Originally posted at TomDispatch. As October ended, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest announced that the U.S. would be sending "less than 50" boots-on-the-ground Special Operations forces into northern Syria in an “advise-and-assist” program for...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. In an effort to attack Taliban fighters, an air strike by a U.S. plane killed dozens of civilians in Kunduz, Afghanistan. In the wake of the attack, an American general responded in unequivocal fashion. “I take this possible...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Afghanistan! Whether the story is the fall of a major city to the Taliban, the destruction of a hospital with staff and patients still in it, or the president’s announcement that U.S. troops will remain in that country until at...

If journalism was once considered the first rough draft of history, now, when it comes to American military policy at least, it’s often the first rough pass at writing a script for "The Daily Show." Take, for example, a little inside-the-paper piece that...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Sometimes I imagine the last 14 years of American war policy in the Greater Middle East as a set of dismal Mad Libs. An example might be: The United States has spent [your choice of multiple billions of dollars] building up [fill in...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. To this day, it remains difficult to take in the degree to which the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq destabilized the Greater Middle East from the Chinese border to Libya. Certainly, as the recent Republican and Democratic...

Whatever happened to the “imperial presidency”? In mid-September, in the midst of the serial collapse of a $500-million Pentagon program to train “moderate” Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State (ISIS), President Obama suddenly claimed, through White House Press...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. 1,500. That figure stunned me. I found it in the 12th paragraph of a front-page New York Times story about “senior commanders” at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) playing fast and loose with intelligence reports to give...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Three Exceptional Facts About America It's Safe to Be Paranoid in the US Given the cluttered landscape of the last 14 years, can you even faintly remember the moment when the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War ended in a stunned...

Why do I always seem to be writing about Henry Kissinger? I once listened to the man who helped prolong the Vietnam War for half a decade declare that its “tragedy” lay in the fact “that the faith of Americans in each other became destroyed in the process.” I later...