Can there be any question that, since the invasion of 2003, Iraq has been unraveling? And here's the curious thing: Despite a lack of decent information and analysis on crucial aspects of the Iraqi catastrophe, despite the way much of the Iraq story fell off newspaper...
Dedicated sardonically "to Dwight and Nikita" – President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, for those too young to remember – Mordecai Roshwald's futuristic novel Level 7 was published in 1959. It was the "diary" of a "button pusher"...
Let's start with a few simple propositions. First, the farther away you are from the ground, the clearer things are likely to look, the more god-like you are likely to feel, the less human those you attack are likely to be to you. How much more so, of course, if you,...
Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shi'ite cleric who emerged triumphant from an Iraqi government assault on his Mahdi Army militia in Basra (and Baghdad) has called for a "million-strong" march in Baghdad tomorrow to mark the fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq....
They came, they saw, they… deserted. That, in short form, is the story of the Iraqi government "offensive" in Basra (and Baghdad). It took a few days, but the headlines on stories out of Iraq ("Can Iraq's Soldiers Fight?") are now telling a grim tale. The...
Yes, their defensive zone is the planet and they patrol it regularly. As ever, their planes and drones have been in the skies these last weeks. They struck a village in Somalia, tribal areas in Pakistan, rural areas in Afghanistan, and urban neighborhoods in Iraq....
In Iraq, in Afghanistan, and at home, the position of the globe's "sole superpower" is visibly fraying. The country that was once proclaimed an "empire lite" has proven increasingly lightheaded. The country once hailed as a power greater than that of imperial Rome or...
We at TomDispatch love anniversaries. So how could we have forgotten DARPA's for so many months? This very year, the Pentagon's research outfit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), turns 50 years old. Happy birthday, DARPA! You were born as a...
No one was prepared for the storm when it hit. The levees meant to protect us had long since been breached, and key officials had already left town. The well-to-do were assured of rescue, but for everyone else trapped inside the Superdome in a fast-flooding region,...
Today, in his usual remarkable way, Mark Danner takes stock of the president's failed War on Terror abroad. One day, we will also need to take full stock of George W. Bush's War on Terror at home. After all, conceptually speaking, the War on Terror lay at the heart of...
