Uncovering the Military’s Secret Military
In “Getting bin Laden,” Nicholas Schmidle’s New Yorker report on the assault on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, here’s the money sentence, according to Noah Shachtman of Wired Magazine’s Danger Room blog: “The Abbottabad raid was not DEVGRU’s...
Lowering America’s War Ceiling?
By now, it seems as if everybody and his brother has joined the debt-ceiling imbroglio in Washington, perhaps the strangest homespun drama of our time. It’s as if Washington’s leading political players, aided and abetted by the media’s love of the horse race, had...
Ballpark Liturgy: America’s New Civic Religion
Post-9/11, doesn't it seem as though all American experience is blending into a single experience whose label is "your safety"? Which means, in practical terms, you get poked, prodded, searched, and surveilled wherever you go. The other day, I went to the...
How Not to Make Friends in the Greater Middle East
Islam-Baiting Doesn’t Work
During the 2010 midterm election campaign, virtually every hard-charging candidate on the far right took a moment to trash a Muslim, a mosque, or Islamic pieties. In the wake of those elections, with 85 new Republican House members and a surging Tea Party movement,...
Obama’s Bush-League World
George W. who? I mean, the guy is so over. He turned the big six-five the other day, and it was barely a footnote in the news. And Dick Cheney, tick-tick-tick. Condoleezza Rice? She’s already onto her next memoir, and yet it's as if she's been wiped from history, too....
Bradley Manning, American Hero
The Militarized Surrealism of Barack Obama
War Fever Subsides in Washington
Imagine yourself in a typical Twilight Zone episode. You’ve been tossing and turning in delirium for some time and now, to your astonishment, you wake up to find yourself in an almost unrecognizable world. Your country, the former “sole superpower” on planet Earth, is...
