Lockheed Martin’s Shadow Government
As a boy in the 1950s, I can remember my father, a World War II vet, becoming livid while insisting that our family not shop at a local grocery store. Its owners, he swore, had been “war profiteers” and he would never forgive them. He practically spat the phrase out....
All Bases Covered?
India, a rising power, almost had one (but the Tajiks said no). China, which last year became the world's second largest economy as well as the planet's leading energy consumer, and is expanding abroad like mad (largely via trade and the power of the purse), still has...
Freedom Fighters for a Fading Empire
The Urge to Surge
The Great Fear
Moments of imperial and economic decline – according to a recent poll, 65 percent of Americans now believe this country to be “in a state of decline” – can also be periods of cultishness, even of madness incarnate. Such a mood now seems to be spreading through the...
Politics in the Terrordome, 2011
Here in the United States of Fear, official voices are again rising in a remarkable crescendo of hysteria. My advice: don't even try getting on the subway car filled with American politicians and their acolytes accusing WikiLeaks and Julian Assange of terrorist...
Celebrity Generals
Let's consider for a moment the fates of two men who took unique paths in military life and whose careers were once intertwined: Gen. David Petraeus, now our Afghan War commander, and his former subordinate, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, our former Afghan War commander...
A Flood of Drone Strikes
The American War Dead Disappear Into the Darkness
America's heroes? Not so much. Not anymore. Not when they're dead, anyway. Remember as the invasion of Iraq was about to begin, when the Bush administration decided to seriously enforce a Pentagon ban, in existence since the first Gulf War, on media coverage and...
