Originally posted at TomDispatch. It may be hard to believe now, but in 1970 the protest song “War,” sung by Edwin Starr, hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. That was at the height of the Vietnam antiwar movement and the song, written by Norman...
The US Military Suffers From Affluenza
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Here’s my little joke of the month: How do you spell Pentagon? M-O-R-E. Whether it’s funny or not, it couldn’t be more accurate. And that urge for more is fed endlessly by an American military that has increasingly...
The US Military Bombs in the Twenty-First Century
Here’s my twenty-first-century rule of thumb about this country: if you have to say it over and over, it probably ain’t so. Which is why I’d think twice every time we’re told how “exceptional” or “indispensable” the United States is. For someone like me who can still...
The Peace Movement’s War Story
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Who even remembers the moment in mid-February 2003, almost 13 years ago, when millions of people across this country and the planet turned out in an antiwar moment unique in history? It was aimed at stopping a conflict that had yet to...
How To Avert Real Change in Election 2016
Originally posted at TomDispatch. It was the grisliest of stories: a decade and a half ago a former KGB man, Alexander Litvinenko, defected to England and turned on the powers-that-be in his own country, accusing its leader of both acts of assassination and, among...
Failed States and States of Failure
Originally posted on TomDispatch. One of the charms of the future is its powerful element of unpredictability, its ability to ambush us in lovely ways or bite us unexpectedly in the ass. Most of the futures I imagined as a boy have, for instance, come up deeply short,...
How To Succeed at Failing, Pentagon-Style
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Iraq and Afghanistan are separated by more than 1,000 miles and, although they both exist in what is now known as the Greater Middle East, they had little in common – at least until March 2003, when the Bush administration...
Enduring Bases, Enduring War in the Middle East
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Meet the hottest new commander in the increasingly secretive world of American warfare, Lieutenant General Raymond “Tony” Thomas. A rare portrait in the Washington Post paints him as a “shadowy figure” – an...
How We Learned To Stop Worrying About People and Love the Bombing
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Torturers, rapists, murderers: for more than a decade as I researched my history of the Vietnam War, Kill Anything That Moves, I spent a good deal of time talking to them, thinking about them, reading about them, writing about them....
America Revisits the Dark Side
Originally posted at TomDispatch. They’re back! From the look of the presidential campaign, war crimes are back on the American agenda. We really shouldn’t be surprised, because American officials got away with it last time – and in the case of the drone...