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...
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...
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...
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...
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: To check out the most recent review of my book, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, which just went up at Mother Jones magazine's Web site, click here (“...as in his daily dispatches, he takes on our war-possessed...
Much of the time, our wars may hardly exist for us, but in the age of celebrity, our generals do – exactly because they become celebrities. When Barack Obama picked Stanley McChrystal as his Afghan war commander, the general was greeted by the media as little short of...
