On January 4th, the Pentagon "announced the identities" of six American soldiers who had died between December 28th and New Year's Eve. It was just one of many such listings over these last years and, like similar announcements, this one had a just-the-facts quality...
Just this week, the Bush administration is considering making a little futuristic news. The president might soon approve "a major step forward in the building of the country's first new nuclear warhead in nearly two decades," the Reliable Replacement Warhead. If only...
In our world, the Pentagon and the national security bureaucracy have largely taken possession of the future. In an exchange in 2002, journalist Ron Suskind reported a senior adviser to President Bush telling him: "that guys like me were 'in what we call the...
Every now and then, you have to take a lesson or two from history. In the case of George Bush's Iraq, here's one: No matter what the President announces in his "new way forward" speech on Iraq next week – including belated calls for "sacrifice" from the man whose...
Okay, folks, it's time for a year-opening sermon. And like any good sermon, this one will be based on illustrative texts, in this case from 2006, and inspirational passages plucked from them. Its goal, as in any such quest, will be to reveal a world normally hidden...
Although Vietnam flooded instantly back into American consciousness as the invasion of Iraq was launched in March 2003 – along with its ancient vocabulary from "hearts and minds" to "quagmire" (or the deeply referential "Q-word") – for the Bush...
(Today, a rarity at the site. Two pieces, officially identified as such and piled atop each other – think of them like a double-decker bus – each focused on a different aspect of the Iraq situation as Washington imagines it. First comes a little "political...
Right now, we have on the table a "possible exit strategy" from Iraq – James A. Baker's Iraq Study Group report [.pdf] – that, once you do the figures, doesn't get the U.S. even close to halfway out the door by sometime in 2008; and that report is already...
An early impulse of Bush administration officials after the attacks of September 11, 2001 was to take off "the gloves," or, as CIA Director George Tenet put it (so Ron Suskind tell us in his book, The One Percent Doctrine), "the shackles." Those were the "shackles"...
[Note for TomDispatch readers: Be on the lookout – former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega, who took over TomDispatch last week, is tentatively scheduled to appear on The Colbert Report tonight. Don't forget to be the first person in the neighborhood to...
