Someday, when historians look back, they will undoubtedly be struck by the utter inanity, not to say collective insanity, of the United States fighting what our president has called a “war of necessity,” now in its tenth year, in Afghanistan, as well as a “covert” war...
Tired of Afghanistan and all those messy, oil-ish wars in the Greater Middle East that just don’t seem to pan out? Count on one thing: part of the U.S. military feels just the way you do, especially a largely sidelined Navy—and that’s undoubtedly one of the reasons...
Imperial powers hedge their bets. The most striking recent example we have of this is in Egypt. While the Pentagon was pouring money into the Egyptian military (approximately $40 billion since 1979), it turns out—thank you, WikiLeaks!—that the U.S. government was...
Recent uprisings and rumblings across North Africa and the Middle East from Tunisia and Egypt to Saudi Arabia and Yemen have shone a bright, unflattering light on long-time U.S. allies in the region—despotic kleptocrats whom we supported sometimes to the tune of...
Was there ever an American president who publicly told more people on this planet what they must do than George W. Bush? I suspect not. He’s gone, of course, but America’s version of a “must-do” foreign policy didn’t exactly leave the scene with him—the only...
Chalmers Johnson was a stalwart of TomDispatch. He first wrote for this website on Jan. 8, 2003 (“Iraqi Wars”), barely more than a month after it was launched. The last piece he wrote in his life (“Portrait of a Sagging Empire”) was for TomDispatch as well. In the...
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: As of Wednesday, I’ll be off the grid for a week. Back April 8. TomDispatch will be unaffected and will post as usual thanks to associate editors Nick Turse and Andy Kroll. But for those writing in with comments, requests, or anything...
