Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of the Committee. It is an honor to appear before you today. I thank you for your invitation. I am glad the Committee is holding this hearing about our policy in Syria. Through superb efforts led by our military and with the excellent help of our diplomatic team, America and its allies have largely seized territories the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) had controlled. The Syrian Army and its allies also took back territory, including the long-time stronghold of Deir Zour. ISIS has not gone away entirely, but compared to even 12 months ago…

Official Washington and those associated with it have misrepresented the facts numerous times in the service of military actions that might not otherwise have taken place. In the Middle East, these interventions have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Arab civilians, brought chaos to Iraq and Libya, and led to the expulsion of a million Christians from communities where they have lived since biblical times. The most famous of these episodes, of course, was the U.S. government’s assurance to the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which formed the basis for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The government…

The Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal continues to be front-page news. According to current reports, Cambridge Analytica obtained private Facebook data, which it used to send pro-Trump material to targeted Facebook users. These reports have met outrage in Washington DC. The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation, and U.S. senators have called for Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, to testify in front of Congress. Calls by Congress for increased oversight to prevent private companies from surveilling people are extremely ironic given that they recently renewed a section of the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows for the warrantless surveillance of Americans. Issues regarding the…

Sometimes a prophet can be right about what will come, yet torn about whether it should. President Trump’s recent speech in Warsaw, in which he urged Europeans and Americans to defend Western civilization against violent extremists and barbarian hordes, inevitably evoked Samuel P. Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” — the notion that superpower rivalry would give way to battles among Western universalism, Islamic militance and Chinese assertiveness. In a book expanded from his famous 1993 essay, Huntington described civilizations as the broadest and most crucial level of identity, encompassing religion, values, culture and history. Rather than “which side are you on?” he wrote, the overriding question in the…

There’s been an interesting debate over the years about the relation between capitalism and democracy, for example, are they even compatible? I won’t be pursuing this because I’d like to discuss a different system – what we could call the “really existing capitalist democracy,” RECD for short, pronounced “wrecked.” — Noam Chomsky, 2013 It’s incredible. Here we are fifteen months into the horrific, arch-plutocratic right-wing Donald Trump presidency and still the United States (U.S.) has done nothing to protect its elections and its broader political culture from the vicious oligarchs who have subverted U.S. “democracy.” The 2018 mid-term Congressional elections are…