Originally posted at TomDispatch. In April 2003, with Baghdad occupied by American troops, the top officials of the Bush administration were already dreaming of building bases in Iraq that would be garrisoned more or less in perpetuity. Everyone was too polite to call...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. I’m sure that you’ve heard about the three bare-bones “staging outposts” or, in the lingo of the trade, “cooperative security locations” that the U.S. Marines have established in Senegal, Ghana, and...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. There’s an ugliness to war beyond the ugly things war does. There are scars beyond the rough, imperfectly mended flesh of the gunshot wound, beyond the flashback, the startle reflex, the nightmare. War finds peculiar and heinous...
It might have been the most influential single sentence of that era: “In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. It’s been an incredibly quiet show. In recent years, the U.S. military has moved onto the African continent in a big way – and essentially, with the exception of Nick Turse (and Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post), just about...
Rambo! In my Reagan-era youth, the name was synonymous with the Vietnam War – at least the Vietnam War reimagined, the celluloid fantasy version of it in which a tanned, glistening, muscle-bound commando busted the handcuffs of defeat and redeemed America’s honor in...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Think of this as a little imperial folly update – and here's the backstory. In the years after invading Iraq and disbanding Saddam Hussein’s military, the U.S. sunk about $25 billion into “standing up” a new Iraqi...
President Obama couldn’t have been more eloquent. Addressing the Clinton Global Initiative, for instance, he said: “When a little boy is kidnapped, turned into a child soldier, forced to kill or be killed – that’s slavery.” Denouncing Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In September 2001, the Bush administration launched its “global war on terror,” to which its supporters later tried to attach names like “the long war” or “World War IV.” Their emphasis: that we...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Soon after 9/11, Ann Jones went to Afghanistan to help in whatever way she could, “embedding” with civilians who had been battered by the rigors of that war-torn land. Out of that experience, especially dealing with the...
