Real talk: Joe Biden hasn't had too many finest hours in his 47 years plus years on the national scene. To be fair, he’s had his moments – like a powerful, earthy, and impassioned 1986 speech he delivered to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, opposing the Reagan...
Biden’s Bolt From Yemen?: Symbolic Step, Systemic Limits, and Linguistic Gymnastics
The Intercept labeled it a "dramatic policy shift." And here’s hoping it’s that. Still, President Joe Biden’s announcement – during his first major foreign policy address – that he would end American support for Saudi and United Arab Emirates-led...
Backing France’s African Adventures: What Could Go Wrong?… Everything
In Africa, Islamic State, and other Islamists, are just the tip of an underlying conflicts iceberg. Still, for decades, French Titanics – fueled by America – have rammed the symptomatic spire whilst ignoring the subsurface bulk of problems Paris largely caused or...
Peering Into a Forever-War Crystal Ball
Originally posted at TomDispatch. More than 19 years ago, the U.S. launched the air war that would become the ground invasion and “liberation” of Afghanistan. More than 17 years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared “major combat”...
ISIS-Africa Alarmism: Brought to You Context-Free by Defense Analysts
Long before he played various roles in the Obama administration, Robert Berschinski was described as among the "rarest of creatures." For starters, he was an R.O.T.C. cadet at an Ivy League school – Yale – on September 11, 2001, at a time when graduates of elite...
In Other News: Another Franco-American Forever War Failing in Africa – Mali Edition
This past August, a U.S. military-trained African army officer staged a coup in an impoverished country – Mali – wracked by violence that’s long been folded under the opportunist umbrella of a global war on terror. Washington subsequently feigned surprise, pretended...
The [Neocon] Empire Strikes Back: Victoria Nuland, and the Kagans Who Love Her
Recently on Twitter, a someone graciously dubbed me a "prophet" after rereading my April article arguing that "American Exceptionalism Scars Both Victim and Victimizer" – and which pivoted around actual philosophical prophet, Ms. Simone Weil. This...
‘There Won’t Be Snow in Africa This Christmas’ – But There Will Be US-Enabled War Crimes
Ethiopia has pursued "legitimate" military action in its Tigray province since early November, according Moussa Faki Mahamat, the chairman of the African Union (AU) Commission. Maybe. It does seem that the northern state’s regional forces – the Tigray...
Eastern [African] Exposure: Ethiopia, Ethnicity, and other Kindling for Tigray’s Backstory
There’s a whole mess of bloody messes around the world that few Americans care about. In fact, they could form a whole category of conflict labeled: "Top Ten Violent Hot Spots You’ve Never Heard Of (But Should Have)." The list might include, for starters,...
Spilling Ink and Spilling Blood
Originally posted at TomDispatch. TomDispatch is essentially a no-submissions site. The only exception I’ve made over the years has been for those in the U.S. military or retired from it who, miraculously enough, became critical of it and the forever wars that...