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Readings 2006

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  • Iraq Study Group Report – Iraq Study Group
    In our efforts to make this report available to all, the report may be downloaded, reproduced, and translated free of charge. – The United States Institute of Peace, December, 2006

  • While You Were at War . . . – Richard A. Clarke
    In every administration, there are usually only about a dozen barons who can really initiate and manage meaningful changes in national security policy. For most of 2006, some of these critical slots in the Bush administration have been vacant. – Washington Post, December 31, 2006

  • So How Come We Haven't Stopped It? – John Prendergast
    Nearly four years into what Bush himself has repeatedly called genocide, the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region is intensifying without a meaningful response from the White House. – Washington Post, November 19, 2006

  • The Arabs Are Victims, Too – Julie Flint
    In the fourth year of the war in Sudan's Darfur region, tens of thousands of Arab nomads are barely clinging to life in the ravaged valley... – Washington Post, November 19, 2006

  • Message To West Point –Bill Moyers
    An excerpt from a Lecture on The Meaning of Freedom delivered by Bill Moyers at the United States Military Academy. Many of you will be heading for Iraq. I have never been a soldier myself, never been tested under fire... – TomPaine.com, November 15, 2006

  • Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do – Michael Moore
    Monday, November 27th, marked the day that we had been in Iraq longer than we were in all of World War II. That's right. We were able to defeat all of Nazi Germany, Mussolini, and the entire Japanese empire in LESS time than it's taken the world's only superpower to secure the road from the airport to downtown Baghdad. – MichaelMoore.com, November 29, 2006

  • Peacemaking in the time of hostility – Stephanie Wilkes
    Mark Umbreit, a professor in the School of Social Work, is the founding director of the Center for Restorative Justice and Peacemaking, established at the University of Minnesota in 1994. – UMN news, Dec. 13, 2006

  • 5 Reasons Torture Is Always Wrong – David P. Gushee
    What measures can legitimately be taken to extract information from prisoners held by us in the "war on terror" and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? It is about government power in a liberal democracy. – Christianity Today, February 1, 2006

  • What the Amish are Teaching America – Sally Kohn
    After the deaths of their girls, one question they asked might surprise us outsiders. What, they wondered, can we do to help the family of the shooter? – CommonDreams, October 6, 2006

  • What My Father Saw at Nuremberg – Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn)
    In Nuremberg, Germany, the verdicts were read in a trial that will forever define the punishment of war criminals. My father watched the U.S. win the battle of ideas. Have we lost our way? – Los Angeles Times, October 1, 2006

  • War Signals? – Dave Lindorff
    The Bush Administration and the Pentagon have moved up the deployment of a major "strike group" of ships, including the nuclear aircraft carrier Eisenhower, to head for the Persian Gulf, just off Iran's western coast. – The Nation, September 21, 2006

  • Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq – Rajiv Chandrasekaran
    Applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration. – Washington Post, September 17, 2006

  • September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows 9/11/06 Statement
    On September 11th, 2001, members of our families became civilian casualties of terrorism. And while we grieved their loss, we were seized by the urgent desire to spare other families, in any part of the world, the suffering that we were experiencing.

  • Knock on Wood – David Cole
    The President has it half right--we are still vulnerable to a terrorist attack. In fact, we may be more vulnerable than ever. But that is in large part because of--not in spite of--the Administration's so-called "war on terror." – The Nation, September 8, 2006

  • 62,006 - 180,000, the number killed in the 'war on terror' – David Randall and Emily Gosden, The Independent
    The "war on terror" - and by terrorists - has directly killed a minimum of 62,006 people, created 4.5 million refugees and cost the US more than the sum needed to pay off the debts of every poor nation on earth. – Information Clearing House, Sept 10, 2006

  • The Bush Administration and Godwin's Law – Ken Silverstein
    “Godwin's Law” holds that in any charged debate (abortion, Iraq, Israel, foreign policy), it's only a matter of time before someone compares his opponent to Hitler, and has almost definitely failed to make his point. – Harper's Magazine, August 31, 2006

  • War is not a solution for terrorism – Howard Zinn
    We should learn something important from the US and Israel in Middle East: massive military attacks, inevitably indiscriminate, are not only morally reprehensible, but useless in achieving our stated aims. – Boston Globe, September 2, 2006

  • The Islamic Way of War – Andrew J. Bacevich
    How is it that the seemingly weak and primitive are able to frustrate modern armies only recently viewed as all but invincible? Muslims have stopped fighting on Western terms—and have started winning. – The American Conservative, September 11, 2006

  • Watching Lebanon – Seymour M. Hersh
    The Bush Administration was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks against Hezbollah. Bush and Cheney were convinced that a successful Israeli bombing campaign in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack on Iran’s nuclear installations. – The New Yorker, August 14, 2006

  • Fixing Foreign Policy – Samantha Power
    Our plummeting global standing, our deadly war in Iraq, our democratization efforts (with outcomes we don’t like), or our often seemingly self-defeating efforts to curb terrorism -- the US is in trouble abroad. – Harvard Magazine, July-August 2006

  • Learning,Too Young, of War – Michelle Mason, SAP Neighbor for Peace member
    This was to be the summer that my four-year-old daughter finally met her teta (grandma) and other family in Beirut. This summer I was to finally return to Beirut to view her in all her reborn glory. – Common Dreams, July 23, 2006

  • Americans Support Full Due-Process Rights for Terrorism Suspects – Program on International Policy Attitudes
    U.S. public, whether Republican or Democrat, strongly supports such protections. Robust majorities said that detainees should have the right to not be held indefinitely without charges or a trial, to have a lawyer, to have their treatment monitored by the Red Cross, and to neither be tortured nor threatened with torture. – WorldPublicOpinion.org, July 17, 2006

  • Half of U.S. Still Believes Iraq Had WMD – Charles J. Hanley AP Special Correspondent
    Do you believe in Iraqi "WMD"? Did Saddam Hussein's government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003? Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office... – CBS News, Aug. 7, 2006

  • Stop the Band-Aid Treatment: We Need Policies for a Real, Lasting Middle East Peace – Jimmy Carter, Washington Post
    The Middle East is a tinderbox, with some key players on all sides waiting for every opportunity to destroy their enemies with bullets, bombs and missiles. – the Carter Center, August 1, 2006

  • Large and Growing Numbers of Muslims Reject Terrorism, Bin Laden
    Nonetheless, in most Muslim countries antipathy toward the US and the West in general has remained negative or even intensified. These findings emerge from polls conducted in Muslim nations this spring. – World Public Opinion, June 30, 2006

  • Diagnosis: torture – Deane Morrison
    In spring 2004, photos of prisoners abused at the hands of the U.S. military in the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad shocked the world. Among the outraged Americans was Steven Miles, a physician and professor in the University's Center for Bioethics. "Where were the prison doctors while the abuses were taking place?" he wanted to know. – UMNnews, July 14, 2006

  • McCollum Speaks to the Center for Victims of Torture
    Today is a day for us to say to the world that torture of persons in detention – anywhere and everywhere – must stop... State sponsored torture leaves societies with a profound lack of trust in public institutions. – McCollum website, June 26, 2006

  • American Lives, Iraqi Props – Pierre Tristam
    Two American soldiers go missing and the military in Iraq devotes 6 percent of American ground troops to the manhunt. Thirty-five Iraqis are kidnapped every day, and fifty are killed every day. – Candide's Notebooks, June 20, 2006

  • Nuclear Arms in the Hands of Any Pose A Global Threat – Jacqueline Cabasso, San Francisco Chronicle
    Even as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice condemns North Korea for threatening to test a new missile that could theoretically deliver a nuclear weapon to the Western Aleutians, the Pentagon is poised to develop its own new generation of nuclear-capable long-range delivery systems. – Common Dreams, June 22, 2006

  • A Camp Divided – Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal
    As U.S. tries to give Iraqi troops more responsibility, clash of two American colonels shows tough road ahead. – Candide's Notebooks June 18, 2006

  • Iraq's Pentagon Papers – Daniel Ellsberg, Los Angeles Times
    This unjustified war is waiting for its whistle-blower, says the leaker of Vietnam's secret history, the Pentagon Papers, on June 13, 1971, 35 years ago this week. – Common Dreams June 11, 2006

  • The Persecution of the Palestinians – Patrick J. Buchanan
    For a textbook example of why we are hated, consider Gaza and the West Bank. There, a brutal Israeli/U.S.-led cutoff in aid has been imposed on the Palestinians for voting the wrong way in a free election. – The American Conservative, June 5, 2006

  • Women Nobel Laureates urge negotiation to avert U.S.-Iran conflict – American Friends Service Committee
    Mary Ellen McNish, general secretary for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and a delegation of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates are pushing for increased negotiations between Iran and the United States. – June 14, 2006

  • Why Haditha Matters – The Nation, Editorial
    This was not the work of soldiers gone berserk... As Representative John Murtha has pointed out, the patently false story floated afterward, blaming the killings on roadside bombs, and Marine payoffs to survivors imply a cover-up that may extend far up the chain of command. – The Nation, June 5, 2006

  • Prime Minister Maliki Shows Us the Door – Susan Lenfestey
    I admit that I come to this cut-and-run strategy belatedly, being more in the We-Broke-It-We-Fix-It school of thought. But it's now clear even to dreamers like me that we are a huge part of the problem and not the solution. – CommonDreams.org, June 3, 2006

  • Was the 2004 Election Stolen? – Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Rolling Stone
    The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio. Officials purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. – truthout.org, June 1, 2006

  • U.S. building massive embassy in Baghdad – Charles J. Hanley
    The fortress-like compound rising beside the Tigris River here will be the largest of its kind in the world, the size of Vatican City, with the population of a small town, its own defense force, self-contained power and water, and a precarious perch at the heart of Iraq's turbulent future. – The Boston Globe, Boston.com, April 14, 2006

  • The Measure of War – Tim Heffernan
    The war in Iraq turns three today. Just three. It's a little number, easy to swallow—but surprisingly hard to grasp ... it's 20,000 wounded soldiers, or some 200,000 survivors now safe again at home. – The Village Voice, March 19th, 2006

  • SAS soldier quits Army in disgust at 'illegal' American tactics in Iraq – Sean Rayment
    An SAS soldier has refused to fight in Iraq and has left the Army over the "illegal" tactics of United States troops and the policies of coalition forces. – Telegraph.co.uk, March 12, 2006

  • Mother's Day Procolamation – Julia Ward Howe
    Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of fears! Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause." – 1870

  • Threatening Iran: Bombs that would backfire – Richard Clarke and Steven Simon, The New York Times
    White House spokesmen have played down press reports that the Pentagon has accelerated planning to bomb Iran. We would like to believe that the Bush administration is not intent on starting another war, because a conflict with Iran could be even more damaging to U.S. interests than the current struggle in Iraq has been. – International Herald Tribune, April 18, 2006

  • U.S. Program Is Directed at Altering Iran's Politics – Steven R. Weisman, New York Times
    The project, which will spend $7 million in the current fiscal year, would become many times larger next year if Congress approves a broad request for $85 million that the Bush administration has requested for scholarships, exchange programs, radio and television broadcasts and other activities aimed at shaking up Iran's political system. – Information Clearing House, April 15, 2006

  • Ten Numbers On The State Of Iraq-War Veterans – Tim Heffernan
    The impact of a conflict that's about to surpass the Korean War in duration: Total American troops who have served: 360,000. Fraction of the Army's active duty force deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan: 63 Percent. – Esquire, March 2006

  • The Iran Plans – Seymour M. Hersh
    Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb? The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. – The New Yorker, April 8, 2006

  • What Victory Lost – Wayne Merry
    Where would America be if we hadn’t invaded Iraq? Success in Iraq is certainly preferable to outright failure but still may be inferior to abandonment of a policy that was erroneous from inception. – The American Conservative, April 10, 2006

  • Wisconsin Towns Vote for Withdrawal – John Nichols, The Nation
    "These thirty-two communities were a representative sample of the state, with twenty-two of the thirty-two located in counties that George Bush won in the 2004 election. This is yet more evidence of a new antiwar majority in Wisconsin." – Common Dreams, April 6, 2006

  • Antiwar Grannies arm themselves with toy soldiers – Doug Grow, Star Tribune
    Rejected by the Army, Grandmothers for Peace has opened up a new front in expressing opposition to the war in Iraq. The Grandmothers, sometimes working in conjunction with Women Against Military Madness, are leaving toy plastic soldiers around the metro. Attached to each one is the message: "Please bring me home." – Women Against Military Madness, February 25, 2006

  • The Logic of Withdrawal – Anthony Arnove
    We need to answer concerns of thoughtful, well-meaning people who have been persuaded by one or more of the arguments for why U.S. troops should remain in Iraq, at least until "stability" is restored. Eight reasons why the U.S. should leave Iraq immediately, addressing common arguments for "staying the course." – In These Times, March 18, 2006

  • America’s Blinders – Howard Zinn
    Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of deception has become overwhelming, we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled? – The Progressive, April 2006

  • Why Are We Here? – Norman Solomon
    Senator Dianne Feinstein accused the Bush administration of "incompetence" in the Iraq war. What would be a competent way to pursue the war in Iraq? How would you drop huge bombs on urban neighborhoods in a competent way? How would you deploy cluster munitions that shred the bodies of children in a competent way? – truthout, March 20, 2006

  • U.S. Troops in Iraq: 72% Say End War in 2006
    An overwhelming majority of 72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and more than one in four say the troops should leave immediately, a new Le Moyne College/Zogby International survey shows. – Zogby International, February 28, 2006

  • Tough U.S. Steps in Hunger Strike at Camp in Cuba – Tim Golden, New York Times
    United States military authorities have taken tougher measures to force-feed detainees engaged in hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after concluding that some were determined to commit suicide to protest their indefinite confinement, military officials have said. – Common Dreams, February 9, 2006

  • The War Within – Matthew B. Stannard
    The photo of the ‘Marlboro Man’ in Fallujah became a symbol of the Iraq conflict when it ran in newspapers across America in 2004. Now the soldier has returned home to Kentucky,where he battles the demons of post-traumatic stress – San Francisco Chronicle, January 29, 2006

  • War in Error – Andrew J. Bacevich
    Sending a general to do a sheriff’s job — When Bush, after 9/11, launched the US on a global war on terrorism, he scornfully abandoned the law-enforcement approach of previous administrations. To all but the most militant true believers, it's become increasingly evident that this was an error of the first order. – The American Conservative, February 27, 2006

  • Rumsfeld and Cheney Revive Their 70's Terror Playbook – Thom Hartmann
    Rumsfeld told the press we should be preparing for "the Long War," saying of the war this administration has stirred up with its attack on Iraq that, "Just as the Cold War lasted a long time, this war is something that is not going to go away." The last time Rumsfeld talked like this was in the 1970s, in response to the danger of peace presented by Richard Nixon. – CommonDreams, February 13, 2006

  • The Iraq Quagmire: The Mounting Costs of War and the Case for Bringing Home the Troops – Phyllis Bennis and Erik Leaver
    The most comprehensive accounting of the mounting costs and consequences of the Iraq War on the United States, Iraq, and the world. Among its major findings are stark figures that quantify the continuing of costs since the Iraqi elections. – A Study by the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy In Focus, and the IPS Iraq Task Force, August 31, 2005

  • Democrats May Unite on Plan to Pull Troops – Rick Klein
    After months of trying unsuccessfully to develop a common message on the war in Iraq, Democratic Party leaders are beginning to coalesce around a broad plan to begin a quick withdrawal of US troops and install them elsewhere in the region, where they could respond to emergencies in Iraq and help fight terrorism in other countries. – The Boston Globe, February 20, 2006

  • The Impeachment of George W. Bush – Elizabeth Holtzman
    People have begun to speak of impeaching President George W. Bush, openly, in newspapers, on the Internet, in ordinary conversations and even in Congress. As a former member of Congress who sat on the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon, I believe they are right to do so. – The Nation, January 11, 2006

  • 'The Biggest Secret' – Thomas Powers
    A review of State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration by James Risen – The President decided to attack Iraq, he brushed caution and objection aside, and Congress, the press, and the people, with very few exceptions, stepped back out of the way and let him do it. – The New York Review of Books, February 23, 2006

  • Come Home, America – Bill Kauffman
    Liberals need another George McGovern—and perhaps conservatives do too. Perhaps, as George McGovern ages gracefully while his country does not, it is time to stop looking at McGovern through the lenses of those neoconservatives who so often trace their disenchantment with the Democratic Party to the 1972 campaign. – The American Conservative, January 30, 2006

  • Blair-Bush deal before Iraq war revealed in secret memo – Richard Norton-Taylor
    Tony Blair told President George Bush that he was "solidly" behind US plans to invade Iraq on January 31 2003 - nearly two months before the invasion. Mr Bush made it clear the US intended to invade whether or not there was a second UN resolution and even if UN inspectors found no evidence of a banned Iraqi weapons programme. – The Guardian, February 3, 2006

  • Torture flights: what No 10 knew and tried to cover up – Richard Norton-Taylor
    The British government is trying to stifle attempts to find out what it knows about CIA "torture flights" and privately admits that people captured by British forces could have been sent illegally to interrogation centres. Rendition is the US practice of transporting detainees to secret centres where they are at risk of being tortured. – The Guardian, January 19, 2006