An 11-Quote Quiz on the Bush Administration's War of Words From "mission accomplished" through those endless "turning points" and "tipping points" up to the "brink" of "the abyss" and "the precipice," and back again, American officials, military and civilian, in...
Here's the strange thing: Since 2001, our media has been filled with terrifying nuclear headlines. The Iraqi bomb (you remember those "mushroom clouds" about to rise over American cities), the North Korean bomb, and the Iranian bomb have been almost obsessively in the...
Finally, the great American disconnect may be ending. Only four years after the invasion of Iraq, the crucial facts-on-the-ground might finally be coming into sight in this country – not the carnage or the mayhem; not the suicide car bombs or the chlorine truck...
Soon after the invasion of Iraq was launched, war supporters and critics alike, in a bow to the Vietnam era, began to speak referentially of the "Q-word" – for "quagmire," of course. By now, Iraq has had that administration-inspired "Q" hung firmly around its...
Former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega has been writing about the case of outed CIA agent Valerie Plame for this site since the summer of 2005. The story itself began back in July 2003 with a New York Times op-ed by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph...
A few weeks ago, I offered Tomdispatch readers, "Close Your Eyes," my fantasy graduation speech for the class of 2007, given from the podium of some university of my mind. Mark Danner, however, recently stood at an actual podium at the University of California,...
Of the seven wonders of the ancient Mediterranean world, including the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Colossus of Rhodes, four were destroyed by earthquakes, two by fire. Only the Great Pyramid of Giza today remains. We no longer know who built those fabled...
In a recent inside-the-fold roundup of the previous day's mayhem in Iraq, David S. Cloud, writing for my hometown paper, devoted 729 words to an account of American casualties from IEDs ("Six American soldiers and their interpreter were killed by a roadside bomb in...
Hey, aren't we the most exceptional nation in history? George Bush and his pals thought so – and they were in a great American tradition of exceptionalism. Of course, they were imagining us as the most exceptional empire in history (or maybe at the end of it),...
Way back in 1999, when I was still a TomDispatch-less book editor, I read a proposal from Chalmers Johnson. He was, then, known mainly as a scholar of modern Japan, though years earlier I had read his brilliant book on Chinese peasant nationalism – about a period...
