Gareth Porter is a historian, journalist and policy analyst on U.S. foreign and military policy. His latest book is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005).
Gareth Porter

Gareth Porter is a historian, journalist and policy analyst on U.S. foreign and military policy. His latest book is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005).
The arrest of a “suspected” Hezbollah operative who is “suspected” of a plan to kill Israeli tourists has become the equivalent of an actual terrorist attack.
Access to an Iranian military test facility wan’t explicitly denied to nuclear inspectors, just subject to bargaining.
The postponement of a massive joint U.S.-Israeli military exercise appears to be the culmination of a series of events that has impelled the Barack Obama administration to put more distance between the United States and aggressive Israeli policies toward Iran.
The intelligence and counter-terrorism communities concede that America’s continuing wars actually increase the risk of terrorism against the United States.
Tension between President Obama and Secretary of Defense Gates over military spending may have been scripted.
It’s time to scrap our failed client-regime national-security strategy.
A quick history of how militarism became the most powerful force in the United States.
General Petraeus reverses field on the Afghan withdrawal timetable he promised President Obama.
By embracing the myth of the surge, Joe Biden reveals the extent to which Obama has continued Bush’s strategy.
Reluctance to withdraw from Afghanistan is only a symptom of the investment American political elites have in global military hegemony.
Israel needs to know that the United States will finish the war that Israel wants to start.
What happened in Basra may be a preview of a strategy aimed at causing the collapse of the U.S. political position in one city after another.
For an anti-war activist of the Vietnam era, the current search for a political strategy for ending the U.S. occupation of Iraq brings to mind the very similar problems facing the movement to end the Vietnam War in 1968-69.
As the U.S. occupation of Iraq heads toward its third year, there is a remarkable absence of debate over withdrawal, despite the evidence that a clear majority of the American people want out.
Amid the orgy of self-congratulation over the bravery of Iraqi voters, officials and commentators have ignored the most important story of the election results: a Sunni electoral boycott that demonstrates a level of support for the insurgency in the Sunni triangle that is far greater than what the administration has admitted.
It is now time for the United States to pursue the one policy option that has been missing from the national discussion of Iraq: the negotiation of a peace settlement with the insurgents that would involve the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops in return for the surrender of the insurgents and the reintegration of the Sunni region into the post-Saddam political system.
Thirty years after the last chopper left the Saigon embassy, Americans still don??t know why this country fought in Vietnam.
The most important development in Iraq since the January 2005 election is the emergence of a sectarian civil war between Sunnis and Shiites.
The occupation’s defenders reject the parallel between Iraq and Vietnam