Nearly five years into the "war on terror," it’s still at the core of American media and politics.

    Yeah, I’ve seen the recent polls showing a drop in public support for President Bush’s "war on terror" claims. And I’ve read a spate of commentaries this month celebrating Bush’s current lack of political traction on the terrorism issue, like the New York Times piece by Frank Rich last Sunday triumphantly proclaiming that "the era of Americans’ fearing fear itself is over."

    That’s a comforting thought, hovering somewhere between complacent and delusional.

    Reflexive fear may be on vacation, but it hasn’t quit. The "war on terror" motif is fraying – but it remains close at hand as a mighty pretext for present and future warfare…

Read the full column.

The leading pro-war Democrat in the Senate is hoping for a landslide in the New York primary next month. And unless progressives quickly mobilize to dent her vote total, she’s likely to get it.

Hillary Clinton, of course, intends to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008. But first there’s her quest to win big for reelection. If antiwar voters cut into Clinton’s percentage in the primary on Sept. 12, despite overwhelming media visibility and a massive campaign war chest, her momentum would take a hit.

After Sen. Joe Lieberman lost to antiwar challenger Ned Lamont in Connecticut’s Democratic primary last week, I thought some more about the fast-approaching Senate race in New York, where anti-war candidate Jonathan Tasini (www.tasinifornewyork.org) will be on the ballot next to Clinton…

Read the full column.

Syndicated columnist Richard Cohen declared in the Washington Post on Tuesday that an-eye-for-an-eye would be a hopelessly wimpy policy for the Israeli government.

“Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that proportionality is madness,” he wrote. “For Israel, a small country within reach, as we are finding out, of a missile launched from any enemy’s back yard, proportionality is not only inapplicable, it is suicide. The last thing it needs is a war of attrition. It is not good enough to take out this or that missile battery. It is necessary to reestablish deterrence: You slap me, I will punch out your lights.”

Cohen likes to sit in front of a computer and use flip phrases like “punch out your lights” as euphemisms for burning human flesh and bones with high-tech weapons, courtesy of American taxpayers.

Read the full column.

After getting out of Lebanon, writer June Rugh told Reuters on Tuesday: "As an American, I’m embarrassed and ashamed. My administration is letting it happen [by giving] tacit permission for Israel to destroy a country." The news service quoted another American evacuee, Andrew Muha, who had been in southern Lebanon. He said: "It’s a travesty. There’s a million homeless in Lebanon and the intense amount of bombing has brought an entire country to its knees."

Embarrassing. Shameful. A travesty. Those kinds of words begin to describe the alliance between the United States and Israel. Here are a few more: Government criminality. High-tech terror. Mass murder from the skies. The kind of premeditated action that the U.S. representative in Nuremberg at the International Conference on Military Trials — Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson — was talking about on August 12, 1945, when he declared that "no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."

The United States and Israel. Right now, it’s the most dangerous alliance in the world.

Read the full column.

The Baghdad bureau chief of the New York Times could not have been any clearer.

“The story really takes us back into the 8th century, a truly barbaric world,” John Burns said. He was speaking Tuesday night on the PBS “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” describing what happened to two U.S. soldiers whose bodies had just been found. Evidently they were victims of atrocities, and no one should doubt in the slightest that the words of horror used by Burns to describe the “barbaric murders” were totally appropriate.

The problem is that Burns and his mass-media colleagues don’t talk that way when the cruelties are inflicted by the U.S. military — as if dropping bombs on civilians from thousands of feet in the air is a civilized way to terrorize and kill.

When journalists maintain a flagrant double standard in their language — allowing themselves appropriate moral outrage when Americans suffer but tiptoeing around what is suffered by victims of the U.S. military — the media window on the world is tinted a dark red-white-and-blue, and the overall result is more flackery than journalism.

Based on the available evidence from Abu Ghraib to Afghanistan to Guantanamo, anyone who claims that U.S. foreign policy does not include torture is disingenuous or deluded…

Read the full column.

Two years from now, Hillary Clinton might be pleased to hear the kind of boos and antiwar chants that greeted her days ago when she spoke at the annual Take Back America conference of Democratic activists and argued against a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. But so much of politics is about timing. And right now, Clinton is facing a serious problem of premature triangulation.
As long as she needs support from Democratic primary voters, Hillary Clinton will want to defer the media rewards of an all-out “Sister Souljah moment.” Let’s recall that in 1992, when Bill Clinton went out of his way to denounce the then-little-known rap singer Sister Souljah at a Rainbow Coalition conference, he’d already clinched the Democratic presidential nomination and was looking toward the general election.

Bill Clinton’s triangulation gambit, using Sister Souljah as a prop for his calculated move to ingratiate himself with establishment pundits, had been foreshadowed by a Washington Post article that reported the day before: “Some top advisers to Clinton argue that … he must become involved in highly publicized confrontations with one or more Democratic constituencies.” The constituency Clinton chose to polarize with was African-American activists.

These days, and from here to the horizon, there’s no larger or more adamant Democratic constituency than the antiwar voters who want the U.S. military out of Iraq pronto. At this point, Hillary Clinton’s pro-war position is far afield from the views of most grassroots Democrats.

Read the full column.

The scheduled speech by Sen. Hillary Clinton at the “Take Back America 2006” conference in Washington on June 13 is likely to intensify discussion about her relationship with the progressive grassroots of the Democratic Party.

Many weeks ago the conference sponsor, the Campaign for America’s Future, sent out an email telling prospective attendees: “As in years past, we expect America’s most prominent progressive leaders to attend and address the conference. Invited speakers include…” On the list was Hillary Clinton…

Read the full column.