This March marked the 15th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. In 2003, President George W. Bush and his advisers based their case for war on the idea that Saddam Hussein, then dictator of Iraq, possessed weapons of mass destruction – weapons that have...
"If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty." ~ Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (1990) Violence begets violence. The empire, it...
President Trump’s recent cabinet shakeup looks to be a real boost to hard-line militarism and neo-conservatism. If his nominees to head the State Department and CIA are confirmed, we may well have moved closer to war. Before being chosen by Trump to head up the...
Fifty years ago this month, on March 16, 1968, two companies of US Army troops belonging to the Americal Division entered the My Lai and My Khe hamlets of Son My village, in Quang Ngai province, and killed 504 Vietnamese civilians – overwhelmingly women,...
On March 13, while on his way to the besieged Gaza Strip, two 33-pounds bombs targeted the convoy of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister, Rami Hamdallah. Hamdallah was visiting Gaza, through the Israeli border checkpoint, Erez, to open a large sewage treatment plant...
What prompted former CIA Director John Brennan on Saturday to accuse President Donald Trump of “moral turpitude” and to predict, with an alliterative flourish, that Trump will end up “as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history”? The answer shines through the...
The much-anticipated "shock and awe" strategy breathlessly awaited by our image-hungry media has somehow morphed into a war of bluff and bluster. Instead of launching an all-out military assault, the U.S. military strategy is, at least initially, a political...
We were always caught in the middle. We still are. As a young man, a new lieutenant, and a true believer, I once led a US Army scout platoon just south of Baghdad. It was autumn 2006, and my platoon patrolled – mainly aimlessly – through the streets and surrounding...
