Tariq Ali on "The Obama Syndrome"

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6/20/2011
Juan Gonzalez on America's role in Latin America

5/13/2011
Adam Hochschild on how World War I began

4/29/2011
Manning Marable, 1950 - 2011, dies days before publication of his biography of Malcolm X

2/2/2011
Edward Herman and David Peterson on Julian Assange and Luis Posada Carriles

1/28/2011
Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune

12/1/2010
American scholar Chalmers Johnson, 1931 - 2010

11/8/2010
Susan Reverby has won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for Examining Tuskegee

10/25/2010
Fractal Mathmematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot, 1924 – 2010

10/21/2010
Mohammed Arkoun, Islamic scholar who explored Enlightenment ideals, 1928-2010

10/10/2010
Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa wins Nobel Prize

9/20/2010
Tariq Ali on "The Obama Syndrome"

9/10/2010
Historian and public intellectual Tony Judt, 1948 - 2010

8/31/2010
Former U.S. Senator James Abourezk on Leaders in Hiding

8/23/2010
David Kirby on something else we feed chickens

8/5/2010
Andrew J. Bacevich on How to Dismantle the American Empire

8/1/2010
Stacy Malkan on Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry

7/10/2010
Joy Gordon on the Invisble War, the United States and Iraq Sanctions

6/26/2010
Tom Engelhardt on the American Way of War

6/25/2010
Writer, critic and activist Carlos Monsiváis, 1938 - 2010

6/8/2010
He is totally unreproducible — he was sui generis — Martin Gardner, 1914 - 2010

6/7/2010
Joe Meadors: I seem to have all the bad luck in the world when it comes to the Israelis.

5/30/2010
Historian Bruce Cumings on the rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula

5/12/2010
How the hell did it happen? - Daniel Okrent on how Prohibition democratized drinking and made the income tax possible

5/6/2010
"We have more than an oil slick out of control, we also have these big corporations out of control." - Marine toxicologist Rikki Ott on the BP and Exxon Valdez oil spills.

4/24/2010
"This is too important. We cannot leave this to governments": Cormac Cullinan on the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights

4/6/2010
Anarchist, poet, publisher and chess-player, John Rety, 1930 - 2010

4/4/2010
"Literature was another victim of the war": Miguel Delibes, 1920 - 2010

3/24/2010
The beautiful brain of Sherman Alexie: War Dances wins 2010 Pen/Faulkner Award

3/13/2010
It's terrible to be possessed by brittle things: Elena Fanailova's The Russian Version wins the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry

3/7/2010
Translator, critic and BBC script editor, Barbara Bray, 1924 - 2010

2/28/2010
Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award to D. A. Powell

2/24/2010
The banks have had nine months to creatively increase the real cost of borrowing: Robert Manning on Credit Card Nation

2/9/2010
Robert McChesney and John Nichols the history and necessity of government subsides for US journalism

2/5/2010
Of course, I’d forgotten she’d died: An extract from A Scattering by Christopher Reid, the 2009 Costa Book of the Year

1/30/2010
Tributes to People's Historian Howard Zinn, 1922 - 2010

1/24/2010
Johann Hari on P. W. Singer's Wired For War

1/23/2010
Jamin Raskin on the Supreme Court campaign finance ruling which removes limits on corporate campaign spending

1/16/2010
"Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom", Tracy Kidder and Peter Hallward on Haiti

1/2/2010
At 42, she was one of the best poets of her generation, Rachel Wetzsteon, 1967 - 2009

12/27/2009
You have to decide which side you are on: there is always a side. Commitment does not exist in an abstraction; it exists in action: Dennis Brutus, 1924 - 2009

12/19/2009
The wedding guests look upon the cracked, pink lips of Rosie's bridegroom - an extract from Petina Gappah's An Elegy for Easterly, the 2009 Guardian First Book Award winning book

12/12/2009
David Cortright on Obama's shallow understanding of the priciples of Just War Theory

11/26/2009
Obama's rejection of Landmine Treaty lacks vision, compassion, and basic common sense

11/22/2009
Those who saw him hushed: Let the Great World Spin, the National Book Award winner by Colum McCann

11/15/2009
Robert Jensen: Of Turkeys and Holocausts

11/8/2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1908 - 2009, his works as a practical anti-racist manifesto

11/7/2009
Power exercised by man over his fellow man is always a usurpation, Francisco Ayala, 1906 - 2009

11/1/2009
If you think you'll to be rich someday, why resent million-dollar bonuses: Barbara Ehrenreich on Positive Thinking

10/21/2009
Four Canadians tortured in the name of fighting Terror, Kerry Pither wins Ottawa Book Award for Dark Days

10/14/2009
The Potato that Became a Tomato, Playgiarist Raymond Federman, 1928 - 2009

9/20/2010 Tariq Ali on "The Obama Syndrome"

What has really changed since Obama replaced Bush in the White House. Very little, argues Tariq Ali in his latest book, The Obama Syndrome: Surrender At Home, War Abroad, apart from the mood music.

I know some of his supporters might feel it’s a little harsh, but I think that we’ve had two years of him now, Amy, and the contours of this administration are now visible. And essentially, it is a conservative administration which has changed the mood music. So the talk is better. The images of the administration are better, the reasonable looks. But in terms of what they do—in foreign policy, we’ve seen a continuation of the Bush-Cheney policies, and worse, in AfPak, as they call it, and at home, we’ve seen a total capitulation to the lobbyists, to the corporations. The fact that the healthcare bill was actually drafted by someone who used to be an insurance lobbyist says it all.

Let’s look at it concretely. Bush had promised exactly the same withdrawal pattern from Iraq: by this time, we will be out. Obama has followed it. They’re not going out. What is essentially happening, they’re reducing the presence of combat troops and eliminating it in the big cities, and building six huge military bases all over Iraq, in which they’ll keep between fifty and sixty thousand soldiers, ready to act when the need be—just like the British did when they occupied Iraq in the '20s and ’30s of the last century. And the British were then driven out by a violent upheaval and revolution in the ’50s. So the US is keeping these bases in, (a) to control Iraq, and (b) as a warning to Iran. And I think there's going to be trouble.

The war isn’t over at all. We’ve seen, just a few days ago, huge explosions in Baghdad and Fallujah. It’s a total disaster and a mess. And to present that as somehow "mission accomplished part two" is a joke. That country has been wrecked, a million Iraqis dead, its social infrastructure destroyed. And in Afghanistan, they are now going from bad to worse. They know, and General Eikenberry knows and says, we cannot win this war militarily. They can’t lose it, but they can’t win it, either. So, political solution is the only way out, and that means that they have to have an exit strategy. Obama isn’t even talking about that, because that might be construed as a sign of weakness. But by who? The army knows what’s going on. They can’t stay there forever. - Tariq Ali, speaking to Amy Goodman on DemocracyNow!

In Cairo, at West Point, at Oslo, Obama has treated the world to one uplifting homily after another, each address larded with every euphemism that White House speechwriters can muster to describe America’s glowing mission in the world: ‘Our country has borne a special burden in global affairs’; ‘Our cause is just, our resolve unwavering.’ The model for this variant of imperial presidency is Woodrow Wilson—no less pious a Christian, whose every second word was peace, democracy or self-determination, while his armies invaded Mexico, occupied Haiti and attacked Russia. But cant still goes a long way to satisfy those who yearn for it... - Tariq Ali, from The Obama Syndrome.

The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad
Tariq Ali
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The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power
Tariq Ali
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1968: Marching in the Streets
Tariq Ali, Susan Watkins
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Bush in Babylon: The Recolinisation of Iraq
Tariq Ali
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The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity
Tariq Ali
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