via Lobe Log
by Marsha B. Cohen
Taking advantage of the delay in the vote on Chuck Hagel’s nomination to the Senate, the spinmeisters of the anti-Hagel propaganda machine have a new charge to hurl at the former Nebraska Senator. Ben Shapiro of Breitbart.com claims that “Senate sources” have told him that Hagel secretly accepted a campaign [...]
via Lobe Log
by Robert E. Hunter
To say that President Barack Obama’s visit this spring to Israel, the West Bank and Jordan is the proverbial gamble is an understatement. He may end up (rightly) congratulating himself on his wisdom and courage in taking this step and doing so at this time — and [...]
via Lobe Log
Not too long ago, John McCain considered Chuck Hagel to be one of the leading voices on national security and foreign policy in the Senate. “I’d be honored to have Chuck with me in any capacity,” McCain said in 2006. Although the two had disagreed about Iraq policy for the past [...]
via Lobe Log
The smear campaign against Chuck Hagel did not begin on Dec. 14, 2012. The former Nebraska senator’s opposition to war as the preferred means of conducting foreign policy made him a maverick during the post-9/11 Bush years. Although most Republicans agreed with Hagel’s socially conservative positions on domestic issues, his nuanced [...]
via IPS News
WASHINGTON, Dec 6 2012 (IPS) - Increasingly distressed over the possible consequences of Israel’s recent steps to punish the Palestinian Authority (PA) and consolidate its hold on the West Bank, a number of prominent voices here are urging President Barack Obama to exert real pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu [...]
via Lobe Log
The bad news about Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s expanding constitutional powers in Egypt is the threat of another dictatorship in Egypt. The good news is that normal politics is returning to Egypt after decades of brutal authoritarian regimes.
Recent mass demonstrations in support of and opposition to Morsi’s new draft constitution [...]
via Lobe Log
The vote in the United Nations General Assembly on the Palestinian application for non-member status is a foregone conclusion. They’re going to win and it’s not really going to matter much, at least in the short term. Nonetheless, the decidedly warped world of diplomacy around the Israel-Palestine conflict has managed to [...]
via Lobe Log
You will not hear me say this often, but Hossein Shariatmadari — Iran’s irascible and intractable editor of the hardline Kayhan daily — makes one important point in this editorial. Although a few months ago Iran’s leader Ali Khamenei referred in general terms to the fact that Iran had been [...]
via Lobe Log
By Richard Javad Heydarian
The recent war in Gaza has been portrayed as a political dividend for the main protagonists, namely Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Egypt’s Mohammad Morsi, and the Hamas leadership in Gaza, despite the tremendous psychological, infrastructural and humanitarian costs borne by innocent civilians, especially the Palestinians.
As Hamas and [...]
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Hagel and the Hawks
via Lobe Log
Chuck Hagel hasn’t even been nominated for Secretary of Defense and yet rumors abound that he is a frontrunner for the job. The volume of the squawking from hard-line hawks opposing his nomination reveals much about the way the neoconservative echo chamber operates.
Morris Amitay, a former executive director of [...]