Originally posted at TomDispatch. “I'm going to Saigon,” said Secretary of Defense James Mattis last month before correcting himself. “Ho Chi Minh City – former Saigon.” It was the fifth time that Mattis would meet with his Vietnamese...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. He was the candidate who, while talking to a foreign policy expert, reportedly wondered "why we can’t use nuclear weapons." He was the man who would never rule anything out or take any "cards," including nuclear...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In June, Austin “Scott” Miller, the special-ops general chosen to be the 17th U.S. commander in Afghanistan, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Like so many of the generals who had preceded him, he...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. We’re already two years past the crystal anniversary and eight years short of the silver one, or at least we would be, had it been a wedding – and, after a fashion, perhaps it was. On October 7, 2001, George W. Bush launched the...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. The following excerpt from Tom Engelhardt’s book The End of Victory Culture is posted with permission from the University of Massachusetts Press. 1. “Hey, How Come They Got All the Fun?” Now that Darth Vader’s...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. It was May 2017. The Saudis were growing increasingly nervous. For more than two years they had been relying heavily on U.S. military support and bombs to defeat Houthi rebels in Yemen. Now, the Senate was considering a bipartisan...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In July 1999, Chalmers Johnson began the prologue to Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire this way: "Instead of demobilizing after the Cold War, the United States imprudently committed itself to maintaining a...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. When you think about it, the Earth is a relatively modest-sized planet – about 25,000 miles in circumference at the Equator, with a total surface area of 197 million square miles, almost three-quarters of which is water. It’s...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Like many in my generation, undoubtedly including Donald Trump, I went into space early (and I’m not even counting all those hours in my early teens I spent reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy or H.G. Wells’s...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. It was the rarest of graphics in the American news media: a CNN map in which recent Saudi air strikes in Yemen were represented by little yellow explosions. Below them were the number of civilians killed (“97,”...
