Originally posted at TomDispatch. War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. So that classic late 1960s song claimed. Still, for Bill Astore and me (and, I have little doubt, Joe Biden, too), such a thought didn’t cross our minds as we played with toy soldiers on...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. Martin Luther King, Jr., hero for peace. It’s sad that the word “hero” is so often modified by or married to “war” in history. He’s a war hero, we say, without giving it too much thought. As if wars are...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. What will historians say decades or centuries from now when the U.S. empire collapses into ruin? How will they explain it? Consider the United States in the big picture. I see a country with unique strengths....
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. There’s a man who famously crowned himself emperor rather than submit to the otherworldly power of a pope. A new movie will soon be out on his “glories.” Napoleon Bonaparte, a military genius, embraced war and...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, America heard something about “peace dividends” and “a new world order.” With the Soviet Union gone, the Cold War over, America could take all the hundreds of billions it...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. I read Saturday that Israel had already dropped 6000 bombs on Gaza in six days. Here’s the report from the Wall Street Journal: The Israeli Air Force said it has dropped about 6,000 bombs targeted at Hamas in...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. The ancients were wise to make war a god. Violent, unpredictable, destructive, seductive, brutal, and capricious. And of course very, very powerful in its hold on the human mind. I trained as a historian,...
In September 2007, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore emailed me out of the blue. He’d been reading TomDispatch articles on this country’s Global War on Terror, especially the invasion of, and never-ending conflict in, Iraq. And as a...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. “Integrity First” is the fundamental core value of the U.S. Air Force. Two other core values speak to “service before self” and “excellence in all we do.” But integrity remains the wellspring, and it’s the...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. I can still remember my parents singing a somewhat cleaned-up version of the World War I-era song “You’re in the Army Now.” (“You’re in the Army now, You’re not behind a plow; You’ll never get rich, you son of a bitch, You’re in the...
