Back in September 1989 – almost a lifetime ago – I published an article in The Progressive magazine under the title "Star Wars Won't Die." Star Wars was, of course, the movie-inspired nickname for Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), his...
The Roman historian Tacitus famously put the following lines in the mouth of a British chieftain opposed to imperial Rome: "They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger? they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor?...
On the brief occasions when the president now appears in the Rose Garden to "comfort" or "reassure" a shock-and-awed nation, you can almost hear those legions of ducks quacking lamely in the background. Once upon a time, George W. Bush, along with his top officials...
Among my somewhat over-the-hill crowd – I'm 64 – there's one thing friends have said to me repeatedly since the stock market started to tumble, the global economic system began to melt down, and Iceland went from bank haven to bankrupt. They say, "I'm just...
In a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, spoke proudly of how, in July 1979, he had "signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul"...
The year is 2010 and, yes, Saddam Hussein is gone and there are no American troops in Iraq, but, as the report suggests, "the challenge will be to see whether a modern, secular successor government emerges that does not threaten its neighbors" – especially since...
In last Friday's presidential debate, John McCain went after Barack Obama on the surge in Iraq: "Senator Obama said the surge could not work, said it would increase sectarian violence, said it was doomed to failure. Recently on a television program, he said it...
Let's start with the money the Bush administration has already thrown at the war in Iraq. According to the June congressional testimony of William Beach, director of the Center for Data Analysis, the war has cost $646 billion so far. The new defense budget for 2009...
As Andrew Bacevich tells us in the latest issue of the Atlantic, there's now a vigorous debate going on in the military about the nature of the "next" American wars and how to prepare for them. However, while military officers argue, that "next war" may already be...
Having laid out the staggering expansion of a budget-busting Pentagon – as diplomat, arms dealer, spy, intelligence analyst, domestic disaster manager, humanitarian caregiver, nation-builder, and global viceroy – in part one of her series on the Bush...
