International

300 more to Iraq, for a total of 800. But we're told, no boots on the ground. Just security forces for the 500 already there, mostly in the Taj Majal U.S. Embassy, just a few in foward positions as "advisors". Sound familiar? It does for those of us who survived the 60's and 70's.

I've lived long enough to see now three iterations of the old Domino Theory; it goes something like...if we allow a country to fall, it will spiral into a cascade of other nearby countries to follow suit and be taken over by nefarious forces.

The drumbeat for a renewed Iraq intervention from the neo-cons and neo-liberals within and outside the administration is pissing me off. The media learned nothing from Vietnam, Iraq II and Afghanistan; they are fielding all the totally discredited talking heads to tell us President Obama needs to show strength.

Can anyone give me one rational reason why we would even consider launching a bombing/missile/drone attack on so called Iraq militants? No, I mean a really rational reason?

Ok, Vladimir. Enough of the belligerence. Crimea was an outrage and eastern Ukraine doubly so. So was Georgia. Speaking for myself and possibly millions of my fellow Americans, we don't want a renewal of one of our worst mutual eras, the Cold War.

One of my favorite investigative reporters, David Cay Johnston observes that our foreign trade deals in the last couple of decades figure in a big way in the systemic weakness of our domestic economy. Particularly hard hit by really bad trade deals are the non-college educated in the workforce.

Oh, wait. They're talking about Crimea, not Texas. Nor Hawaii, or Midway, American Samoa, Wake Island and half dozen other pacific islands we annexed, from what I can see, without money changing hands. And there are a dozen other annexations the good old U.S. of A. pulled off where we actually paid the owner while we held a gun to their head. Such as Puerto Rico and Guam, not to mention the Panama Canal zone.

I've been trying to follow recent events in Venezuela. Here's my take, informed by the work of activist Tom Hayden of Peace Exchange, Chris Gilbert, professor at Universidad de Venezuela and Rory Carroll, a reporter for the Guardian and Observer Latin America, based in Caracas for six years until recently.

Medea Benjamin, the indomitable co-founder of the women's activist group Code Pink has reported that en-route to a women's conference in Gaza, she was physically attacked at an airport in Egypt.

Some sentimentalists have been characterizing the Ukraine crisis as a popular revolution. Not so fast. This situation requires some careful analysis, not platitudes. Hear that CNN and mainstream media? Probably not.

You might have read that the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, developed under the auspices of the Obama Administration is currently stymied, bottled up in both the House and the Senate, with lots of opposition. Let's count our blessings while we can on this one. Here's why, in a nutshell.

Robert Parry, of ConsotiumNews and noted investigative reporter has just published an investigative report on the August 21 Sarin Gas attack in Syria. The report is entitled “The Mistaken Guns of Last August” and can be seen at ConsortiumNews.com. He cites the work of Richard Lloyd of Tesla Labs and Theodore A. Postol, science professor at MIT. Parry says: “A new report by two American weapons specialists, entitled “Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelligence in the Damascus Nerve Agent Attack,” makes clear that the case presented by Kerry and the Obama administration was scientifically impossible because the range of the key rocket carrying Sarin was less than a third of what the U.S. government was claiming.

The President's speech on Friday, pre-empting the final report he commissioned on NSA restraints, is a good first step. So, we applaud a beginning in rolling back the Surveillance State aimed at the American people.