June 17 – The Continuing Disastrous Legacy of the Bush/ Cheney Iraq War; Why Does Obama Listen to the Neocons?; Can the U.S. and Iran Work Together to Save Iraq

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the historical amnesia in the press over who is responsible for the crisis unfolding in Iraq. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who had a ringside seat at the highest foreign policy level in the first Bush Administration as the Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, joins us to discuss the continuing disastrous legacy of the Bush/Cheney intervention in Iraq and how much it has exhausted the U.S. military and soured the appetite of the American people for more foreign wars.

Part 2

Then we speak with Colonel Andrew Bacevich, a professor of International Relations and History at Boston University and author of “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War” and “Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country”. We discuss the influence of hawks and neocons on Obama’s foreign policy and Andrew Bacevich’s article in Commonweal Magazine “The Duplicity of the Ideologues: U.S. Policy & Robert Kagan’s Fictive Narrative”.

Part 3

Then finally we look into the possibility of Iran and the U.S. working together to defuse the explosive situation in Iraq with Dr. Trita Parsi, the co-founder and the president of the National Iranian-American Council and author of “A Single Roll of the Dice – Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran”. We discuss the likelihood of U.S. military action in Iraq and Iranian intervention on the side of the embattled Maliki government and Trita Parsi’s article at Foreign Policy “Pivot to Persia: Washington may not want to admit it, but Iran is the most stable country in the Middle East right now”.