On Aug. 6, 1945, the day that was to prove the blindingly bright dawn of the atomic age, Little Boy, a 9,700-pound baby with the look of "an elongated trash can with fins," had already been loaded into the specially prepared bomb bay of a B-29. The night before, in...
Of the two superpowers that faced each other down in an almost half-century-long Cold War, one – the United States – emerged victorious, alone in the world, economically powerful, militarily dominant; the other, never the stronger of the two, limped off, its...
An overstretched military? You bet. Things going terribly in Iraq? No kidding. Why only yesterday, Jill Carroll and Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor reminded us that, with 140,000 troops (and untold numbers of mercenaries) in Iraq, the Americans can't...
Quote of the Month (November 1967) "In November, as their plans gelled, General Westmoreland embarked on a whirlwind tour of the U.S. to testify before Congress and drum up support for the Johnson Administration. 'With 1968,' he said, speaking before the National...
On Wednesday, I posted The Normalization of War, the first of two excerpts from a remarkable new book – Andrew J. Bacevich's The New American Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War. In the second excerpt, Bacevich takes up the subject of neoconservatism,...
We are now in an America where it's a commonplace for our president, wearing a "jacket with ARMY printed over his heart and 'Commander in Chief' printed on his right front," to address vast assemblages of American troops on the virtues of bringing democracy to foreign...
A month ago at TomDispatch, I wrote an essay, "Which War Is This Again?," about the naming of the "war" our president declared in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The neocons fell in love with the idea of us being in a generational struggle like...
While our media is filled with stories on the Bush administration and Iran, they almost invariably focus on the Iranian nuclear program (or European negotiations and U.S. non-negotiations about the same). You could read our press for weeks at a time – if you...
Last December, Mark Danner took a piercing look back at our Presidential election in Florida, "How Bush Really Won," printed up in the New York Review of Books and posted on line at Tomdispatch. In the aftermath of another election, closely linked to our own and to...
In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the USA PATRIOT Act, the following exchange took place between former White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, now attorney general, and Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.): "GONZALES: Mr. Chairman, let me, kind of, reassure the...
