FRANCE’S ALGERIAN NIGHTMARE
December 21, 2012 Marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the frightful Algerian Independence War, French President Francois Hollande did the right thing last Thursday by recognizing the...
View ArticleThe Mother of all Battles
16 March 2013 NEW YORK – This month marks the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War. In October, 2002, I wrote a cover-story about Iraq for the first issue of American Conservative Magazine, entitled “The...
View Article“ON NE PASSE PAS!” THE UNKNOWN VICTORY OF THE SOUTHERN MAGINOT LINE
June 22, 2013 SOSPEL, FRANCE – The wild Maritime Alps are the most remote and least known part of this country, a chain of vertiginous, snow-capped peaks and narrow defiles running due south along the...
View ArticleARE WE BECOMING WHAT WE ONCE HATED?
August 3, 2013 In the late 1980’s, an old friend of mine based in Moscow was calling her husband in the USA late one night. She said it was a “typical dumb husband/wife call,” mostly about a broken...
View ArticleTHE US SAVES ISRAEL IN THE 1973 WAR
October 12, 2013 Forty years ago–6 October 1973 – Egyptian forces stormed the supposedly “impregnable” Israeli Bar Lev fortifications along the Suez Canal. Syrian forces advanced onto the...
View ArticleTHE PHONY PULLOUT FROM AFGHANISTAN
December 7, 2013 Those wondering what lies in store for Afghanistan need only look at the way the British Empire ruled Iraq in the 1920’s. As Shakespeare wrote, “what is past is prologue.” Imperial...
View ArticleTHE ROAD TO WAR
Feb. 27, 2014 The surging crisis in Ukraine is a dramatic example of how wars begin. Take arrogance, toxic nationalism, tribalism, moral outrage and profound miscalculation, mix thoroughly, and, voilà...
View ArticleAFGHAN ELECTIONS FOR ANOTHER FAKE REGIME
April 5, 2014 Afghanistan’s national election held this week is a sham. A group of candidates, handpicked by the US, will pretend to compete in an election whose outcome has already been determined –...
View ArticleTHE BRIDGE THAT BEGAN THE GREAT WAR
May, 17, 2014 PARIS – Of the many bridges that span the Seine River, none is more beautiful nor majestic than the Pont Alexandre III. Just south of the splendid Grand Palais, this bridge was named in...
View ArticleTHE GREAT WESTERN GAS FIASCO
May 24, 2014 GENEVA – Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin usually wears a perfect poker face. But last week in Shanghai, the icy-cold Russian president came awfully close to bursting into a big grin. And...
View ArticleWAR OF THE RISING SUN
June 28, 2014 As we near the grim anniversary of World War I, let us remember the first great war of the blood-soaked 20th Century. Shortly before midnight on 8 February, 1904, Japanese destroyers and...
View ArticleISRAEL’S 155mm CURE FOR ‘TERRORISM’
July 27, 2014 NEW YORK – In 1956, Britain and France were convinced that Egypt’s charismatic nationalist leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was threatening what was left of their Mideast and African colonial...
View ArticleWORLD WAR ONE: TRAGEDY OF TRAGEDIES
2 August 2014 The 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I is upon us. Well we should mourn this cataclysmic event and continue to draw lessons from it. As a former soldier and military...
View Article“EDDY CHEVVY,” GORBY, AND THE FALL OF THE WALL
November 8, 2014 Margolis Interview with Shevardnadze Twenty-five years ago this week, the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe was collapsing. The Berlin Wall had been breached. The Communist East German...
View ArticleNO GOOD WAR; NO BAD PEACE
November 15, 2014 A full century after World War I we still cannot understand how generals sent so many soldiers to be slaughtered. Ten million soldiers died on all sides; millions more were left...
View ArticleFASCISM IS COMING ALIVE AGAIN
February 28, 2015 The wildly exaggerated threat of so-called Islamic terrorism is being shamelessly used by some western governments to boost their flagging fortunes at a time of economic...
View Article“GET ME A BATTLESHIP!”
March 7, 2015 NEW YORK – During World War II, the very drunk American humorist Robert Benchley, decked out in a tux and top hat, came staggering out of the tony Sherry-Netherlands Hotel....
View ArticleChurchill’s disaster – Gallipoli
April 19, 2015 One hundred years ago this month -April 1915 – the Allies and Germany were stalemated on the Western Front. Winston Churchill, the young, ambitious First Lord of the British...
View ArticleSTALIN’S SOVIET UNION DEFEATED GERMANY – WE SHOULD NOT FORGET
May 9, 2015 It was churlish for western leaders to boycott this week’s Victory Parade in Moscow that commemorated the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany 70 years ago. Historic events are facts...
View ArticleTHE ROHINGYA – ADRIFT ON A SEA OF SORROWS
30 MAY 2015 When is genocide not really genocide? When the victims are small, impoverished brown people no wants or cares about – Burma’s Rohingya. Their plight has finally commanded some media...
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