This article originally appeared at TruthDig. Certain Christmas songs have always made me cry. As a largely lapsed Catholic, Bing Crosby’s “Do You Hear What I Hear?” touches a nerve, John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” reminds me of the horror of combat, and...
During 2019: At least 3,092 people were killed in the various conflicts taking places across Iraq. Another 22,612 were wounded, and 1,384 bodies were found in mass graves. The number of dead was cut in half from 2018, but the number of wounded rose substantially. At...
Contractors were the bane of my existence. It was first apparent to me in Iraq in 2007, at the height of the civil war. A bunch of Blackwater mercenaries had decided to swing through my assigned sector and shoot up a bunch of civilians in a crowded public square. As...
As the calendar prepared to flip from 2019 to 2020, protesters stormed the US embassy in Baghdad. As I write this, the action – a response to US airstrikes in Iraq and Syria which killed at least 25 and wounded more than 50 – hasn’t yet become a...
On Friday, WikiLeaks released even more internal emails and documents from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) related to the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria, on April 7th 2018. The release is the fourth leak related to the alleged...
This is all wrong. The entire war on terrorism, and every bit of the suffering, spending and lost liberty that has come with it, has been an unnecessary evil. At the time of the September 11, 2001 attack which got this new era of war started, the enemy in Afghanistan...
As of Dec. 26, Kim Jong Un's "Christmas gift" to President Donald Trump had not arrived. Most foreign policy analysts predict it will be a missile test more impressive than any Pyongyang has yet carried off. What is Kim's game? What does Kim want? He cannot...
