Originally posted at TomDispatch. Here’s a little portrait of the United States in June 2020, a passage from a New York Times report on the National Guard’s treatment of a recent protest march of people chanting "We can’t breathe!" in Washington, D.C.:...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Here’s a word that essentially dropped out of Washington’s dictionary in this century: peace. It used to be part of the rhetoric, at least, of politicians there, but in the era of the war on terror it’s barely made...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Here was the headline that recently caught my eye: “Former Top U.S. General Dunford Joining UNICEF.” Okay, you knew it was a joke immediately, right? There’s really only one conceivable headline of that sort when...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. We’re in an age in which the president who miraculously “captured” ISIS in “a month,” or so he recently claimed, and has tweeted his fervent desire to end America’s “endless wars” and...
How are you with numbers? I can deal with $1.5 million. I think I can even imagine $1.5 billion, a sum a thousand times greater. But how about a million times greater: $1.5 trillion? That happens to be the estimated cost of the Pentagon’s program to build, deploy, and...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. After almost 18 years of the war (or rather wars) on (or perhaps of) terror, there's some good news! The Washington Post reports that American troops are finally coming home from Afghanistan! Actually, let me amend that slightly. They...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. It’s no small thing to lodge a word or phrase of your own in our language. So give Dwight D. Eisenhower credit. In his presidential farewell address to the American people in 1961, the former five-star general of World War II...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In those pre-seat-belt years – it might have been 1953 – I can remember being in the back seat of the family car with our dog. My dad was driving, my mom sitting next to him. And I can still practically hear them launching, with...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Consider it a conundrum. Both parties in Congress and the president simply can’t pour enough money into the Pentagon and the rest of the national security state. As a result, theirs has been a cumulative trillion-dollar budget...
Should we have a Department of Offense in place of a Department of Defense (DoD)? Wouldn’t “Offense” be more accurate? Perhaps in more ways than one? Consider the revival of “great-power rivalry,” meaning China and Russia as...
