Is your representative speaking out against escalation of the Afghanistan war? Last week, some members of Congress sent President Obama a letter that urged him to "reconsider" his order deploying 17,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan. Everyone in the House of...
Hours after President Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress, the New York Times printed the news that he plans to gradually withdraw "American combat forces" from Iraq during the next 18 months. The newspaper reported that the advantages of the...
The United States began its war in Afghanistan 88 months ago. The "war on terror" has no sunset clause. As a perpetual emotion machine, it offers to avenge what can never heal and to fix grief that is irreparable. For the crimes against humanity committed on...
A few days after the inauguration, in a piece celebrating the arrival of the Obama administration, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote that the new president has clearly signaled: "No more crazy wars." I wish. Last week – and 44 years ago –...
Israelis and Arabs "feel that only force can assure justice," I. F. Stone noted soon after the Six-Day War in 1967. And he wrote: "A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements. The Others are always either less than human, and thus their...
Sunday morning, before dawn, I read in the New York Times that "the Pentagon is planning to add more than 20,000 troops to Afghanistan" within the next 18 months – "raising American force levels to about 58,000" in that country. Then I scraped...
Of course Katharine Gun was free to have a conscience, as long as it didn't interfere with her work at a British intelligence agency. To the authorities, practically speaking, a conscience was apt to be less tangible than a pixel on a computer screen. But suddenly...
With 223 days left in his presidency, George W. Bush laid more flagstones along a path to war on Iran. There was the usual declaration that "all options are on the table" – and, just as ominously, much talk of diplomacy. Three times on Wednesday, the...
While the Iraqi government continued its large-scale military assault in Basra, the NPR reporter's voice from Iraq was unequivocal on the morning of March 27: "There is no doubt that this operation needed to happen." Such flat-out statements, uttered with...
Maybe it sounded good when politicians, pundits, and online fundraisers talked about American deaths as though they were the deaths that mattered most. Maybe it sounded good to taunt the Bush administration as a bunch of screw-ups who didn't know how to run a proper...
