Originally posted at TomDispatch. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” is an old American adage. Venerable, time-tested, and seemingly true, though here’s an exception: retired general, disgraced former CIA chief, and leaker of classified information,...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Yes, four-star General Lloyd Austin commanded American forces in Iraq back in 2010 and 2011. In 2013, he took over from General James Mattis (remember him?) as the head of United States Central Command, or CENTCOM, overseeing...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Yep, it happened again for the 11th time this year. (In 2020, the number was 13.) An American warship, in this case the guided-missile destroyer Milius, sailed through the Taiwan Strait between mainland China and the disputed island...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Back in 2007, in his first piece for TomDispatch, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore focused on the proliferation of self-congratulatory ribbons and medals on the chests of America’s generals....
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In 2006, Newsweek dubbed him “a rising star” and one of the “Jedi knights who are fighting in what [Vice President] Cheney calls ‘the shadows.'” The particular Jedi knight being touted to the skies was...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Ann Jones began her remarkable book Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan this way: "I went to Afghanistan after the bombing stopped. Somehow, I felt obliged to help pick up the pieces. I was a New Yorker who had...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Let me make my own position on China all too clear. I’m distinctly “soft” on that country. I always have been. After all, it represents a remarkable civilization, one I studied in graduate school. Among my greatest...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. It’s hard to imagine how I would have done my work at TomDispatch over the last decade without one crucial resource: Brown University’s Costs of War Project. After all, that website has offered a remarkable look at...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Just in case you didn’t realize it, the lost war in Afghanistan was their fault, not ours. If we had any fault at all, as Secretary of Defense and former Iraq War commander Lloyd Austin pointed out at a Senate hearing last week,...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. The bad news stemming from the ill-planned and ill-managed U.S. evacuation of the Afghan capital just kept coming in. The Washington Post put it this way in blowing the whistle on the culminating disaster: “U.S. military admits...
