Do we have a shortage of female heroes in this country? Are virtuous women that scarce? Or is it simply that Women’s History Month, by eliminating women from the conversation who don’t fit the narrative of the State Department and the Pentagon, failed to...
Iraq Daily Roundup: Four Killed
The Pentagon’s Budget from Hell
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Somehow, when it comes to Congress and the mainstream media, the true strangeness of the Pentagon budget always is missing in action. Despite arguments about the small things, just about everyone accepts that the United States must...
20 Years Later: Confessions of a Conscientious Quitter
It’s been 20 years since the lies and obfuscation that led to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. I’m about to turn 37 and it hit me: those events 20 years ago were how I began my political journey, though I didn't know it at the time. As a progressive activist, one...
Vladimir Putin vs. the International Criminal Court
On March 17, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant of arrest for Russian President Vladimir Putin as a war criminal for allegedly deporting and transferring children from Ukraine to Russia. The Nuremburg Tribunal declared that "To initiate a war of...
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Now Ukraine: Reductio ab Absurdum
The recent 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 has caused me to reflect on the two years (2007-08) that I worked as a field-level civilian advisor in Iraq followed by six years in Afghanistan (2009-14) and to correlate this experience to the current...
We Don’t Have To Choose Between Nuclear Madmen
The announcement by Vladimir Putin over the weekend that Russia will deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus marked a further escalation of potentially cataclysmic tensions over the war in neighboring Ukraine. As the Associated Press reported, "Putin said the...
The Best Way To Protect US Troops in Syria
Last week saw a sharp increase in attacks on US troops occupying northeastern Syria, with a drone strike against a US base blamed on “pro-Iran” forces and a US counter-strike said to have killed at least 19 people. After the US retaliation, another strike...
The Ukraine War Enters the 2024 US Presidential Election Stage Right
Opposition to Joe Biden’s proxy war to destroy Russia has entered the 2024 US Presidential election – from stage Right. And the growing anti-interventionist sentiment among grass roots conservatives and libertarians is alarming Establishment warhawks on both...
The Banality of Biden’s ‘Exceptional’ Elite Advisers
Danger: President Joe Biden’s sophomores running U.S. foreign policy today live in a dream world on the verge of becoming a nightmare. The nightmare – military confrontation with both Russia and China – now looms. It is scary enough that Biden seems to be out of it....


