Note for TomDispatch Readers: Think of this dispatch, in TV terms, as counterprogramming. While much of America sits, couch- and Earth-bound, checking out the latest 24/7 bout of Democratic primary coverage, TomDispatch soars into the heavens on the wings of historian...
The last war won't end, but in the Pentagon they're already arguing about the next one. Let's start with that "last war" and see if we can get things straight. Just over five years ago, American troops entered Baghdad in battle mode, felling the Sunni-dominated...
It's like old times in the Persian Gulf. As of this week, a second aircraft carrier battle task force is being sent in – not long after Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Michael Mullen highlighted planning for "potential military courses of action" against Iran;...
The RAND Corporation was the ur-think tank, the Cold War granddaddy of them all, and it's still with us. In the 1950s, nuclear war-gaming a conflagration for which the usual war games would have been ludicrous, it took the U.S. military into virtuality and science...
You simply can't pile up enough adjectives when it comes to the general, who, at a relatively young age, was already a runner-up for Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 2007. His record is stellar. His tactical sense extraordinary. His strategic ability, when it...
Last Sunday, David Barstow of the New York Times revealed just how effectively the Pentagon orchestrated a propaganda campaign for "information dominance" when it came to the president's various wars (and prisons). Pentagon officials, from the secretary of defense on...
Can there be any question that, since the invasion of 2003, Iraq has been unraveling? And here's the curious thing: Despite a lack of decent information and analysis on crucial aspects of the Iraqi catastrophe, despite the way much of the Iraq story fell off newspaper...
Dedicated sardonically "to Dwight and Nikita" – President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, for those too young to remember – Mordecai Roshwald's futuristic novel Level 7 was published in 1959. It was the "diary" of a "button pusher"...
Let's start with a few simple propositions. First, the farther away you are from the ground, the clearer things are likely to look, the more god-like you are likely to feel, the less human those you attack are likely to be to you. How much more so, of course, if you,...
Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shi'ite cleric who emerged triumphant from an Iraqi government assault on his Mahdi Army militia in Basra (and Baghdad) has called for a "million-strong" march in Baghdad tomorrow to mark the fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq....
