John Baker’s Blog

On AlterNet, David Michael Green, professor of political science at Hofstra University, examines some aspects of American Foreign Policy and asks, If America Loves Peace So Much, Why Are We Always At War?
Maybe we can detect America’s dislike for war in another metric, say military spending. Oops. Turns out that’s going to be a bit [...]

Michele Neubert, NBC News Producer, has a nice article about the re-awakening of the al-Mutanabi book market in the centre of Baghdad.
“It’s an old disease in Iraq – people spend their money on books, not on food. Iraqi intellectuals are very poor because of it.”
The district was attacked by a suicide car-bomber last March, [...]

Sam Smith on Undernews has some pertinent observations about the so-called struggle against terrorism:
The journalist Bernard Fall noted that the French, after Dien Bien Phu, had no choice but to leave Southeast Asia. America, with its vast military, financial, and technological resources, was able to stay because it had the capacity to keep making the [...]