Originally posted at TomDispatch. Today, in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests, TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich considers the all-American version of “extreme materialism” that Martin Luther King called out more than half a century ago. And...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. In the grimmest sense imaginable, this has already been an action-packed year. Try, in fact, to imagine a summary of this moment in historical terms: Right now, in June 2020, we’re experiencing a version of the 1918...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. It was a bare-knuckle brawl of the first order. It took place in Washington, D.C., and it resulted in a KO. The winners? Lobbyists and the defense industry. The losers? Us. And odds on, you didn’t even know that it happened. Few...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Here’s a little portrait of the United States in June 2020, a passage from a New York Times report on the National Guard’s treatment of a recent protest march of people chanting "We can’t breathe!" in Washington, D.C.:...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Consider it strange. The U.S. has been fighting in Somalia on and off (mostly on) since the early 1990s. (Who, of a certain age, doesn’t remember the "Black Hawk Down" fiasco?) Almost 30 years later, at a time when the U.N....

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Someday, America’s Afghan Wars – the first was against the Soviet Union, 1979-1989; the second began with the post-9/11 invasion of that country and has never ended – may be seen as follies of an unprecedented sort. Certainly,...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. There was certainly a hint that the previous century was not going to unfold in a particularly propitious manner when World War I, “the war to end all wars” (a phrase famously attributed to American President Woodrow...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. I’m sure you still remember them. The president regularly called them “my generals.” They were, he claimed, from “central casting” and there were three of them: retired Marine Corps General John Kelly,...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Though my father served in World War II (an experience he would seldom talk about), I was never in a war myself, nor has the rest of my family been. Nothing strange there. It’s typical, in fact, of American life since the draft was...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Nick Turse began covering what might be thought of as the secret history of American war in this century – the rise and spread of American Special Operations forces – for TomDispatch in 2011. That was the year when he first revealed...