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...
The Iran Crisis in Global Context
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...
The Nuclear Renaissance
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...
Out of the Superpower Orbit
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...
Letting in the Draft?
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...
Iraq ‘Uptick,’ Superpower Downtick?
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...
New Boys in Town: The Neocon Revolution and American Militarism
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,...
The New American Militarism
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...
Waiting for DE-Day
A month ago at TomDispatch, I wrote an essay, "Which War Is This Again?," about the naming of the "war" our president declared in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The neocons fell in love with the idea of us being in a generational struggle like...
Oil and the Coming War With Iran
While our media is filled with stories on the Bush administration and Iran, they almost invariably focus on the Iranian nuclear program (or European negotiations and U.S. non-negotiations about the same). You could read our press for weeks at a time if you...


