A move is afoot in Congress to change the 2001 law that kicked off what became the “war on terror” (although the Obama administration has dropped the now politically incorrect term). The administration, however, opposes changing the statute, because, as one Pentagon...
Now that Republicans have legitimate and troubling scandals on which to criticize the Obama administration—the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups and the Justice Department’s broad seizure of the Associated Press’s phone records—hopefully they...
What do Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan have in common? Although it’s true that the United States has conducted recent military interventions in all of them, the more fundamental answer is that they are all artificial countries. That is, they are...
Many politicians in Washington--not yet realizing that the still-broken American economy can no longer sustain an informal, globe-girdling U.S. empire—have sought to use Bashar al-Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons on a small scale to escalate U.S. involvement in...
The bomb attack on innocent civilians and subsequent shooting of two law enforcement officials was a reprehensible act of terrorism, but the saturation media coverage and resulting societal frenzy is unwarranted and actually harmful. Apparently, the lone surviving...
Up until recently, we were all laboring under the illusion that U.S. Pakistani “friends” had reluctantly agreed to allow the United States kill al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban with drone attacks on their soil in exchange for bucket loads of cash in foreign aid. Now we...
No doubt exists that North Korea’s recent belligerent and irresponsible rhetoric is kinda scary. The question, of course, is how to respond to it. The usual response of a superpower, which conducts an overly militarized foreign policy, is counter-threats and...
Many Americans – except perhaps the very small percentage nowadays who actually have served in the American armed forces – have a stereotypic image of "military efficiency" and thus assume that any cuts to the defense budget will make the nation less secure....
Recent events surrounding North Korea and Iran and past U.S. pressure on autocratic rulers indicate that trying to isolate such despots is exactly what they want. So why does the U.S. government continue to blunder into these failed policies? The answer is that human...
As usual, at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), speaker after speaker idolized the stylized image of Ronald Reagan. Unfortunately, humans believe images, which often diverge from reality; that’s why advertising on TV works. The same is true in...
