Salon

Was the suicide bomber attack at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan on Tuesday an attempted assassination of Vice President Dick Cheney or a horse's head in his bed?The day before, Cheney had delivered a stinging message to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf -- U.S. aid would be withheld unless Pakistan supported strikes against Taliban and al-Qaida forces that have nestled in Pakistan as a sanctuary, where they have gathered strength in anticipation of a spring offensive against the Afghan… more

Hezbollah operatives plant explosives along the disputed border area between Lebanon and Israel. The Israeli military moves in and destroys them. Israeli and Lebanese forces engage in sporadic gun battles.It may sound like the prelude to the war waged last summer between the Israeli military and Hezbollah, but it happened just last week. Tensions are running high along the Israel-Lebanon border again, and political and intelligence analysts are predicting another major flare-up of hostilities this spring or summer,… more

On the sidelines of a recent security conference in Oman, a former high-ranking Iranian official turned to a Saudi colleague and said: "You are overestimating our influence in Iraq. We are not as powerful as you think." A few moments later, the Iranian smiled and added, "But don't underestimate our influence, either."

Such calculated ambiguity has become a familiar feature of Iranian foreign policy, particularly regarding its role in Iraq, its nuclear stance and, of course, its support for Hamas… more

Events in Iraq have long ceased to dominate the news. The trial of Saddam Hussein, which the media once seized on as yet another "defining moment," has been lost amid the daily repetition of car bombs, assassinations, the countless numbers of Iraqi and American dead. It is a sideshow for Iraqis, who are too busy trying to stay alive, and a bore for Americans, who have ceased to be interested in the war's many retroactive justifications. But the show in… more

In the spring and summer of 2004, the radical young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr led an armed uprising against the U.S. occupiers. His militia, the Mahdi army, fought several bloody battles against American forces. Muqtada's intifada, along with the Sunni insurgency that broke out in Fallujah at the same time, spelled doom for the neocon fantasy that the U.S. occupation would be a cakewalk. High-ranking U.S. officials called for Muqtada to be captured or killed. But the fiery cleric not… more

Politics involves the art of achieving the possible. Rarely do you get what you want, so you take what you can get. But when it comes to electoral reform, reformers run the risk of overpromising in trying to gain attention for their particular issue -- and can end up underdelivering, increasing voters' cynicism.

Two of the most talked-about electoral reforms in the past decade have been the public financing of election campaigns and the use of independent commissions to redraw… more

I don't have anything against dolls, but part of me has always found them a little creepy -- their inert perfection, their blinky eyes, the way you find them in odd corners of the house, limbs akimbo, as if dropped from a great height. As a child, I had a Barbie with a frothy black cocktail dress and a Heidi doll I was fond of, though I could never get her hair rigged back up into those cinnamon buns on… more

"Guantanamo," now playing in New York, warns that the liberties the U.S. government has taken abroad in the name of homeland security present grave threats to our own civil liberties.

There's something happening here. And with apologies to the '60s rock group Buffalo Springfield, what it is, is exactly clear. In times of war, governments naturally seek to clamp down on dissent and disagreement. And people mostly support such clamping; loose lips, after all, sink ships. Only occasionally, at least in… more

Whaddya know. Two investigations, both spawned by the Pentagon, have cleared the Pentagon in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. Cleared the higher-ups, at least. The lower-downs are on their own, fodder for the judicial and reportorial cannons. A shocking, shocking turn of events -- although perhaps not as shocking as a third investigation, in which a defense official who boasted about snapping a picture of Satan has been cleared for further duty.

On Tuesday, the Schlesinger commission, consisting of… more

As a sense of gloom about Iraq escalated along with the fighting the past two weeks, so did neoconservative calls to "stay the course" -- even if it's a course to nowhere.

Once, the right painted visions of cakewalks, of jubilant Iraqis welcoming their own conquest, of blossoming secular pro-Western democracy. Now that mirage has dissipated. Following President George W. Bush's press conference last Tuesday, neocon Bill Kristol told the Los Angeles Times, "I was depressed." The publisher of the… more