Reprinted from TomDispatch. Hey, you remember that guy, right? You know, the candidate who, in his third campaign for president in 2024 insisted that he was the one who would remove this country’s “warmongers and America-last globalists” and that returning him to the...
War Doesn’t End When It ‘Ends’
Originally appeared at TomDispatch. We normally think of wartime and peacetime as two distinct and separate realities. When wars end, they end. Period. Unfortunately, when it comes to modern wars, that’s been anything but the case, as TomDispatch regular Andrea...
Contemplating the Unimaginable Costs of a Nuclear War
Here’s something strange about our all-too-nuclearized planet: in my youth during the 1950s and early 1960s, the possibility of an obliterating nuclear war played a significant role in our everyday nightmares. We schoolkids then regularly engaged in “duck and cover”...
The Army We Don’t See
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In late March, I was taken aback by a news story about a drone attack on American troops at a joint base with Kurdish forces in Syria. Though five U.S. soldiers were wounded, there was only one death and, as Eric Schmitt reported in...
Former Soldiers Without a Future
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Here’s something we seldom focus on when it comes to war, American-style, even during the just-passed 20th anniversary of our disastrous invasion of Iraq: many more soldiers survive armed conflict than die from it. This has been...
My War on Terror, Up Close and Personal
Originally posted at TomDispatch. It’s hard to imagine how I would have done my work at TomDispatch over the last decade without one crucial resource: Brown University’s Costs of War Project. After all, that website has offered a remarkable look at...
Why America’s Wars Never End
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Almost 20 years after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, as the Taliban takes district after district, withdrawing American troops are discarding vast piles of junk on bases they are now abandoning. In the process, the war on terror...
A Pandemic of Sexual Assault in the Military?
Originally posted at TomDispatch. From the dawn of recorded history, humans have been making war and rape has been part of it. In ancient Greece, the rape of a woman was considered a property crime; that is, a crime against her father, husband, or master. But in war,...
The Massive and Unseen Costs of America’s Post-9/11 Wars
Perhaps the strangest thing about America’s "forever wars" is how little obvious impact they’ve had here. A country – an imperial power, in fact, that liked to think of itself as the planet’s last or "lone" superpower – goes to war for so long (and...
Stop Thanking the Troops and Lend a Hand
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Nineteen years ago, the administration of George W. Bush responded to the 9/11 attacks by invading Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. And, yes, you won’t be shocked to learn that the Taliban is stronger now than at any time since...