June 22 - As Iraq Unravels the Neocons are Revived; Putin has Won the War in Ukraine but Lost the Ukrainian People; The "Balkinization" of the Middle East

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the further capture of towns in Iraq’s northwest by ISIL and the Sunni forces fighting with in an alliance of convenience, and discuss the irony that while Iraq is unraveling, the architects of its destruction, the neocons led by Dick Cheney, are undergoing a revival thanks the U.S. mainstream media. Mark Danner, who is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and is the author of “The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War’s Buried History” and “Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror” joins us to discuss this anomaly and his recent article at The New York Review of Books “Cheney: The More Ruthless the Better”.

Part 2

Then, with Vladimir Putin announcing that he will conditionally accept Ukraine’s offer of a ceasefire, while successfully destabilizing Eastern Ukraine, we discuss the extent to which the western Europeans don’t want to impose further sanctions on Putin who obviously does not want to be subjected to them, and the likelihood that a compromise will be reached on accepting Russia’s control of Crimea and influence over Ukrainian provinces in the east. A leading international expert on contemporary Ukrainian and post-communist politics, nationalism and European integration at the Center for Political and Regional Studies at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Taras Kuzio, joins us to discuss how Russia has won the war but lost the Ukrainian people.

Part 3

Then finally, with the ISIL insurgents bulldozing the berm that marked the hundred year-old Sykes-Picot colonial-drawn border between Syria and Iraq, Scott Anderson, a veteran correspondent who has reported from Lebanon, Israel and Egypt and is the author of “Lawrence In Arabia: War Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East” joins us to discuss his article at CNN “Why the Middle East’s border will never be the same again” and the “Balkanization” of Iraq and Libya as we run out of places that the European colonists screwed up.