All you really need to know is that, at Robert Gates' Pentagon, they're still high on the term "the Long War." It's a phrase that first crept into our official vocabulary back in 2002 but was popularized by CENTCOM commander John Abizaid in 2004 – already a...
Send me a postcard, drop me a line, Stating point of view. Indicate precisely what you mean to say Yours sincerely, Wasting Away. – the Beatles, "When I'm 64" I set foot, so to speak, on this planet on July 20, 1944, not perhaps the best day of the century. It...
To offer a bit of context for Chalmers Johnson's latest post on the privatization of U.S. intelligence, it's important to know just how lucrative that intelligence "business" has become. According to the latest estimate, the cumulative 2009 intelligence budget for the...
It's summer and gassing up your car is like emptying your wallet directly into that fuel pump. So you think you have it bad? You think you're feeling the pain? Well, stop your whining! Other oil "addicts" have it so much worse! Have you no pity? Take an obvious...
[Note for TomDispatch readers:We live in a media world with a remarkably short memory, which means that stories with a past go missing in action all the time. Witness the one that follows. To the extent my aging brain is able, TomDispatch tries to keep the past in...
It's been on the minds of antiwar activists and war critics since 2003. And little wonder. If you don't remember the pre-invasion of Iraq neocon quip, "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran..." – then take notice. Even before American...
And speaking of oil, just when we were barely getting used to Big Oil and Iraq hitting the front pages of American newspapers in tandem, here comes Afghanistan! Who now remembers that delegation of Taliban officials, shepherded by Unocal ("We're an oil and gas...
[Note for TomDispatch readers: The following piece offers a picture of the Bush administration's 18-month "surge" in Iraq that, I believe, you'll find nowhere else. Something similar could be said of all the pieces collected in the new book, The World According to...
At $34 billion, you're already counting pretty high. After all, that's Harvard's endowment; it's the amount of damage the triple hurricanes – Charley, Ivan, and Jeanne – inflicted in 2004; it's what car crashes involving 15-to-17-year-old teenage drivers...
[Note for TomDispatch readers: It's worth mentioning that the missing Iraqi oil story – see below – wasn't missing online, and certainly not at TomDispatch. This site's newest book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire, has a...
