Trying to play down the significance of an ongoing WikiLeaks dump of more than 250,000 State Department documents, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently offered the following bit of Washington wisdom: “The fact is, governments deal with the United States because...
It's finally coming into focus, and it's not even a difficult equation to grasp. It goes like this: take a country in the grips of an expanding national security state and sooner or later your “safety” will mean your humiliation, your degradation. And by the way, it...
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Last Saturday, Chalmers Johnson died. I'm particularly proud that, in his last years, he did much of his most penetrating analysis of American militarism and our war state for this Web site. He penned his first piece for TomDispatch,...
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I'm sad to report that Chalmers Johnson died on Saturday. He was a stalwart of this site, writing for it regularly from its early moments. Without the slightest doubt, he was one of the most remarkable authors I've had the pleasure to...
Last year, it was Kuwait, Qatar, and Iraq. This year, it's Germany, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Next year, it could easily be Afghanistan, Pakistan, Diego Garcia, Bahrain, and Turkey. Or of course they could choose to play in Japan (with a...
You must have had a moment when you thought to yourself: It really isn't going to end, is it? Not ever. Rationally, you know perfectly well that whatever your “it” might be will indeed end, because everything does, but your gut tells you something different. I had...
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hasn't been alone in playing for time when it comes to American policy, that's for sure. (Think, for instance, of our Afghan War commander Gen. David Petraeus.) But Netanyahu played out the pre-election months with some skill...
Almost two years and one disastrous election later, we're still waiting for the other Barack Obama to make an appearance, and from the gab coming out of Washington right now, it looks like we'll be twiddling our thumbs a bit longer (if not forever). Once again, the...
