Victor Davis Hanson, previously a classics professor at Fresno State specializing in the military history of ancient Greece and currently embedded at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, is a fervent apologist for the Bush administration's interventionist foreign...
In reference to coercive British rule, Tom Paine once told Americans that there is something absurd about the idea that the entire continent of North America should be forever ruled by the little island of Great Britain. Paine, as always in his work, was trying to...
President Jimmy Carter was demonized for pointing out in his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, that there are actually two sides to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Distinguished American scholars, such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have suffered the same...
Future historians studying the decline and fall of the American Empire will probably focus on George W. Bush's disastrous Iraqi adventure – the modern-day equivalent of Alcibiades' Sicilian expedition – to explain the pathology of a global hyper-power....
[Note for TomDispatch readers: In the weeks when the first Gulf War was underway – it seems a lifetime ago – I began researching a book on the history of American triumphalism (which I came to call "victory culture"), especially as I had experienced it in my...
In the year 701 B.C., the Assyrian king Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem. The Bible records the words that the Assyrian general, Rabshakeh, addressed to Hezekiah, king of Judah: "Now, behold, thou trusteth upon the staff of this bruised reed, even upon Egypt, on...
American military aid to Israel has been increased yet again, which leads us to ask the inevitable question: What are we getting for our money? Well, we're getting this, as well as this, and this – not to mention this. The regularly quoted figure is $3.5 billion...
Last December, when the U.S. Marine Corps charged four infantrymen for the murder of 24 civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha on Nov. 19, 2005, the counts represented the most serious case of alleged war crimes committed by Marines in Iraq or Afghanistan. An official...
BAQUBA - Amid the violence and chaos in Diyala province, kidnappings continue unabated, bringing an uncertain fate for the abducted and unanswered questions for their families. Kidnapping has become another form of violence, to add to car bombs, assassinations,...
Updated at 12:05 a.m. EDT, Sept. 6, 2007At least 51 Iraqis were killed and 65 wounded during attacks that included bombing civilians in Sadr City and Mosul. Ten American soldiers were also killed in separate events. Two GIs were killed today and another was wounded...
