One of the pitfalls of writing history is that things that happened tend to seem inevitable in retrospect. Coupled with wishful thinking, this can lead to a dialectic mindset, in which the course of human events seems preordained somehow. The "end of history" wasn't...
Terrorism has become as all-American as apple pie. It is ingrained in our civic DNA, it fills our newspapers and is the backstory for every foreign policy discussion on talk radio and television. One might reasonably expect that American mothers might now cajole their...
Readers of this site are well aware of the revelations during the past six months of spying by the National Security Agency (NSA). Edward Snowden, a former employee of an NSA vendor, risked his life and liberty to inform us of a governmental conspiracy to violate our...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In the years when I was growing up more or less middle class, American war on the childhood front couldn’t have been sunnier. True, American soldiers were fighting a grim new stalemate of a conflict in Korea and we kids often...
I am reading Ann Jones’s new book, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars: The Untold Story and I am crying, again. I am thinking how military recruiters would like to destroy copies of this book the way the Pentagon did to Tony Shaffer’s...
The ever-mercurial Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, recently called a council of the nation’s tribal elders (a loya jirga) to ratify a bilateral security agreement reached with the United States governing the up to 12,000 U.S. forces that would be left in that...
More than 300 U.S. drone attacks have killed 2,160 militants and 67 civilians in Pakistan since 2008, according to Pakistani defense ministry data. But people living in the affected areas are now questioning these figures, asking why they never get to know the names...
