Excerpted from American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity Americans, including GIs, were losing their once reflexive faith that the U.S. military, with all its skill and firepower, would prevail in Vietnam as it had so often throughout history. Also...

Secretary Tillerson was far from an ideal choice, but his anointed successor at the State Department – Mike Pompeo - may ditch diplomacy all together and start a war! We both attended West Point. That’s where the commonalities end. I’ve been a soldier opposed to...

When I ask a class of college students how many have heard of My Lai, only a few if any raise their hands, tentatively. Even they are unsure what it was, or where, or when, or who was involved. Why have we forgotten the nadir of the Vietnam War? Is our collective...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. I’ve long been struck by one strange aspect of the most recent part of the American Century: just how demobilized this country has been in the midst of distant wars that have morphed and spread for almost 17 years. I was born in...

I rarely have the chance to watch TV, but I would be lying if I say I did not love political dramas. As a former student of Political Science, I see the way American politics is played out on television as a dramatized caricature of reality. My feelings are slowly...

The latest example of alleged Russian perfidy – the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia – is yet another case of faith-based attribution. In accusing Russia of some heinous crime – in this instance, the murder of a former double agent working for MI6 –...

Let’s try to make this simple: The basic rationale behind charges that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in the 2016 U.S. election to help candidate Donald Trump rests, of course, on the assumption that Moscow preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton. But that is...