Originally posted at TomDispatch. There are always winners and losers, aren’t there? For instance, the seven children who died in that last drone strike the U.S. military launched in Kabul as it was leaving town were certainly losers. Those who ordered that...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. TomDispatch began with the Afghan War — with a sense I had from its earliest moments that it was a misbegotten venture of the first order. Here, for instance, is a comment I wrote about that disaster in December 2002, a little...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. If it hasn’t been forever, it’s certainly felt like it. Almost 20 years after George W. Bush and crew invaded and occupied Afghanistan, the American-installed government there collapsed, its leader fled the country, and...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In January 2004, Chalmers Johnson wrote “America’s Empire of Bases” for TomDispatch, breaking what was, in effect, a silence around those strange edifices, some the size of small towns, scattered around the planet....
In what seems like another life, I used to interview American veterans of the Vietnam War. Over the course of a decade, I spoke with hundreds of them, mostly about one topic: war crimes. Some were unrepentant. An interrogator who had tortured prisoners, for instance,...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Seven years after the Soviet Union collapsed in a heap of post-Afghan-War rubble and seven years after President George H.W. Bush fought the First Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to what looked like typical all-American...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. It was all so long ago, in a world seemingly without challengers. Do you even remember when we Americans lived on a planet with a recumbent Russia, a barely rising China, and no obvious foes except what later came to be known as an...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Almost 20 years after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, as the Taliban takes district after district, withdrawing American troops are discarding vast piles of junk on bases they are now abandoning. In the process, the war on terror...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. The single scariest night of my life may have been on October 22, 1962, when I thought that all the duck-and-cover moments of my childhood were coming home to roost. President John F. Kennedy appeared on national television (and...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. This editor’s note introduced the single article that took up almost every inch of space in the August 31, 1946, New Yorker magazine: “TO OUR READERS: The New Yorker this week devotes its entire editorial space to an...
