On March 19, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld discussed the "metrics" of measuring success in Iraq with Steve Inskeep of National Public Radio's Morning Edition. Here is part of that interview: "NPR: I want to start, Mr. Secretary, with something you said...
Dahr Jamail, an independent reporter from Alaska, covered our occupation of Iraq for much of 2004 and the beginning of 2005 before coming home early this year. As a "unilateral," he was a distinctly atypical figure in Baghdad. Unlike reporters for major papers, wire...
In its June 9 issue (on sale this week), the New York Review of Books will be the first American print publication to publish the full British "smoking gun" document, the secret memorandum of the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair's top advisors in July 2002, eight...
At a moment when the North Koreans claim to have just "harvested a nuclear reactor for weapons fuel," the latest flare-up in the Iranian/European Union negotiations involving the "Iranian bomb," well described below by Dilip Hiro, only highlights the increasingly...
On Aug. 6, 1945, the day that was to prove the blindingly bright dawn of the atomic age, Little Boy, a 9,700-pound baby with the look of "an elongated trash can with fins," had already been loaded into the specially prepared bomb bay of a B-29. The night before, in...
Of the two superpowers that faced each other down in an almost half-century-long Cold War, one – the United States – emerged victorious, alone in the world, economically powerful, militarily dominant; the other, never the stronger of the two, limped off, its...
An overstretched military? You bet. Things going terribly in Iraq? No kidding. Why only yesterday, Jill Carroll and Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor reminded us that, with 140,000 troops (and untold numbers of mercenaries) in Iraq, the Americans can't...
Quote of the Month (November 1967) "In November, as their plans gelled, General Westmoreland embarked on a whirlwind tour of the U.S. to testify before Congress and drum up support for the Johnson Administration. 'With 1968,' he said, speaking before the National...
On Wednesday, I posted The Normalization of War, the first of two excerpts from a remarkable new book – Andrew J. Bacevich's The New American Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War. In the second excerpt, Bacevich takes up the subject of neoconservatism,...
We are now in an America where it's a commonplace for our president, wearing a "jacket with ARMY printed over his heart and 'Commander in Chief' printed on his right front," to address vast assemblages of American troops on the virtues of bringing democracy to foreign...
