Peter Hallward, author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment, writes in the Guardian on yet another "shameful betrayal" of the Haitian people.
A new edition of Damming the Flood will be published on 12th January 2010, updated with a substantial new afterword addresssing the international response to the earthquake.
Almost everyone now accepts that the United Nations brought cholera to Haiti last month ... Probably as a result of UN negligence, more than 1,200 people are already dead and 20,000 infected, and the toll is set to rise rapidly over the coming weeks. So is the number and intensity of popular protests against this latest in a series of UN crimes and misadventures in Haiti in recent years, which include scores of killings and hundreds of alleged rapes.
This week for Tomdispatch Nick Turse, author of The Case for Withdrawal From Afghanistan, reveals a disturbing trend in Iraq that counters Obama's August 31st announcement of the "end of our combat mission in Iraq," showing it as another potential "mission accomplished" moment:
The construction projects are sprouting like mushrooms: walled complexes, high-strength weapons vaults, and underground bunkers with command and control capacities—and they're being planned and funded by a military force intent on embedding itself ever more deeply in the Middle East.
Sir Raymond Carr, the renowned historian of Spain, has reviewed Ronald Fraser's In Search of a Past for the Spectator. While Fraser and Carr may differ somewhat in their views on the aristocracy, Carr finds the book "a compelling read."
Chalmers Johnson, whose critiques of the American Empire and its unsustainability—Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis—grow more powerful and uncanny each year, has passed away. We have lost a giant, but his work will continue to reverberate for a long time to come.