The annual defense budget, passed recently by both the House (377-48) and Senate (82-8), came in at $738 billion for 2020, up from last year a sweet $22 billion. War hits the motherlode every year. “The money just isn’t there” for virtually anything that matters...
The U.S. House of Representatives, after several months of hearing testimony on the potential abuse of executive power within the Trump administration, voted along party lines, with the Democratic majority succeeding in impeaching the President of the United States...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. America’s forever wars and their fallout over these last 18 years have been hell for kids. Just ask Ismail or any of the other 56 wounded children who survived an August 2018 attack on their school bus in northern Yemen by Saudi...
The trove of U.S. "Lessons Learned" documents on Afghanistan published by the Washington Post portrays, in excruciating detail, the anatomy of a failed policy, scandalously hidden from the public for 18 years. The "Lessons Learned" papers, however,...
How, exactly, did I get here? My political journey has somehow taken me from canvassing for Obama north of Fort Knox, KY in 2008, to voting for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Primary outside of West Point, NY in 2016, to – gulp! – "defending" Trump against...
Three years ago, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 2334. With fourteen members voting in favor and one abstention, the Resolution was the equivalent of a political earthquake. Indeed, it was the first time in many years that Israel was roundly...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Retired U.S. Army Major Danny Sjursen offers a year-ending look at what “forever war” really means in the American experience. To do so, he turns not to the wars in which he personally took part in Afghanistan and Iraq,...
“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn’t know what we were doing.” So said Gen. Douglas Lute, who oversaw the US war on Afghanistan under Presidents Bush and Obama. Eighteen years into the longest war in US history, we...
