The tributes to the late President Idriss Deby just poured in last week – especially from Western leaders. And boy were the condolences nauseating – at least to anyone vaguely familiar with Chad and its longtime strongman, or those even faintly fond of decency. The...
Make no mistake: much policy indecency is permitted and enabled by vacuously vague bureaucratic reports peddling in platitudes. For further evidence bolstering this increasingly open-and-shut case, see Exhibit number 3,472, or so: last week’s release of the Annual...
Washington’s hypocrisy and the frontiers of its New Cold War (of choice) appear to know no bounds. Eastern Europe is the classic theater of course, but you’ll hear the Pentagon’s new buzzword-acronym priority purpose, "great power competition" (GPC) – etched...
White faces in fatigues – I’m sure that’s just what most Mozambicans were hoping to see upon their shores. After all, it certainly isn't the first time. Ever since the Portuguese started planting trading posts and forts on what was known as the Swahili...
Counterinsurgency snake oil was sold to soldiers and civilians alike as a "new" brand of urbane and civilized warfare. The absurdly over-the-top euphemistic buzzwords and mantras applied to such strategies – "stability-" and "information"...
Let the record show that the almighty American military machine was soundly defeated by an enemy that didn’t like fighting either in the dark or cold. Talk about bad medicine that’s good for a society (somehow still) desperately in need of a decisive case study in the...
When does neo-imperialist subtext tip over to overt imperialism? Well, when it comes to America’s Africa policy, apparently it’s when Foreign Affairs indulges the published fantasies of a multigenerational military trio of facsimile David Petraeuses peddling un-ironic...
After some hints to the contrary, it turns out French troops in the Sahel aren't going anywhere anytime soon. So said President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on February 16, even before his virtual summit with France’s former-colonial "partners" – Burkina Faso,...
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken might have been "outraged" by a rocket attack on a U.S. base in northern Iraq – that killed a foreign contractor and wounded an American service member and several other contractors – but he shouldn't have been surprised. After...
February 9th marked the first time in nearly two decades that the U.S. military went one full year without a trooper killed in Afghanistan action. Now, with newly minted President Biden weighing his Afghan options – and under immense bipartisan insider pressure to...
