On October 5th, Robert Reich tweeted out "We just ended the longest war in U.S. history, yet we’re still increasing the Pentagon budget. Could there be any clearer sign that congress is in the pockets of the defense industry?" It is not often that I find...

There is an unmistakable shift in American politics regarding Palestine and Israel, a change that is inspired by the way in which many Americans, especially the youth, view the Palestinian struggle and the Israeli occupation. While this shift is yet to translate into...

War and conflict rarely benefit the lives of ordinary people. Indeed, the very nature of war is destructive. In the case of Afghanistan, once the US war and occupation ended, any delusive stability or vitality in the nation’s economy collapsed too. Numbers and...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Just in case you didn’t realize it, the lost war in Afghanistan was their fault, not ours. If we had any fault at all, as Secretary of Defense and former Iraq War commander Lloyd Austin pointed out at a Senate hearing last week,...

Battles in the US Congress that erupted again this week, holding up an extra $1bn in military funding for Israel, underscored just how divorced from reality the conversation about US financial aid to Israel has become, even among many critics. For 48 hours last month,...

The Middle East was a crucial arena in the Cold War. It was then that Israel first acquired its value to the US as a bulwark against perceived Soviet penetration into the Middle East. The Soviet Union perceived US activity in the Middle East as encircling them on...

Reprinted with permission from Responsible Statecraft. There is a rapidly growing political demand for making American officials accountable for the failures of the Afghanistan War, with a focus now on the military leadership and top generals’ role in keeping forces...