It's like taking a trip in a time machine, going all the way back to the darkest days of the cold war era, as headlines scream: Russian spy cabal arrested! Glamorous Russian Mata Hari – “worthy of a 007 movie” – was sending secret messages! Eleven seemingly ordinary –...
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: To check out the most recent review of my book, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, which just went up at Mother Jones magazine's Web site, click here (“...as in his daily dispatches, he takes on our war-possessed...
Nearly a week after the abrupt demise of Washington's top commander in Afghanistan, U.S. strategy for reversing the flood of bad news that has been recently pouring out of that strife-torn country remains as unclear as ever. Led by Sen. John McCain and many of the...
Click here to listen to this commentary. This past week various news events once again made it abundantly clear that our foreign policy is an abject failure. Unfortunately, in spite of this, the administration is determined to stay on this destructive course, despite...
Now we know why “King David” Petraeus fainted like a girl at his Senate testimony [.pdf] two weeks ago. Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin put Petraeus on the ropes by asking if his allegiance to President Obama's withdrawal timeline for Afghanistan...
“Your modesty overwhelms me, Yogi.” “Why not, Boo Boo? I've got a lot to be modest about.” Those are my two favorite lines from The Yogi Bear Show, a cartoon I watched when I was a kid. After his reply to Boo Boo, Yogi looks self-conscious as he realizes what he has...
I am composing these lines while looking through the window at the blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea and thinking about the young man who is being held not far from this sea, a few dozen kilometers from here. Can Gilad Shalit look out on the same sea through his...
Much of the time, our wars may hardly exist for us, but in the age of celebrity, our generals do – exactly because they become celebrities. When Barack Obama picked Stanley McChrystal as his Afghan war commander, the general was greeted by the media as little short of...
