The RPI Challenge

Riyadh’s war in Yemen marks a dramatic escalation in its efforts to roll back Iran’s rising influence in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia portrays its Yemen campaign simply as a battle of “good” Arabs and Sunnis supporting Yemen’s legitimate government against “evil” Iranians trying to overthrow it via local Shi’a “proxies”—reiterating a generalized Saudi (and Israeli) narrative about Iran’s use of proxy allies to consolidate regional “hegemony.” More considered analysis shows that Iran’s “proxy”...

When at first you don’t succeed, fail, fail again. And with that, we woke up Wednesday to see the Obama administration ready to announce a change of course in Iraq, one that is very much a back to the future kind of event. Following about a year of not defeating, degrading or destroying Islamic State (IS; in fact, they are doing quite well, thank you), the administration let slip it’s planning to send hundreds or more new US military personnel to set up a new training base in Anbar Province,...

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the US government’s plunge into Cold War II would bring back the one-sided propaganda themes that dominated Cold War I, but it’s still unsettling to see how quickly the major US news media has returned to the old ways, especially the New York Times, which has emerged as Official Washington’s propaganda vehicle of choice. What has been most striking in the behavior of the Times and most other US mainstream media outlets is their utter lack of self-awareness, for...

If you look at the track record of the interventionists you might think they would pause before taking on more projects. Each of their past projects has ended in disaster yet still they press on. Last week the website Zero Hedge posted a report about hacked emails between billionaire George Soros and Ukrainian President Poroshenko. Soros is very close to the Ukrainian president, who was put in power after a US-backed coup deposed the elected leader of Ukraine last year. In the email...

Intellectuals have long been glorified as champions of truth and defenders of society’s highest values. But in Washington, they serve as Leviathan‘s Praetorian Guard. Intellectuals are thriving in DC thanks in large part to the ruinous policy advice they proffer. The District of Columbia has 120 times more political scientists per capita than the rest of the nation. But rather than producing “good governance,” the 3,200 political scientists and legions of other would-be Brain Trusters provide...

US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter was at the headquarters of the US European Command in Stuttgart, Germany this week with two dozen US military commanders and European diplomats to discuss how to escalate their economic and military campaign against Russia. They will assess the impact of current economic sanctions, as well as NATO’s strategy of exploiting the crisis in eastern Ukraine to deploy ever-greater numbers of troops and military equipment to Eastern Europe, threatening Russia with...

Russia historian Stephen Cohen points to the neoconservative establishment for America's latest outbreak of what can only be referred to as late-stage imperial dementia. Neocons Robert Kagan and wife Victoria Nuland have certainly done the heavy lifting to make Ukraine the staging ground for what appears to be a NATO blitzkrieg on Moscow. But whatever the determination of the neocon plot, they are only the barking dogs of master imperialist Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose grand design has been...

Last August, Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole attacked an article I wrote, stating that it was "Misleading, inaccurate and unfairly disparages the dedicated (TSA) workforce. … We will not sit back and allow misinformation and conjecture to malign our employees." Pistole resigned last December — in time to miss the uproar this week about TSA agents failing to detect 95% of the weapons and bombs smuggled past them by Inspector General testers. While Pistole is leading...

In the final phase of the negotiations with Iran, the US-led international coalition is still seeking Iran’s agreement to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit any military facilities it deems suspicious and to interview a selected list of Iranian nuclear scientists. Such measures are not necessary to ensure that Iran is adhering to its commitments under the agreement, but they are necessary to manage the political threat from the pro-Israel extremists in the Senate to...

“A person under surveillance is no longer free; a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy.”—Writers Against Mass Surveillance THE GOOD NEWS: Americans have a right to freely express themselves on the Internet, including making threatening—even violent—statements on Facebook, provided that they don’t intend to actually inflict harm. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Elonis v. United States threw out the conviction of a Pennsylvania man who was charged with making unlawful threats (it...

There seems to be great Republican resistance to the idea that their interventions in Iraq and the Muslim world are the main cause of both the mess in Iraq and the growing and increasingly powerful worldwide Islamist movement. To the extent that Hillary Clinton and other Democratic senators and congressmen joined the Republicans in illegally delegating the war-declaring power to George W. Bush there is a point to the Republicans’ resistance. The correct formulation of the statement is that...

When last we checked in on the situation in Syria, ISIS (who a secret Pentagon document recently revealed was, and probably still is, considered a US “strategic asset”) was supposedly on the move, emboldened by recent successes in the ancient city of Palmyra and the conquest of Ramadi in Iraq, where, you’re reminded, Iraqi forces showed “no will” to fight according the Pentagon. Recent reports also indicated that the militants may have commandeered 2,300 humvees worth more than $1 billion when...