Ivan Eland
Dr. Eland is the author of the Independent Institute books "The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed," and "Putting 'Defense' Back into U.S. Defense Policy," as well as "The Efficacy of Economic Sanctions as a Foreign Policy Tool."
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Articles by Ivan Eland
July 21, 2009
The seeming irrationality behind the George W. Bush administration´s "against the grain" (and the law) policies on torture, warrantless domestic surveillance, and now notification of Congress about CIA covert operations was not irrational at all.
Most experts say that torture is counterprod...
July 14, 2009
The U.S. government is deeper in debt than it has been since just after World War II. When Bill Clinton, who actually reduced the federal deficit as a portion of GDP, left office, the Congressional Budget Office projected an $800 billion dollar yearly budget surplus for the years 2009 to 2012. Now C...
June 30, 2009
Barack Obama´s reaction to the mass protests and violence in Iran shows he is following through on his pledge to be more like George H.W. Bush rather than his son, George W. Bush. Obama has admired the father´s realism and has criticized the idealistic neo-conservatism of the son. But is...
June 24, 2009
When massive turmoil occurs in an important country, U.S. policymakers struggle to make heads or tails of it and arrive at an appropriate reaction. Kibitzers and pundits, however, have no trouble reaching immediate and sweeping conclusions and egging on the policymakers to further their own agendas....
June 16, 2009
One election in Iran will not significantly change U.S.-Iran relations—only a change in U.S. thinking and policy will do so.
Historically, the U.S. government, under both Republican and Democratic presidents, has painted relatively poor third world regimes that don´t toe the empire&a...
June 09, 2009
Fearing a new, more formidable opponent than the often buffoonish and macho cowboy George W. Bush, the two leaders of al Qaeda have tag teamed Barack Obama with twin audiotapes condemning him. Unlike Bush—who made little effort to understand the Islamic world and whom al Qaeda could easily bai...
June 02, 2009
Hillary Clinton´s blunt public statement that President Obama "wants to see a stop to settlements—not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions" made for good headlines. The Israelis were shocked and upset that their slavish ally had acted slightly less obsequious and...
May 21, 2009
Of all the countries lining up to get under the United States´ protective shield in the NATO alliance, the Ukraine is the most important for the United States and Russia. During Soviet times, the Ukraine was the breadbasket of the nation and also housed important industries within its borders....
May 15, 2009
A few—and only a few—prescient commentators have questioned whether the U.S. can sustain its informal global empire in the wake of the most severe economic crisis since World War II. And the simultaneous quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan are leading more and more opinion leaders and taxp...
May 05, 2009
Neo-conservatives used the Republican Party as a vehicle to promote and employ their policies of muscular nation-building overseas. But like the parasite that eventually kills its host, the Republican Party´s virtual collapse, in large part because of the failed nation-building adventure in Ir...
April 16, 2009
The Pentagon´s annual publication, "Military Power of the People´s Republic of China 2009," accused China of stocking its military with weapons that can be used to intimidate or attack Taiwan and mitigate U.S. air and naval superiority near its territory. Even if the Department of Defens...
April 02, 2009
President Warren Harding once said, "I have no trouble with my enemies," but noted that his friends "keep me walking the floor nights." That maxim should have applied to U.S. foreign policy since 9/11 and even before that.
It is sometimes puzzling why the U.S. government fears faraway countries t...
March 12, 2009
Shortly after Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he attempted to push the U.S. military to openly accept the reality that it had gays and lesbians in its ranks. Colin Powell, then Clinton´s top general, and Sam Nunn, the powerful Democratic Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, nixed...
March 02, 2009
A front page article in the New York Times starts out with the sentence: "The budget that President Obama proposed on Thursday is nothing less than an attempt to end a three-decade era of economic policy dominated by the ideas of Ronald Reagan and his supporters." Not so much.
Ronald Reagan, desp...
February 12, 2009
Now that their nemesis, George W. Bush, has left office, the mainstream media can be unbridled in their optimism about the future of Iraq. After 9/11, they chose to allow themselves to be duped by the Bush administration´s fairly lame reasons for the clearly unrelated U.S. invasion of Iraq and...
February 06, 2009
The Obama administration is reluctant to turn over too many rocks in the Bush administration´s conduct in the War on Terror. Obama has pledged to reach a post-partisan nirvana, and Republicans could condemn any investigation of Bush administration abuse of the republic as a partisan witch-hunt...
February 06, 2009
When you stop to think about it, people measure how well their lives are going not by their absolute state of being but by their situation relative to their expectations. For example, a poor person in a developing country may be ecstatic about getting a pair of shoes for the first time; in contrast,...
January 12, 2009
Somebody is going to have to whisper in President-elect Obama´s ear that the unipolar moment has passed and that the United States can no longer afford its informal worldwide empire. Even though the looming economic meltdown will likely be serious—and maybe even cataclysmic—the for...
January 06, 2009
The "Israeli model" has long been held up by hawks in the United States as the gold standard for dealing with adversarial nation-states, guerrillas, and terrorists. The storyline goes that Israel is a small country surrounded by aggressive enemies that use unfair measures (including terrorism) to tr...
December 15, 2008
General David Petraeus, the former military commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and author of the military´s most recent counterinsurgency manual, learned the lessons of the successful British counterinsurgency experience in Malaya in the 1950s. He was able to reduce the violence in Iraq by insti...
December 15, 2008
As rage coursed through India after the Mumbai terrorist bombings, Condoleezza Rice, the Bush administration´s Secretary of State, flew to India and cautioned the Indian government on avoiding a knee jerk and counterproductive response. She warned the Indians that "any response needs to be jud...
December 01, 2008
Upon Barack Obama´s election, the Russians made threats to U.S. allies over their acceptance of a U.S. missile defense system. Also, Russia recently sent its first large military force to Latin America since the end of the Cold War to participate in naval exercises off the Venezuelan coast. Is...
November 25, 2008
President-elect Barack Obama—showing the obligatory toughness toward foreign "evildoers" needed (especially by Democrats) in American political campaigns—pledged to use the American military to go after al Qaeda in Pakistan. Of all people, his hawkish rival, Senator John McCain, who supp...
November 19, 2008
Few incoming presidents have been left by their predecessors with as many challenges as Barack Obama. In fact, with the daunting terrain facing the incoming president, one wonders why Obama and John McCain even wanted the office.
Other presidents facing an uphill task when taking office were:
...
November 11, 2008
The Russian military was clearly superior to that of a small country in its "near abroad"—Georgia—but is a "resurgent" Russia a threat to the United States? If the United States insists on expanding its informal empire into Russia´s nearby sphere of influence, it has to expect some...
November 11, 2008
The media and the Washington foreign policy elite breathed a sigh of relief when Barack Obama thumped John McCain in the election. Had John McCain won, there was always the chance that the neoconservatives would have beaten out the Republican realists for his foreign policy soul. With a victory by t...
October 27, 2008
In the battle for endorsements in the presidential campaign, Barack Obama snared a strong nod from former Secretary of State Colin Powell and John McCain received an equally strong recommendation from al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda? Yes, you heard right, al-Qaeda! This endorsement indicates what has long bee...
October 10, 2008
In politics, truth telling can be dangerous. Remember when Jimmy Carter was voted out of office, in part, for telling the American people, in a time of high inflation and unemployment, what they didn´t want to hear—that they were self indulgent and consumed too much? Remember when Larry ...
September 20, 2008
In her "I´m just a hockey mom" speech at the Republican National Convention, Sarah Palin—who has rapidly rocketed from an unknown, recently-minted governor of Alaska to Republican Vice Presidential candidate—questioned, with a straight face, whether Barack Obama has had enough expe...
September 20, 2008
In the twilight of his eight-year term, George W. Bush is the loneliest guy in town these days. Remember him? With the economy in the tank, the Iraq War dragging on with casualties at 2004 levels (which we were all horrified about back then), Bush´s popularity is in the cellar and holding. Rep...
August 25, 2008
The U.S. Should Be Wary of Strongly Backing Georgia.
Despite significant U.S. and Georgian culpability in the crisis in Georgia, most U.S. politicians and media painted Russia as the diabolical "evildoer." As if the Russian military incursions into Georgia, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia—the...
August 07, 2008
The media, egged on by John McCain and his campaign, are going to twist the arm of Barack Obama until he cries "uncle" and admits the U.S. troop "surge" has worked in Iraq. So far, Obama has not cracked under the pressure and, for reasons of political expediency, admitted this dubious proposition.
...
August 07, 2008
Many opponents of the Bush administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq have always argued that this conflict is an irrelevant and even counterproductive sideshow to the real "war on terrorism" in Afghanistan. In fact, Barack Obama led the parade to initiate a troop surge in Afghanistan after ha...
June 10, 2008
From the administration that used the 9/11 tragedy to violently pursue an unrelated vendetta against Saddam Hussein´s Iraq, we get Round Two. After a cyclone devastated portions of Burma (which the despotic Burmese government has renamed Myanmar) and killed an estimated 100,000 people, instead...
May 12, 2008
More memos recently have surfaced that were written early in the Bush administration by John C. Yoo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel -- the man who gave us the administration's horrifyingly narrow definition of torture. As difficult as it is to believe, the recently released mem...
March 26, 2008
As the fifth anniversary of the United States´ second-longest (next to Vietnam) and second-costliest (next to World War II) war passes, the good news is that the counterinsurgency strategy of Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno seems to be working. The bad news is that it will pro...
February 05, 2008
Now that the deadline has passed without an international agreement on the future of Kosovo—the Serbian province that has enjoyed autonomy under the tutelage of the United Nations since the NATO-Serb war of 1999—a showdown in the U.N. Security Council looms. No matter what the outcome of...
December 05, 2007
Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf is now teetering on the edge of the abyss, just as I predicted in the spring of 2007. He was pushed there by U.S. policy, and worse yet, his country is armed with nukes. To prevent the Pakistani Supreme Court from declaring him ineligible to serve another te...
October 24, 2007
In an otherwise divisive, partisan debate on the Iraq war, the 75-23 bipartisan Senate vote to divide Iraq into autonomous regions was astounding. People who disagree on everything else about Iraq, such as conservative Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and liberal Democrat Barbara Boxer of Ca...
October 24, 2007
The Bush administration is attempting to soothe the Turkish government’s apoplectic reaction to the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s label of “genocide” on Turkey’s slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians, which occurred almost a century ago. The administration fears that an enraged Turkish ally, alread...
August 20, 2007
If a restaurant, dry cleaner, or home repair business provided inferior goods or shoddy services, it is likely that the concern would go belly up. Yet when the U.S. government makes a blunder, the more its citizens reward its failure with further money and authority.
For example, after the Bush a...
July 19, 2007
Those of us who opposed the expansion of NATO in 1999 (admitting Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic) and 2004 (Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and the former Soviet republics of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania) warned that it would lead to problems with Russia. Those problems have arrived...
July 10, 2007
As Congress begins to consider the Iraq War funding bill, defections by important Republican Senators have caused a White House debate on whether to try to get ahead of the onrushing train to leave Iraq. In the Bush administration’s surreal parallel universe, this “post surge redeployment”—normal pe...
July 03, 2007
When U.S. government officials and foreign policy pundits discuss terrorism, they usually focus on the characteristics, personnel, history, tactics, targets, objectives and effects of terrorist organizations. They rarely talk about motives.
To fully understand Islamic terrorism, one needs to unde...
June 19, 2007
The Bush administration may live in a bubble of “unreality,” regarding its foreign policy in Iraq, but neo-conservatives inhabit a parallel universe on Iran. Unbelievably, despite the fact that the U.S. quagmire in Iraq has greatly weakened the U.S. position vis-à-vis Iran, the neocons are pushing f...
June 11, 2007
The Iraq War has made refugees of millions of Iraqis. They have been ethnically cleansed or displaced to other locations both inside the country, to neighboring countries, and overseas. Yet the Bush administration, the creator of the chaos and mayhem in Iraq, has done little to help them.
Accordi...
June 11, 2007
The Bush administration has decided its new model for a long-term solution in Iraq is Korea. It’s an attempt to stifle the inevitable comparisons of the Iraq quagmire to Vietnam and a way to justify the eventual reduction of U.S. forces in Iraq (to take the heat off Republican candidates in the 2008...
May 30, 2007
The Bush administration has failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden or to win the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, the administration has also missed the chance to maintain a stable nuclear-armed Pakistan. Like the U.S. policy toward the Shah’s Iran in the 1960s and 1970s, the Bush administratio...
May 23, 2007
After initially spurning the Iraq Study Group’s (ISG) recommendations, President Bush now seems inclined toward the ISG’s recommendation of transforming the U.S. military’s role from fighting insurgents and militias into a smaller force that would train Iraqi forces in seeming perpetuity. Although t...
May 15, 2007
With its usual tin ear for public relations, the Bush administration provided another “Kodak moment” of incompetent belligerence by yet again sending a high-level administration official to use an aircraft carrier as a prop for a hawkish rant. Vice President Dick Cheney did manage to refrain from di...
May 08, 2007
The Bush administration and Congress have put too much faith in governments—the U.S. as well as the Iraqi—to remedy the chaos in Iraq. To keep the pressure on the administration for eventual U.S. troop withdrawals, the Democrats have already begun to blame the Iraqi government for not meeting benchm...
May 01, 2007
President Bush’s plan to deploy missile defenses in Central Europe will reduce U.S. security, not enhance it. Installing radar for tracking incoming missiles in the Czech Republic and anti-missile interceptors in Poland could do more harm than good.
Ostensibly, the European radar and interceptors...
April 23, 2007
Michael Chertoff, President Bush’s secretary of Homeland Security, desperately tried to refute Zbigniew Brzezinski’s cogent charge that the administration has hyped the “war on terror” to promote a “culture of fear,” in a recent Washington Post op-ed. In addition to shamefully smearing Brzezinski, J...
April 16, 2007
America’s problems in Afghanistan and Iraq may have one positive effect: They will cause the U.S. public to withhold support for future military interventions that are not absolutely necessary for U.S. security. That’s exactly what has happened in the past and there’s no reason to believe the curren...
April 12, 2007
The media often report overseas developments, but don’t always explore their underlying causes, which, in many cases, conveniently lets the U.S. government off the hook. The recent internecine violence in Somalia provides a classic example.
The U.S. media have focused to date almost exclusively o...
April 04, 2007
President Bush has scolded House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for visiting Syria. In the president’s opinion, shared by others, the U.S. government should speak with just one voice overseas. Yet that view flies in the face of both the text and the spirit of the Constitution.
Before the rise of the post–W...
March 26, 2007
The conventional wisdom for dealing with Iran is demanding repeatedly that the Iranians end their uranium enrichment program, and slapping on new sanctions. Although the December 2006 United Nations Security Council sanctions that banned countries from exporting nuclear and missile materials and tec...
March 22, 2007
The Bush administration, desperate for justifications to buy a little more time with the American people for its failed adventure in Iraq, markets the idea that if the United States rapidly withdraws from Iraq, the “terrorists will follow us home.” A closer examination of this assertion—like the res...
March 12, 2007
In its newly released annual report on the status of human rights around the world, the U.S. State Department disparages a long list of nations about their violations of individual freedoms. The report notes that countries in which power is concentrated in the hands of unaccountable rulers, whether ...
March 11, 2007
The bulk of expert opinion predicts that the Bush administration’s escalation strategy in Iraq will fail. The void created by the administration’s lack of a back–up plan for that outcome has been filled with proposals from pundits, academics, and think–tank analysts, who recommend containing Iraq’s ...
March 09, 2007
While media attention has been focused on the U.S. quagmire in Iraq, an equally failed war in Afghanistan has received little coverage. As in countless militaristic U.S. nation–building fiascos, “mission creep” in Afghanistan is leading to another foreign policy disaster. Although the escalation in ...
February 21, 2007
As President Bush continues his Nixonesque policy of “exiting” Iraq by escalation and intimidation, both Republican and Democratic politicians are also imitating the Vietnam-era rhetoric of blaming the citizens of the chaotic country and their neighbors for the mess. In fact, the politicians are bla...
February 14, 2007
President Vladimir Putin of Russia recently bluntly lashed out at U.S. foreign policy. At an international security conference with U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in attendance, referring to U.S. actions in the international arena, Putin said, “Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained h...
February 06, 2007
Each year, one of the most important events in the nation’s capital is the release of the federal budget. Yet the media provides insufficient coverage because the budget is technical, unglamorous, and requires hard work sifting through mounds of data to uncover the key truths. It is much sexier to c...
February 03, 2007
There have been pop psychology explanations that attribute President Bush 43’s aggressive foreign policy decisions to a rivalry with President Bush 41—for example, ascribing junior’s invasion of Iraq as a reaction to his father’s writings about the pitfalls of doing so. Advocates of such explanation...
February 01, 2007
Dinesh D’Souza, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has raised a ruckus in his new book The Enemy at Home. In the book, he contends that the 9/11 attackers were motivated by neither U.S. foreign policy abroad nor by a hatred of U.S. freedom, as President Bush has ...
January 16, 2007
Although President Bush’s escalation of the Iraq War has been opposed by a substantial majority of the American people, many generals, the Iraq Study Group, and most Democrats and some Republicans in Congress, the most important opposition may come from Iraqis. Although Bush had trouble correctly re...
January 09, 2007
President George W. Bush, contrary to the will of the American and Iraqi peoples and his own military commanders, seems ready to embark on a potentially disastrous escalation of the Iraq war, which was lost long ago. This mind-numbingly idiotic strategy is sure to needlessly cost more American and I...
December 19, 2006
Ever since the Iraq Study Group (ISG) issued its recommendations, the debate in Washington has swirled around what to do about the mess in Iraq. Unfortunately, both the recommendations of the study group and the contradictory inclinations of the Bush administration are “bridges to nowhere.” Both gro...
December 14, 2006
This holiday travel season, Santa Claus is not the only one who is checking to see whether you’ve been naughty or nice. For the last four years, the U.S. government has been snooping by computer into people’s travel records and assigning them a risk score for being terrorists or criminals. Of all th...
December 06, 2006
The Baker Commission report calls for a phased withdrawal of combat forces in Iraq and for the United States to talk to adversarial neighboring countries—that is, Iran and Syria—about playing a more constructive role in that country’s civil war. If his rhetoric before the release of the report is an...
November 28, 2006
Many foreign policy experts advocate using economic sanctions to motivate foreign governments to change policy. And, while it may be true that many of these governments could improve their countries with policy reforms, history shows that economic coercion doesn’t work.
Both conservatives and lib...
November 14, 2006
Most of official Washington has long believed that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld needed to be sacked. Unfortunately it took a major Republican loss at the polls to finally prompt George W. Bush to cut loose a key player from his inner circle.
The removal of Rumsfeld signals that Bush is li...
November 13, 2006
Conservatives, especially neoconservatives, (and even some pro-Israeli moderates and liberals), admire Israel’s use of muscular tactics to safeguard its security. Many conservatives also admire Robert E. Lee’s aggressive, offense-oriented tactical victories in the U.S. Civil War. But like Lee, who u...
November 06, 2006
In the run-up to the mid-term elections, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s recent remarks about U.S. national security policy once again point out the Bush administration’s haughtiness and disdain for checks on executive power.
“You cannot make national security policy on the basis of that [election o...
October 31, 2006
President Bush and Karl Rove realize they are losing the pre-election public relations battle with the Democrats over the war in Iraq.
Rove, the president’s political ace, didn’t think the American people could intellectually process more than three words. So he cleverly tried to define the presi...
October 29, 2006
In the run up to the November 7 elections, U.S. politicians from both parties are telling Iraqis that they are not doing enough to improve their own security. Democrats are disparaging Iraqi security efforts and criticizing the Bush administration for not pressuring Iraqis to do more. In response, t...
October 24, 2006
In the frenzy surrounding the exposed plot to simultaneously blow up ten airliners flying from Britain to the United States, one line of inquiry being pursued by investigators should make the Bush administration very nervous. British and Pakistani law enforcement officials are examining whether the ...
October 23, 2006
Like JFK’s assassination in 1963 and the moon landing in 1969, people remember where they were and what they were doing on September 11, 2001. In my case, just a few hours before the attack, I was walking down one of the corridors of the Pentagon that was later obliterated by the hijacked aircraft. ...
October 09, 2006
President Bush has so badly lied himself into a corner that he now needs the bipartisan “Iraq Study Group”—headed by the Bush family’s fix-it man, former Secretary of State James Baker—to tell the American public that things are rapidly going south in Iraq. According to the New York Times, one commi...
October 06, 2006
The bell weather of the cautious establishment press, Bob Woodward, has finally unloaded both barrels on the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, in his new book, State of Denial. The media hoopla surrounding the book has focused mainly on the administration’s deceptions surrounding the sorry state of...
September 08, 2006
In Saddam Hussein’s war crimes trial for the 1988 Iraqi “Anfal” campaign that gassed Kurdish villages, his defense lawyers have argued that Iraqi forces were really attempting to strike Iranian forces and the Iraqi Kurdish pesh merga militias that were in and supported by the hamlets. In other words...
September 08, 2006
The outspoken President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has challenged President Bush to debate U.S.-Iran relations. Bush has dismissed the offer and declined. Debate is not good–faith negotiation between the opposing parties, but it is better than nothing. And it might not be as one–sided as most Ameri...
August 23, 2006
Although this weekend’s Israeli commando raid into Lebanon was billed by the Israeli government as an effort to prevent the rearming of Hezbollah, many suspect it was designed to grab a high-level Hezbollah leader to exchange for the Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah. Why then, wasn’t this type...
August 10, 2006
As both the Bush administration and its client government in Israel, with their invasions of Arab states in Iraq and Lebanon, respectively, make the United States ever more hated in the Islamic world, a new book by the chairmen of the 9/11 commission admits that the commission whitewashed the root c...
November 30, 1999
Despite growing world outrage, the Bush administration's continued backing of Israel's over-the-top military action in Lebanon can only help Hezbollah and its patron Iran. The administration's foreign policy could not be more pro-Iranian if the White House had become infested with Iranian agents.
...