We're out of Afghanistan. Good. We should have gotten out before. Our involvement there was America's longest war, longer than the Civil War, World War I and World War II combined. We accomplished little good and plenty of bad. Tens of thousands killed. A trillion...
As if President Joe Biden didn’t have enough trouble to deal with, he now is supposed to rescue imprisoned Americans around the globe. Last weekend relatives of a couple dozen citizens and residents held overseas sent an open letter to the president demanding action....
The US government has made a habit of threatening other countries with military attack if they fail to do what Washington wants, and in some cases the other country finds itself under attack even when it has complied. Iraq disarmed and ended its unconventional weapons...
The Biden administration’s surprisingly confrontational stance toward the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on both trade and security issues has led to considerable comment in the news media. Some commentators even contend that Biden’s China policy is little more than...
Recently, the Biden administration announced that they had no plans to withdraw US troops from Syria. Given the backlash Joe Biden received from the military establishment after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, this was not unexpected. Despite Trump’s multiple...
"When elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled." So warned Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte in his address to the UN General Assembly on September 22, 2020. He was referring to the consequences for East Asia of a conflict between the US and...
Sometimes really smart people are really stupid. Not just stupid, but malign. Such is the case of Sen. Ted Cruz. The presidential wannabe joined many seemingly principled Republicans in opposing Donald Trump in 2016, but then did the ritual political pirouette and...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Ann Jones began her remarkable book Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan this way: "I went to Afghanistan after the bombing stopped. Somehow, I felt obliged to help pick up the pieces. I was a New Yorker who had...
