The single most basic fallacy underlying the present American catastrophe in Iraq is the belief that the U.S. can somehow solve that country's problems, however extreme and intractable they may seem; that, in short, we are part of the solution in Iraq, not part of the...
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, remain both an overwhelming and under-considered horror. TomDispatch will devote the week leading up to the fifth anniversary of 9/11 to various reconsiderations of that moment. In the meantime, the anniversary season was inaugurated...
Yesterday, the Israeli security cabinet authorized an expansion of the ground war in Lebanon (while its military suffered 15 dead and 25 wounded, the highest battlefield casualty rate thus far); Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah threatened to "transform our land in...
The idea that you can solve social and political problems militarily from the air is, on the face of it, ludicrous. The historical record is filled with the dead dreams of air power solutions to ground-based problems. But that stops no one. Just yesterday, for...
First, there was one, Little Boy, which the United States dropped on Hiroshima as a bitter war was nearing its end 61 years ago Sunday; then came Fat Man, dropped on Nagasaki three days later. Both cities were essentially obliterated. By the time the Russians got...
On the April day in 2003 when American troops first pushed into Baghdad, historian Marilyn Young noted a strange phenomenon. In a single rush, the Vietnam War vocabulary had returned to our media. She promptly dubbed Iraq, "Vietnam on crack cocaine." It's true that,...
Barbarism seems an obvious enough category. Ordinarily in our world, the barbarians are them. They act in ways that seem unimaginably primitive and brutal to us. For instance, they kidnap or capture someone, American or Iraqi, and cut off his head. Now, isn't that the...
Jonathan Schell, who ended his Nation magazine column, "Letter From Ground Zero," last February, now takes up "The Crisis of the Republic" in what will be a series of periodic, longer essays appearing in the Nation under that rubric. For all its wealth, its power, its...
Last week, Attorney General Alberto J. Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the president had personally shut down a Justice Department investigation into the domestic eavesdropping program being run by the National Security Agency. According...
Imagine a government in which the names of those who worked as key aides in the office of the second (if not, arguably, the first) most important official in the country were not available. Oh gosh, there is such a government – and it's ours. Journalist Robert...
