"As long as the United States is not willing to force Israel's hand in abiding by international law and the agreements it signed with the Palestinians, namely regarding West Bank settlements, any direct or indirect talks will be nothing more than meaningless chatter, basically designed to give Israel more time to impose further facts on the ground in Palestine."

"Permanent Security Council members Russia and China may occasionally - all too occasionally - block hostile Western actions against defenseless third parties in the United Nations, but Washington always walks away with a mandate and the final say in the selection of viceroys to complement U.S. and NATO military forces on the ground in subjugated nations."

"It's time for Obama to put aside empty, soaring speeches and come to grips with who his enemies really are. It's time for him to step onto dry land and walk a mile in his own shoes -- while he still has a pair."

"...his screed on Gore Vidal is merely yet another example of Hitchens’s escalating propensity to project his own increasingly vast distance from reality onto those who object to his war-mongering. It is not Gore who has ‘taken a graceless lurch toward the crackpot’, in the unabashed words of Vanity Fair’s introduction to Hitchens’s outburst. Rather, it is Hitchens who has become after 9/11 an unhinged and deranged cheerleader for Total War. After Gore, Hitchens would have himself anointed ‘emperor’. But it is Hitchens, not the indefatigable Gore Vidal, who staggers and stumbles, shamelessly exposed, screaming nonsensically, through the streets of the American capital."

"The unending war creates a reality of occupation and oppression, of death and destruction, brutality and cruelty, moral degeneration and general bestiality. Can any ideal be realized in this situation? Can feminism, for example, achieve its aims in a country that is in the throes of an unbridled chauvinist militarism? Can animals be saved from torture when the torture of human beings is routine? Can rivers and forests, birds and leopards be saved when residential quarters are bombed and shelled with white phosphorus?"

This "Chicago" state of mind, Gates argues, had far-reaching consequences that could have been easily foreseen by its advocates. "The results of this purpose-driven ‘operating system’ were guaranteed to concentrate wealth and income and thereby undermine both democracies and markets. By equating personal freedom with financial freedom, we were induced to freely embrace the very forces that now jeopardize freedom," Gates says.

"Under the label of fighting terrorism, the West led by the US has launched wars in distant lands killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Yemen and Iran readily come to mind as actual or potential theatres of war. Somalia, too, is on the list and if the US achieves military success in any, more countries will be targeted in the West’s inexorable drive to grab their resources."

China and Russia, by not capitulating to U.S. and Western European pressure to enforce further, even more onerous sanctions against Iran of the type that have in recent years been followed by all-our war against other nations, have frequently been chastised by U.S. leaders, with China lately being dressed down by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, about whom it cannot be said as President John Quincey Adams claimed of the early American republic that "she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy."