Issue: 354

“If you want peace, understand war” – B.H. Liddell Hart The only thing truly surprising about the Obama administration announcing an escalation of the war in Afghanistan is the surprise and disappointment being expressed by the Clausewitz-total-war-types and the Obama-supporting-pragmatic-progressives. Obama is doing exactly what he said he would do during the presidential campaign –…

After the feasting, the bloodletting. Only a few months has passed since de facto president of the Philippines Gloria Arroyo was publicly criticized for wanton spending of thousands of dollars in her dinners in New York City and Washington DC when another political “scandal” explodes, this time a political mass slaughter of defenseless Filipino civilians.…

I did not want to see this film. An obese black girl raped by her parents, cursed at, infected with H.I.V. who struggles to read. I see Precious everywhere. In “Do or Die” Bed Stuy mothers yell at children as if stabbing them with words or yank them around like dolls for not hurrying. At…

This commentary originally appeared in The Nation. When I was five years old, my parents enrolled me in Sainte Marguerite-Marie, a French grade school in a suburb of Rabat, in Morocco. The school was run by a group of Franciscan nuns who had arrived in the country during the colonial period but had stayed behind…

Naari meel qabow ma leh – A Somali adage that says there are no cool corners in hell Approximately nine months ago the UN-sponsored peace conference in Djibouti produced the current president of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. President Ahmed’s internationally supported unity government continues to be mired down in internal…

Obama’s plan for a military escalation in Afghanistan is bad news for Afghanistan and the United States, and for the peoples in both countries, and really for the entire world. Something this stupid this violent this wrong this futile this doomed can’t conceivably do anyone anywhere in this world any good, outside the US” munitions…