree at the soccer fields in the Red Hook section of BrooklynRebellion Into Money
How Slovenia Wins the World CupGuest Columns
How I Overcame My Jewish-Evangelical Upbringing and Learned to Love Christmas, Anyway
Guest Column: Gavin Evans Back in the day, when Gavin and I were young activists trying to change the world, the doorbell rang at our Observatory student house. I opened it to see a tall and handsome man in the silky purple shirt and dog collar of an Anglican Bishop. "You must be Tony," said Bis...Featured Analysis
Does Obama Have a Mideast Plan B?
It's hardly surprising that President Barack Obama chose to schedule a White House visit by Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the dead of night on Monday, because right now Obama has little to show for his 10-month effort to revive a Middle East peace process. The Israeli leader's refu...Unholy War
Who Lost Fatah?
‘Who lost China?” was the battle cry of a witch-hunt conducted in the US State Department following the 1949 victory of Mao Zedong’s communists. The department’s “China hands”, critics charged, had been woefully ignorant of the dynamics at work on the ground in China after the Second W...A Skeptical Read
More Iran Hysteria from the NY Times
The surest sign that another neocon bill of goods is being hawked in respect of the Iran "nuclear peril" is the revival of Rumsfeld-esque "unknowable unknowns", a la Iraq WMD panic circa late 2002. In the real world, of course, solid progress is being made towards a plausible diplomatic deal to ...99c Blogging
The 'Metrics' of Obama's Vietnam
Why is the Administration conducting a "test run" for its metrics of success in Afghanistan? Because the metrics used will be those that provide the desired verdictHear! Hear!
Helena Cobban Explains FatahIf I Was a Blogger...
More Dennis Ross Dissembling
Obama's Iran point man can't seem to get his head around the reasons for Israeli emigrationA Wondering Jew
Obama, Foxman and Israel's Purpose
Having spent decades drumming home the idea that Israel is rooted squarely in the Holocaust experience, and should be viewed by the world as the state of the survivors, Israelis and some of their most fervent backers in the U.S. are suddenly insisting that this is a misleading, even hostile idea.Annals of Globalization
The Shebab, the Shahids and the Champion's League Final
The Shebab gunman on the left appears to be a Gunner, i.e. an Arsenal fan... In honor of today's Champion's League final, I republish my op ed that ran in the National a year ago. What was most fascinating about the photograph of the Somali gunman who was part of the crowd dragging the body...The Whole World's Africa
Congo's Not Africa's WWI, It's Worse Than That
If there is a European analogy to be applied in the Congo, it would be the brutal Thirty Year War in Germany that ended in 1648Shameless Cronyism
Embedded with the Jihadis
My crazy friend Nir Rosen goes on embed with the Taliban, and finds out just why the U.S. can't win in AfghanistanCould Die Laughing
Whatever Became of that Nice Mr. Blair...
The problem with a global conversation between Muslims and Christians refereed by Tony Blair? Two words: Tony Blair.The 51st State
A Teachable Moment in Basra
It should come as no surprise that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's disastrous offensive against the Mahdi Army of Moqtada Sadr in Basra has had the exact opposite effect of that intended -- strengthening rather than weakening Sadr, and making clear that he, and the Iranians, have far greater in...Futures Market
Will Russia Partition Kosovo?
Why my tea-leaf reading suggests that Moscow has a nasty surprise in store for Washington in the BalkansCuisine
Yummy yummy Umami
Why a leftover lamb bone turned a bean stew into an ecstatic eventHousekeeping
'Lost' Entries on Rootless Cosmopolitan
Previous entries that now register as "not available" are ones that got left behind in a server migration. We're working on retrieving themNew York Moments
The Debka Made ‘Em Do ItFrom Tony's Archive
A Playground Lesson for Bush
How a spontaneous alliance of jocks, do-gooders and lesser bullies against the biggest bully at the school changed the balance of power at Milnerton Primary
