Memory Failure at the Pentagon
Call it a mantra, a litany, or a to-don’t list, but the drip, drip, drip of Afghan disaster and the gross-out acts accompanying it have already resulted in one of those classic fill-you-in paragraphs that reporters hang onto for whenever the next little catastrophe...
How to Trump a Superpower
Chalk it up to the genuine strangeness of our second Afghan War. Americans, according to the latest polls, are turning against the conflict in ever greater numbers, yet it’s remarkable how little — beyond a few obvious, sensational events — they know about what’s...
What the Laws of War Allow
Why Washington’s Iran Policy Could Lead to Global Disaster
The Afghan Syndrome
Take off your hat. Taps is playing. Almost four decades late, the Vietnam War and its postwar spawn, the Vietnam Syndrome, are finally heading for their American grave. It may qualify as the longest attempted burial in history. Last words — both eulogies and curses —...
Joining the Whistleblowers’ Club
The world can be a luckless place, but every now and then serendipity just knocks you off a cliff. In what passed for my real life before TomDispatch intervened, I was (and remain, on a part-time basis) a book editor in mainstream publishing. The “slush pile” in a...
Data Mining You
I was out of the country only nine days, hardly a blink in time, but time enough, as it happened, for another small, airless room to be added to the American national security labyrinth. On March 22, Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence...
Republican Math and the Pentagon Budget
Math has never been my strong suit, but even I can see that the Pentagon — whose officials treat “weapons program” and “cost overrun” as synonyms — has a monster math problem. Not surprisingly, it’s also a place that has never successfully passed an audit. Its top...
A New Age of Enemies
Just a couple of days after “Sergeant Massacre” left his base in southern Afghanistan and single-handedly perpetrated the My Lai of the Afghan War, shooting and evidently in some cases stabbing to death 16 Afghan villagers, including nine children, a district police...
