Dissent Mag

15/05/2008 11:02:00 AM GMT

How can we expect the military dictatorship of Myanmar to feel comfortable accepting our help?

By Pablo Ouziel

In the chaotic “west” it is often difficult to gain the attention of the public, but one must be committed to trying due to the severity of our current existential crisis.

We are psychotic as a society, we have become so manipulable that we are truly being led towards digging our own grave and smiling while working. We cannot go on like this. We cannot pretend that we are a decent society with good intentions any longer.

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by Tom Burghardt / May 15th, 2008

In the wake of Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and Susan Collins’ (R-ME) alarmist report, “Violent Islamist Extremism, the Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorism Threat,” the Senate may be moving towards passage of the Orwellian “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007″ (S. 1959).

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by Rodrigue Tremblay / May 15th, 2008

[U.S.] strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. …[His removal is absolutely vital to] the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century [and for] the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil.

– Neocons’ January 26, 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton

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by Richard C. Cook

Global Research, May 14, 2008

This article contains several forecasts, including the possible start of a major war with unforeseeable consequences, if the U.S. should happen to attack Iran .

Of course it is in the nature of forecasts to be speculative. There are also forecasts that are intended to serve as warnings and thereby contribute to preventing the events under analysis from ever taking place.

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Noam Chomsky interviewed by Paul Jay

The Real News Network, November 19, 2007

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR: ElBaradei, is the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, stated quite definitively there is no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran. The recent resolution—the Kyle-Lieberman amendment—and the recent U.S. sanctions against Iran, which one of the charges is that Iran has been helping what they call insurgents in Iraq. There’s practically no evidence of that either. Based on what we know as evidence, there’s not a lot of reasons for U.S. policy to be as aggressive right now towards Iran as it is, certainly not for the stated reason. What really does motivate U.S. policy towards Iran?

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By Tony Smith, MIT Center for International Studies. Posted May 15, 2008.

A Critical Look at the Forced Spread of Democracy

The first subject to discuss in considering the future of the liberal internationalist agenda is the importance of the democratization project to the definition of Wilsonianism. The second is the meaning of multilateralism. In the first case, Thomas Knock and Anne-Marie Slaughter argue in a forthcoming volume that democratization was never an important part of Wilsonianism; that, instead, multilateralism is the key to liberal internationalism. On the basis of this argument, they come to the conclusion that the Bush Doctrine is not in the Wilsonian tradition. In my contribution to this volume, I object to this denigration of the place of democracy in liberal internationalism as being fundamentally illogical. Accordingly, I find the Bush Doctrine easily identifiable as Wilsonian.

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