Whose Hands? Whose Blood?
In Bed With the US Army
As the WikiLeaks document-dump week ends, perhaps the real significance of what happened lay not in the specific revelations in those 92,000 pieces of raw data from American frustration-ville in Afghanistan, 2004-2009 (much of which would have been no news to anyone...
The End of (Military) History?
All the Strangeness of Our American World in One Article
Have you ever thought about just how strange this country's version of normal truly is? Let me make my point with a single, hardly noticed Washington Post news story that's been on my mind for a while. It represents the sort of reporting that, in our world, zips by...
Stop Calling Them Heroes
American War Versus Real War
One striking aspect of the Vietnam years – and the antiwar movement of that era – was the degree to which you could see images of Vietnamese civilian suffering here in the United States. Among the iconic images of that war, for instance, was Nick Ut's photo of a young...
Why Are We in Afghanistan?
July 12, 2011, Washington, D.C. - In triumphant testimony before a joint committee of Congress in which he was greeted on both sides of the aisle as a conquering hero, Gen. David Petraeus announced the withdrawal this month of the first 1,000 American troops from...
Hope and Change Fade, but War Endures
Plotting Terrorism
Barack Obama may not have come into office pledging to get the U.S. out of Afghanistan, but he did pledge one thing: to close the Bush-era prison at Guantánamo within a year. That couldn't have been clearer. And as I wrote back then, it was also a reasonable...
