By next year, a residual force of 9,800 u.s. troops will remain in Afghanistan, down from 33,000 this year and 100,000 in 2011, according to drawdown plans announced by President Barack Obama. At the time the president announced that policy in late May, the cost of the two big foreign policy initiatives of the […]

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(Photo: Hassan Rouhani | Source: Times of Israel) A six-month diplomatic dance with Iran is underway—each step as dainty as a minuet because any misstep is weighted with danger. The issue is Iran’s nuclear research program and the UN inspections that are taking place as a result. And while each side has its own agenda, […]

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  The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) would have been much better off if the snowstorm that blanked Washington, D.C., at the beginning of March had forced their annual “policy conference” to be cancelled. That didn’t happen. Instead, it took place and accomplished nothing for the powerful lobby, except to demonstrate how much it […]

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  I am so fucking scared of the moment a lieutenant or a general would say enough of this rubbish and we are back at military rule completely. It is in their interest for this to disintegrate into chaos, it is in their interest to say ‘you people enough! law and order!’” So says Mona […]

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  Those who want to see a people’s democracy, let them come here and see this,” Fidel Castro told the UN General Assembly in 1960, after his Marxist insurgency overthrew Fulgencio Batista’s government in Cuba. The United States had long made forcefully clear that it preferred dictatorial banana republics (Nicaragua), coffee republics (Guatemala), or, in […]

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