As Department of Defense officials prepared for an invasion of Iraq in early 2003, they were intent on giving good war at home and abroad all at once—and on creating images that, like the coming Pax Americana in the Middle East, would be forever. They planned, as they...
In case you hadn’t noticed, they are—no kidding around—absolutely the niftiest non-humans on Earth. I’m speaking about the special-operations force of Navy SEALs that took out Osama bin Laden. They and their special ops colleagues are “supermen” (ABC News), “X-men”...
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...
