Christopher Hitchens is out to save America. He’s brought the cross of St. George–Orwell, that is–along on the crusade. He’s everywhere in the American media lately, lending his accent and vast self-importance to the cause of Freedom.

You might wonder why imports like Hitchens are center-stage in the U.S. these days. You’d think a country of 300 million could find somebody to make a coherent case for the war in Iraq. But you’d be wrong. Ever hear ‘em try? Bush sounds like an Okie fruit picker on glue; Cheney mumbles like a hanging judge at the end of a long day; and Rove, their PR chief, won’t talk on mic because he knows he’d come across like the scoutmaster trying to explain why he had to share a tent with your son. We’re hopeless. (more…)

But let’s take the question seriously for a second here: who won in Iraq? To answer it, you have to start with a close-up of the region, then change magnification to look at the world picture. At a regional level the big winner is obvious: Iran. In fact, Iran wins so big in this war that I’ve already said that Dick Cheney’s DNA should be checked out by a reputable lab, because he has to be a Persian mole.

“The West let Russia down, and it’s a shame,” said Meadowcroft, a former British MP and veteran of 48 election-monitoring missions to 35 countries.

In a recent telephone interview with The eXile, Meadowcroft explained how he was pressured by OSCE and EU authorities to ignore serious irregularities in Boris Yeltsin’s heavily manipulated 1996 election victory, and how EU officials suppressed a report about the Russian media’s near-total subservience to pro-Yeltsin forces.

This Thanksgiving, we’re publishing an eXile classic Comix from Thanksgiving, 2003…

I told you so. Told you nothing would happen with India and Pakistan. Told you the whole idea of “Hindu militants” was laughable. But Christian militants — that’s a whole ‘nuther thing. Christians are stone killers. You put a Christian…

To: President Vladimir Putin From: The Moscow Foreign Press Corps We, the Moscow Foreign Press Corps, wish to directly address you, the esteemed Russian President, concerning an affront you committed against our profession, and against our careers. Last week, you…

Just when we thought we could forget about Guardian Moscow correspondent Luke Harding’s hackburgling habit, along comes the following juxtaposition from a reader in London. Is Harding unaware that his stuff sounds like everyone else’s, or does he just not care?…

They get in your mind… They make you do things! – General Owen referring to the Brain Bug in Starship Troopers. This isn’t a movie, kids. The Brain Bug is real. It doesn’t look anything like those big fat brain worms…

The New York Times finally got around to writing about exploitation of East European student-labor by US corporations–8 years after The eXile’s Jake Rudnitsky went under deep cover with a bunch of Russian and Ukrainian teenaged serfs working in Pennsylvania. Here is The eXile’s original article…

For your reading pleasure, The eXiled is reposting one of the War Nerd’s most famous–and hilarious–episodes: The epic battle pitting Gary Brecher against neocon historian Victor Davis Hanson, guru to Dick Cheney and “Scooter” Libby. Like Bull Run, this battle…

My idea of a Norwegian was always some cheerless Social Democrat in a knit sweater whose greatest joy in life was comparing the price of beer in Prague (cheap) to the price of beer in Krakow (even cheaper). Then I…

This article was published in The eXile on December 28, 2005. The Putin regime’s latest moves to tighten controls over foreign NGOs are being portrayed in the West as yet more proof of Russia’s savage authoritarianism and anti-Western paranoia. While…

  Before heading back to Moscow in June 2008 to face the Kremlin “audit” of The eXile, which I knew meant the death of the newspaper at the very least, I worked out a deal with my editors at Radar…

No, we’ve been censored, by, of all people, David Johnson, a squeamish Quaker who runs the once-highly-influential Johnson’s Russia List… acting on the orders of his sponsor, a Democrat Party wonk and Stanford professor whose dedication to promoting democracy in the former Soviet Union is matched only by his relentless four-year campaign to censor and marginalize the eXile.

This book is a four-hundred page testimonial to the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the American Russia-watching mafia. In its pages, Michael McFaul condemns himself again and again with staggering non-sequiturs, self-serving lies, crude misrepresentations of his own past and the recent history of Russia, and repeated failures to meet even the most basic standards of academic rigor.

The Europeans have turned against America in the War On Terror. They believe that Americans don’t understand a thing about the world. That Americans are ignorant, shallow and drunk with military might. In such a people’s hands, all that weaponry…

This article was first published in The eXile on November 13, 2003. Reading the Western press accounts of the Khodorkovsky arrest has at times been as unpleasant as one of my famous giardia attacks. I’m not sure which version is more ridiculous:…

This article was first published on November 21, 2007 in The eXile. It was just after 1 a.m. on Monday morning when I pulled my rental car up to my apartment building. I’d just spent the last 48 hours working as…

STEPANAKERT, NAGORNO-KARABAKH — It took my taxi driver and me an hour to get out of Yerevan. Most of it was spent waiting in line to fill up his gas tank. Not with gasoline. No, it was the kind of…

This was first published in The eXile in March 2008 On Friday, a group of Russian performance artists stripped off their clothes and started fucking in the middle of Moscow’s Biology Museum in an act they called “Fuck For Medvedev!”…