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 the invention of “liberal democrats” – before them, Communists and Nazis …
Continue reading “The Long Retreat”
At least 22 people were killed and 30 more were wounded in Iraq attacks.
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 children into turning out the light and going to sleep not …
Continue reading “Congress Scares the People”
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 right to privacy, a right guaranteed by the …
Continue reading “A Conspiracy So Vast”
Fresh attacks in Iraq left 17 dead and 11 wounded.
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 enough found ourselves crouched under our school desks practicing for …
Continue reading “In the Shadow of War”
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 memoir three years ago – and this is …
Continue reading “A Book the Military Won’t Want You To Read”
At least 39 people were killed and 46 more were wounded across Iraq. The most significant attacks took place in Diyala province.
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 country after the withdrawal of all American and international combat forces at …
Continue reading “Call Hamid Karzai’s Bluff”
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 of the militants or see the bodies. Residents of Pakistan’s Federally …
Continue reading “Drone Killings Show Numbers, Not Bodies” 
