War Made Easy has gone into national home-video release. The DVD is also available online.
Reviews of the War Made Easy documentary
Video of Norman Solomon's interview on C-SPAN "Washington Journal" discussing Obama and the war in Afghanistan
War Made Easy has gone into national home-video release. The DVD is also available online.
Reviews of the War Made Easy documentary
Video of Norman Solomon's interview on C-SPAN "Washington Journal" discussing Obama and the war in Afghanistan
When approaching Iran, the Republican Party line and the Hugo Chavez line are running in opposite directions -- but parallel. The leadership of GOP reaction and the leadership of Bolivarian revolution have bought into the convenient delusion that long-suffering Iranian people require assistance from the U.S. government to resist the regime in Tehran.
Inside Iran, advocates for reform and human rights have long pleaded for the U.S. government to keep out of Iranian affairs. After the CIA organized the coup that overthrew Iran's democracy in 1953, Washington kept the Shah in power for a quarter century. When I was in Tehran four years ago, during the election that made Mahmoud Ahmadinejad president, what human rights activists most wanted President Bush to do was shut up.
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Days ago, a warning shot from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue landed with a thud on Capitol Hill near some recent arrivals in the House. The political salvo was carefully aimed and expertly fired. But in the long run, it could boomerang.
As a close vote neared on a supplemental funding bill for more war in Iraq and Afghanistan, The San Francisco Chronicle reported that "the White House has threatened to pull support from Democratic freshmen who vote no." In effect, it was so important to President Obama to get the war funds that he was willing to paint a political target on the backs of some of the gutsiest new progressives in Congress.
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Despite the pronouncements from high Washington places that the problems of Afghanistan can't be solved by military means, 90 percent of the spending for Afghanistan in the Obama administration's current supplemental bill is military...
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To understand what's up with President Obama as he escalates the war in Afghanistan, there may be no better place to look than a book published 25 years ago. "The March of Folly," by historian Barbara Tuchman, is a chilling assessment of how very smart people in power can do very stupid things -- how a war effort, ordered from on high, goes from tic to repetition compulsion to obsession -- and how we, with undue deference and lethal restraint, pay our respects to the dominant moral torpor to such an extent that mass slaughter becomes normalized in our names...
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There are many reasons progressives will mobilize behind the campaign of Marcy Winograd, who announced on Monday that she'll challenge incumbent Congresswoman Jane Harman in the 2010 Democratic primary.
In the Arctic, sea ice is melting. In the United States, houses are foreclosing.
And in Washington, the Senate is becoming a real-life Bermuda Triangle for progressive agendas.
Proposals for major limits on carbon emissions aren't getting far in the Senate, where the corporate war on the environment has an abundance of powerful allies...
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The second part of the interview on the Joan Kenley Show.
As President Obama enters his fourth month in office, two tendencies among progressive-minded Americans seem most hazardous to the political health of the country. The gist of one approach is that Obama can't do anything seriously wrong; the other is that he can't do anything seriously right.
Among the tendencies, the first is more widespread and more dangerous. All kinds of atrocious policies -- from Lyndon Johnson's war on Vietnam to Jimmy Carter's midterm swerve rightward to Bill Clinton's neoliberal measures such as NAFTA, "welfare reform" and Wall Street deregulation -- were calamities facilitated by acquiescence or mild dissent from many left-leaning Democrats...
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"Our 24/7 media cycle is dominated by opinionated news pundits and an onslaught of celebrity or person-of-the-moment headlines. Do we create a false reality from false information? How do our reactions impact our lives – personally and collectively – from politics to war to the economy to our planet’s very survival?
Not afraid to challenge media spin with their own brand of truth-telling, Peter and Norman share their wisdom on how to best navigate through all the noise."
Norman Solomon was interviewed on WOSU.
Top Democrats and many prominent supporters - with vocal agreement, tactical quibbles or total silence - are assisting the escalation of the US war effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The predictable results will include much more killing and destruction. Back home, on the political front, the escalation will drive deep wedges into the Democratic Party...
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Is your representative speaking out against escalation of the Afghanistan war?
Last week, some members of Congress sent President Obama a letter that urged him to "reconsider" his order deploying 17,000 additional US troops to Afghanistan...
One of several journalists in Afghanistan on a tour "organized by the staff of commanding Gen. David D. McKiernan," The Washington Post's Jackson Diehl, wrote a March 23 op-ed in support of an invigorated "counterinsurgency strategy." With journalistic resolve...
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Early this winter, the PBS "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" interviewed the medical director at a community clinic in Northern California. He recalled the sight of military equipment moving along railroad tracks next to his office. "I've joked with my colleagues," Dr. David Katz said, "if we could just get one of those Abrams tanks we could probably fund all the primary care clinics for a year."
The comment didn't make it on the air - it was only included in video on a PBS Web site - and that was unfortunate. We need more public focus on what our tax dollars are buying...
Read the full San Francisco Chronicle op-ed
Hours after President Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress, The New York Times printed the news that he plans to gradually withdraw "American combat forces" from Iraq during the next 18 months. The newspaper reported that the advantages of the pullout will include "relieving the strain on the armed forces and freeing up resources for Afghanistan."
The president's speech had little to say about the plans for escalation, but the few words will come back to haunt...
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by Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 19 (IPS) - The United States is planning to send an additional 17,000 troops to one of the world's most battle-scarred nations - Afghanistan - long described as "a graveyard of empires".
First, it was the British Empire, and then the Soviet Union. So, will the United States be far behind?
"With his new order on Afghanistan, President (Barack) Obama has given substantial ground to what Martin Luther King Jr., in 1967 called 'the madness of militarism'", Norman Solomon, executive director of the Washington-based Institute for Public Accuracy, told IPS.
"That madness should be opposed in 2009," said Solomon, author of 'War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.'
The proposed surge in U.S. troops will bring the total to 60,000, while the combined forces from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), including troops from Germany, Canada, Britain and the Netherlands, amount to over 32,000...
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The United States began its war in Afghanistan 88 months ago. "The war on terror" has no sunset clause. As a perpetual emotion machine, it offers to avenge what can never heal and to fix grief that is irreparable.
For the crimes against humanity committed on Sept. 11, 2001, countless others are to follow, with huge conceits about technological "sophistication" and moral superiority. But if we scrape away the concrete of media truisms, we may reach substrata where some poets have dug...
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A few days after the inauguration, in a piece celebrating the arrival of the Obama administration, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote that the new president has clearly signaled "No more crazy wars."
I wish.
Last week - and 44 years ago - there were many reasons to celebrate the inauguration of a president after the defeat of a right-wing Republican opponent. But in the midst of numerous delightful fragrances in the air, a bad political odor is apt to be almost ineffable...
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