President Donald Trump is getting ready to plunge into the burning Mideast with all the zeal and arrogance of a medieval crusader. The new administration’s knowledge of the region is a thousand miles wide and two inches deep.Reviving a truly terrible idea originated...

North Korea has "entered the final stage of preparation for the test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile(ICBM)." So crowed North Korea’s young leader, Kim Jong-un, in his New Year’s Day message aimed at tough-talking US president-elect, Donald Trump.In...

One of my favorite literary expressions is the term "Parthian shaft." It refers to the favored tactic of the Parthians, a Persian people, of turning while on horseback and firing arrows while retreating.The Roman consul Crassus, who defeated Spartacus, may have died...

A senior CIA source tells me "with a high level of certainty" that Russia’s Vladimir Putin was responsibly for Pearl Harbor, the Korean War, Vietnam, and Iraq. This miscreant was also behind 9/11 and ring around the collar.Not since Dr Fu Manchu have we seen such a...

Seven decades after Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor some truth is finally beginning to emerge from the miasma of propaganda that still clouds our vision of World War II.It seems clear by now that President Franklin Roosevelt’s White House knew from deciphered...

President-elect Donald Trump vows to either tear up or rewrite the recent international nuclear deal with Iran, calling it "disastrous," and "the worst deal ever negotiated by Washington."Iran, which has closed important nuclear facilities, shut down half its...

Sixty years ago, I was home after school, sitting in our living room on New York’s Central Park West, reading a history of Rome and listening to Dvorak’s splendid cello concerto when the announcer on WQXR broke in to announced, “Israeli armored forces are thrusting...

Russia’s dispatch of a ten-ship flotilla to the Syrian Coast has raised some outrage and sneers aplenty in the West. Particularly when one of its embarked MiG-29K fighters crashed on takeoff from Russia’s sole carrier, the obsolescent Admiral Kuznetsov which lacks...

Donald Trump’s startling and explosive victory has not only shaken America’s oligarchy to its core, it’s also sending shock waves across Europe and scaring the top hats off plutocrats and their tame politicians.The great Mark Twain wrote early in the 20th century: ‘if...

As a former soldier and war correspondent who has covered 14 conflicts, I look at all the media hoopla over tightening siege of Mosul, Iraq and shake my head. This western-organized “liberation” of Mosul is one of the bigger pieces of political-military theater that...

“We came, we saw…he died” boasted a beaming Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, speaking of the 2011 western overthrow of Libya’s leader Muammar Khadaffi.She was, of course, shamelessly paraphrasing Caesar’s famous summary of his campaign around the Black Sea. Mrs....

Fifteen years ago this week, the US launched the longest war in its history: the invasion and occupation of remote Afghanistan. Neighboring Pakistan was forced to facilitate the American invasion or “be bombed back to the stone age." America was furious after the...

OK you Russians! No more gentle American diplomacy! No more Mr. Nice Guy! So thundered US Secretary of State John Kerry last week. Right on cue, the usually overwrought US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, blasted the Russians as ‘barbaric’ for their bombing...

“America’s strategic and economic interests in the Mideast and Muslim world are being threatened by the agony in Palestine, which inevitably invites terrorist attacks against US citizens and property.” -Eric Margolis Sun Media Sept 2 2001 (nine days before the Sept 11...

What a mess! In the crazy Syrian war, US-backed and armed groups are fighting other US-backed rebel groups. How can this be?It is so because the Obama White House had stirred up the war in Syria but then lost control of the process. When the US has a strong president,...

Everything grows old. I’m told one day the stars and planets will turn to dust. So I suppose it’s no surprise that America’s arsenal of nuclear weapons is also showing signs of advancing age, and may have to be replaced.One would think that the growing decrepitude of...

It’s been the week from hell for Donald Trump. Everything seems to be going wrong for him. The worst was the foolish and painful fight he picked with the grieving Khan family.What happened was clearly a very clever ambush devised by the Clinton camp. A Muslim-American...

Anti-Russian hysteria in America reached its apogee this week as Democrats tried to divert attention from embarrassing revelations about how the Democratic Party apparatus had rigged the primaries against Bernie Sanders by claiming Vlad Putin and his KGB had hacked...

September 1961. Geneva, Switzerland. A Turkish classmate of mine named Turgut burst into my room, crying, “those bastards just hanged my father!” The “bastards” in question were Turkey’s generals. They had overthrown the civilian government of Adnan Menderes and...

The French have a saying, "un malheur n’arrive jamais seul." That translates into "when it rains, it pours." This week, the heavens opened and poured on the nation’s national fete, Bastille Day. The day began with highly embarrassing revelations by a French satirical...