Category Archives: Analysis

In my recent report on the death toll in America’s post-9/11 wars, I estimated that about 2.4 million Iraqis have been killed as a result of the U.S. invasion and hostile military occupation of their country. But opinion polls in the United States and the United Kingdom have found that a majority of the public in both countries believe that no more than 10,000 Iraqis have been killed. Continue reading →

Europe is facing the most significant refugee crisis since World War II. All attempts at resolving the issue have failed, mostly because they have ignored the root causes of the problem. Continue reading →

US Defense Secretary James Mattis, who earned the nickname “Mad Dog” while serving in the Marine Corps, jetted off to the 2018 International Institute of Strategic Studies’ (IISS) annual Shangri-La Dialogue conference in Singapore armed with threats against China and North Korea. Ironically, Mattis’s military machismo occurred prior to the June 12 summit in Singapore between Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Continue reading →

Last Wednesday, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Spending Oversight and Emergency Management members held a hearing on US “War Powers and the Effects of Unauthorized Military Engagements on Federal Spending.” Continue reading →

The U.S. military is by far the most-respected of all institutions in America. But the U.S. military of today is actually not only the most corrupt but also the worst of America’s institutions. It’s the worst because it serves the worst and is run by the worst. It’s basically a mercenary operation for U.S. and allied aristocracies, and it routinely destroys the lives of millions of people in many countries, but since there is no accountability, it keeps getting even worse. At the basis of it is something fundamentally wrong: not only is it the world’s imperial military, but it is a largely privatized military. The military intrinsically serves a public function; so, privatizing anything in it is corrosive to that public function. This is the basic problem, with America’s military in the modern era. Continue reading →

Studies on migration from Uzbekistan were first conducted in 2008 with the assistance of UNDP of Uzbekistan and published in a book, “Labor Migration in the Republic of Uzbekistan, Social, Legal and Gender Aspects.” Continue reading →

Early in 1968, Clyde Tolson, F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover’s deputy and bosom buddy, a key player in the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., expressed both the hope and intent of those making sure that there would never be another president by the name Kennedy, when he said about RFK that “I hope someone shoots and kills the son of a bitch.” Earlier, as reported by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in his new book, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, the influential conservative Westbrook Pegler expressed this hope even more depravingly when he wished “that some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter [Robert Kennedy’s] spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies.” Continue reading →

Speaking by telephone on Fox’s “Fox & Friends” on the morning of April 26, Donald Trump interjected in his often incoherent rants that his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, is “a businessman . . . he’s got a business.” Trump added, “I don’t know his business, but this doesn’t have to do with me.” Trump did seem to worry about what prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) might discover in the gigabytes of data seized, pursuant to a court order, by FBI agents from Cohen’s office, hotel room, residence, and safety deposit box. Trump said of the law enforcement seizure, “From what I understand, they’re looking at his [Cohen's] businesses. And I hope he is in great shape.” Continue reading →

Notwithstanding all the praises sung to the German-US partnership, often described as a bedrock of the transatlantic relationship, the new German government is trying to stand up to pressure from the US. It has to. The country has been hit hard by the Russia sanctions and is looking to end them. Continue reading →

By bringing former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani onto his legal team, Donald Trump has merely added another mobbed-up New Yorker to his coterie of lawyers. Continue reading →

The ease with which Americans are prepared to welcome boots on the ground, regional lockdowns, routine invasions of their privacy, and the dismantling of every constitutional right intended to serve as a bulwark against government abuses is beyond unnerving. Continue reading →

Eighteen more Palestinians were unapologetically murdered this past “Good Friday” by the Israeli military. They were unarmed. They were on their own land. They were desperate. They screamed their desperation as they marched. Then, they shouted their daily reality of personal horrors too close to Israel’s attention. So, they were killed. Continue reading →

In the first part of this series, I estimated that about 2.4 million Iraqis have been killed as a result of the illegal invasion of their country by the United States and the United Kingdom in 2003. I turn now to Afghan and Pakistani deaths in the ongoing 2001 U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. In part three, I will examine U.S.-caused war deaths in Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. According to Ret. U.S. General Tommy Franks, who led the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan in reaction to 9/11, the U.S. government does not keep track of civilian casualties that it causes. “You know, we don’t do body counts,” Franks once said. Whether that’s true or a count is covered up is difficult to know. Continue reading →

How many people have been killed in America’s post-9/11 wars? I have been researching and writing about that question since soon after the U.S. launched these wars, which it has tried to justify as a response to terrorist crimes that killed 2,996 people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. Continue reading →

Unlike corporations that sell to consumers, Lockheed Martin and the other top contractors to the US government are highly if not totally dependent upon sales to governments, for their profits, especially sales to their own government, which they control—they control their home market, which is the US government, and they use it to sell to its allied governments, all of which foreign governments constitute the export markets for their products and services. Continue reading →

Israel has been brilliant over the years in shaping and misdirecting the public discourse on the future of Palestine. Among its earliest achievement along these lines was the crucial propaganda victory by having the 1948 War known internationally as the ‘War of Independence.’ Such a designation erases the Palestinians from political consciousness, and distorts the deeper human and political consequences of the war. Language matters, especially in vital circumstances where there are winners and losers, a reality that applies above all to a war of displacement. Continue reading →

US President Donald Trump (1946-), as a politician, has succeeded in attracting voters who are dissatisfied or partially dissatisfied with their economic or social situation, especially working class white voters without college degrees. Income inequality and wealth inequality is growing in the United States, and the balance leans toward the winners, even though the losers are more numerous and have not been compensated through job training or social services. In other words, many Americans are disillusioned regarding their chance of living the American dream and about the way the system and public policies disadvantage them. Trump attracts also single-issue voters. Continue reading →

One thing about the neoconservatives, who have thoroughly penetrated the Tory government of British Prime Minister Theresa May and, due to the reality television show savant nature of Donald Trump, are rapidly filling as many vacancies in the US administration as possible, is that they are consistent. Neocons, who make no secret of their desire for major military conflagrations, have dusted off an old playbook with regard to the nerve agent poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England. The convoluted charges made by the British government bear all the hallmarks of the Polonium-210 radiation poisoning of ex-Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko, who died in London in 2006. Continue reading →

What was lost on the corporate media’s coverage of this past week’s sudden firing by Donald Trump of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was that it was carried out while Tillerson was on an official trip to Africa to smooth over fractured relations stemming from Trump’s referral to African countries as “shitholes” and his statement that Nigerians live in “huts.” In fact, Tillerson was forced to cut short his trip while in Nigeria, where he was expected to apologize to Nigerian leaders for Trump’s past racist statements. Continue reading →

The rush amongst the super-rich started after the key event of 2014; this single stunning event suddenly sparked that rush by the super-rich to buy nuclear-proof bunkers, and the rush has been nonstop since that event. Though many news media in the West have reported on the existence of this suddenly booming market for luxurious and supposedly nuclear-proof bunkers, none has reported on what actually caused it—the event that had sparked it. In fact, that event is still a secret in the West—not publicly mentioned here; it is, practically speaking, banned from being publicly even mentioned in the West. Continue reading →

To better understand the threat that Zionism poses to the world, and especially Iran, allow me to turn to a historical analogy. The scenario is eerily reminiscent of the late-1930s, as the earlier aggressive, racist state, Nazi Germany, was allowed to pursue its selfish, warlike agenda against its peaceful neighbors, despite its agenda of world war. The actors in that drama were Nazi Germany versus the Soviet Union, the latter being the only credible peaceful resistance to fascism. Britain, France, and the US refused to stand up to the threat to peace, mistaking the Soviet Union for the enemy, despite it being the only credible resistance to the Nazis. Continue reading →

The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer survey, which is the latest in the annual Edelman series taken in 28 countries, shows that the people of China have the highest trust in their country’s institutions, and that the people of U.S. recorded an all-time-record loss of trust as compared to the prior year: a stunning 37% loss of trust—that’s comparing 2017’s 52% of Americans trusting America’s institutions, down to 43% of Americans trusting them, a 9% slide, which Edelman referred to by saying, “Trust decline in the U.S. is the steepest ever measured.” Continue reading →

On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969), 34th President of the United States, (1953–1961), and a five-star general, gave a Farewell address that has echoed through the years. He not only warned his fellow citizens about the danger of a “military-industrial complex,” which could “endanger our liberties or democratic processes,” but he also issued a wish in saying that “we want democracy to survive for all generations to come.” Continue reading →

The Trump administration has shown that it is more than capable and willing to take advantage of any event, regardless of the sensitivities, to reap political fodder. The recent mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 students lost their lives, is no different. Trump and his supporters have used the incident to call for the arming of school teachers, even though an overwhelming majority of teachers and school administrators have rejected the idea as ludicrous. Continue reading →

Moldova appears to be rushing to embrace NATO. According to the statement of Defense Minister Eugen Sturza, the country’s armed forces will be rearmed to meet NATO standards. In an interview with Moldova-1 TV channel, he said Moldova will buy lethal weapons and ammunition abroad for the first time in 27 years. The republic is to receive €11 million in military aid from the United States. According to the official, it’s just a beginning. The rearmament and modernization process will go much further as the military prepares for taking part in international missions. Continue reading →

Donald Trump has embraced the popular “peace through strength” doctrine (PTSD) with his characteristic panache. Continue reading →

GAZA—Near the end of last month, Haaretz reported that, according to an expert hydrologist, 97 percent of Gaza’s drinking water has been contaminated by sewage and salt. The UN also confirmed that this was the case early last year, and clearly, the situation has remained unchanged even up until 2018. Robert Piper, the UN’s local coordinator for humanitarian and development activities, has called the situation “really very serious” and stated that “[w]e are falling far behind the demand for clean drinking water for Gazans.” Continue reading →

Mark my words, America’s war spending will bankrupt the nation. Continue reading →

With their brief existence, and dumbed down now by a degraded and warped education, most Americans have a telescoped and cartoony sense of history, so nothing matters, really, beyond the last two or three presidential elections, and each foreign country is represented, at most, by a caricature or two, so Germany is Hitler and Merkel, China is Mao and Xi, Russia is Lenin, Stalin and Putin, Japan is no-name-comes-to-mind, Korea is Little Rocket Man, Vietnam is Ho Chee Mann and Mexico, right next door, is, ah, Speedy Gonzales. Having no historical depth, many Americans will claim that China, for example, is a peace loving and fair-minded civilization that shuns invasions and genocides, but you couldn’t have become the most populous nation on earth without gobbling up many lesser ones, and China’s appetite will only increase as its girth balloons even further. To thrive, it will need a chain of vassals and colonies, same as it ever was. Continue reading →

Writing “The Canada Israel Nexus,” I came across many ironies. Continue reading →

The ongoing India-US rapprochement has been couched in terms of a pact between the “two largest democracies in the world” and similar superlatives. While geographically-challenged Americans may be forgiven for not recognizing their immediate northern neighbour as both a larger nation and a better democracy, mnemonically-challenged Indian pundits should nonetheless subject India-US ties to trend-based reality checks. Continue reading →