Subjects Archives: War

  Additional number of American troops President Obama plans to deploy to Afghanistan: 30,000 Total number of U.S. troops that will be there after the deployment: 98,000 Number of private contractors working for the U.S. in Afghanistan as of September 2009: 104,101 Percent by which that number grew between June and September: 40 Percent of […]

Over 300 antiwar protesters took part in a demonstration at the gates to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point Dec. 1 as President Barack Obama sought to justify his decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Facing police and soldiers at the Highland Falls gate to the Academy, demonstrators repeatedly chanted, “30,000 more! […]

In a decision that reflects the post-911 terrorism hysteria, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed prominent civil rights attorney Lynne Stewart’s convictions and remanded her case to district court Judge John G. Koeltl to reconsider her sentence.  The appellate panel directed Koeltl to remand Stewart to custody and the […]

  After ten years’ war with perpetual success, to tell us it is yet impossible to have a good peace, is very surprising, and seems so different from what has ever happened in the world before, that a man of any party may be allowed suspecting that we have either been ill used, or have […]

“It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” — Edward Said On the afternoon of November 3, 2009, the United States House of Representatives voted in favor of House Resolution 867 (H.Res.867), an AIPAC-backed bill that urges both President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to “oppose unequivocally […]

Our community is distraught by the tragic shooting at Fort Hood yesterday.  We extend our condolences to the families and friends of the victims. As upset as we are about this incident, this shooting does not come as a shock.  Eight years of senseless wars have taken a huge toll on our troops and their […]

Part 1: Eight Years and Counting The United States invasion and occupation of Afghanistan entered its ninth year in October, and the majority of Americans now tell opinion polls they want it to end.  So far the war has failed to achieve U.S. objectives, and it is likely the Obama Administration’s expansion of the fighting […]

  “I thought as soon as we hit the ground, we would immediately start changing things and making it better for the people, but, during the entire time I was there, we rarely did any kind of humanitarian aid missions.  They have a lot of social issues that they are dealing with, like poverty and […]

Saadia Toor is an assistant professor at Staten Island College, author of a forthcoming book on Pakistan from Pluto Press, and part of the group Action for a Progressive Pakistan. The Pakistani Army has launched a major offensive against Taliban forces in the province of Waziristan.  What is behind this assault, and what impact will […]

  “Now, my people are squashed between two powerful enemies.  From the sky, the occupation forces are dropping bombs, even using cluster bombs and white phosphorus and killing innocent civilians in the name of combating the Taliban.  On the ground, the Taliban and also Northern Alliance fundamentalists continue their fascism against men and women of […]

In the past few months, the government, by repeatedly asserting its perception of the Maoists as the ‘biggest threat to internal security’, by criminalising the CPI (Maoist), and through a sustained project of trying to build a consensus against various forms of popular upsurge and dissent, has been creating ground for the onslaught that is […]

Tom Kochan, Robert McKersie, Adrienne Eaton, and Paul Adler.  Healing Together: The Labor-Management Partnership at Kaiser Permanente.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell ILR Press, 2009. During his uncontested campaign for AFL-CIO president this year, Rich Trumka offered the olive branch to corporate America — despite the latter’s demonstrated lack of enthusiasm for reinstating organized labor as its […]

Representatives of Iran and six of the world’s most powerful countries are scheduled to meet this week in Geneva, one of a series of events that increasingly looks like a rerun of the build-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. As we prepare for a barrage of anti-Iranian media spin, it would be good […]

  The recently concluded Congress of COSATU among other things declared to the world that COSATU will campaign for PUDEMO to be recognised as the genuine representative of the oppressed people of Swaziland. Further, that PUDEMO must be given diplomatic status accorded all liberation movements in various countries. This is a bold and very revolutionary […]

US workers’ real wages (money wages adjusted for the prices workers actually pay) have not risen from their levels in the 1970s.  Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data confirm that real wages continued to stagnate through 2009.  Across the same 30-year period, the productivity of labor kept rising: the average worker produced ever more output […]

Et la guerre est à peine commencée… “The sleep of our era is not a good sleep that provides rest.  It’s an anxious sleep that leaves you feeling even more worn out, desiring only to go back to sleep again, to escape this irritating reality a little longer.  There is a narcosis that begs for […]

  In the Summer of 1984, under the oversight of U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte, I was deported from Honduras with five other Americans for meeting with union representatives who wanted to tell us about the murders and disappearances of their leaders. At the time, the poor nation was known as “the aircraft carrier USS Honduras” […]

  Bogota, July 30, 2009 1.  The government of Alvaro Uribe has announced a decision to grant the United States the use of military bases on national territory by way of an agreement that would place all of the Colombian land mass at U.S. disposal for all types of military operations inside and outside of […]

  Andrew Hartman.  Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.  x + 251 pp.  $74.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-230-60010-2. Although world affairs are inherently distant from the local activity of running a school, international events can often heighten a sense of threat from abroad and a related […]

  Play now: Patrick Cockburn: I think the government would have liked to have done it earlier, but the Mojahedin-e Khalq, these dissidents, were protected by the Americans in Iraq really since 2003 because the Americans, one way or another, saw them as an ally against the Iranian government. Marco Chown Oved: And does this […]