Gareth Porter

Andrew J. Bacevich has emerged in the early years of this century as the country’s most widely read and widely respected critic of U.S. militarism and empire. He has addressed this issue with unprecedented intensity for an academic. With the appearance of Washington Rules, he has produced six books addressing illuminating these themes in the span of a single decade, writing three major books American Empire (2002), The New American Militarism (2005), and The Limits of Power (2008), and editing two other volumes, The Imperial Tense (2003) and The Long War (2006).

What is important to understand about Reuel Marc Gerecht’s screed and the campaign which encompasses it is that Gerecht and the Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government supports an attack by Israel so that the United States can be drawn into direct, full-scale war with Iran.

In suggesting in his press conference with President Karzai that he will not negotiate with the Taliban until the U.S. military has demonstrated “effectiveness in breaking their momentum”, President Obama seemed to be embracing the shibboleth that you don’t negotiate with an adversary until you can do so from a “position of strength”. But when your strength is built on sand, as it is in Afghanistan, the notion that you must “negotiate from strength” is the worst kind of bunkum.

Ever since he first went to Iraq to cover the U.S. occupation of that country in 2003, Dahr Jamail has distinguished himself as a journalist of rare courage and honesty, who understands that a conscious commitment to humane values is a necessary tool for the reporting the truth and not an obstacle to it. He continued to cover the Middle East since his initial stint as an independent unimbedded journalist, writing for Inter Press Service, Le Monde Dipomatique and Asia Times, among other publications. Dahr was the recipient of the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism.