Donald Rumsfeld, the former U.S. congressman, aide to several Republican presidents, and two-time defense secretary whose torture-laden tenure and ruinous legacy were defined by his lies in service of an unending war that's killed at least hundreds of thousands of...
The Pentagon’s announcement of a series of bombing raids on Syria and Iraq – ordered by President Joe Biden without the constitutional authorization by Congress – raised more questions than it answered. Here are some: 1. Why now? The statement by the Department of...
Last weekend, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. ordered the U.S. military to bomb targets in Syria and Iraq in an effort "to send a clear and unambiguous deterrent message" to Iran. It is apparently the belief of the Biden administration – as it has been with...
On July 3, 2020, Julian Assange will turn 50 years old, spending his third birthday behind bars. The WikiLeaks publisher has been held without any formal charges alongside criminals and terrorists inside London's high-security prison for exposing the US government’s...
It is by now a near cliché in defense-watcher circles to talk about the common peril of "mission creep" in military interventions. Naturally, that’s not translated to America avoiding this tendency – of gradually shifting objectives during the course...
The U.S. has no compelling reason to keep tens of thousands of troops in the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Syria, and it should follow the withdrawal from Afghanistan with complete withdrawals of the forces currently located in these countries. There is a growing body of...
In early June 2021, in a classified directive to Pentagon officials, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin slammed the former Trump administration for talking big but never taking action to counter “the China threat.” Austin made it clear that things would be...
In recent years, the U.S. government has turned starvation into official policy. Determined to force hostile states to bend to its will, Washington increasingly imposes economic sanctions, using America’s financial dominance to penalize foreign individuals, companies,...
