Originally posted at TomDispatch. Hmmm... let me see if I've gotten this straight. In his last days in office, Donald Trump is "ending" America's forever wars (as he long promised he would do) by leaving 2,500 American troops in Afghanistan, a similar number in Iraq,...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. TomDispatch is essentially a no-submissions site. The only exception I’ve made over the years has been for those in the U.S. military or retired from it who, miraculously enough, became critical of it and the forever wars that...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. You may have noticed those U.S. aircraft carrier task forces repeatedly entering the South China Sea to challenge Beijing or the increased arms sales to Taiwan and the special visits high Trump administration officials have paid to...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Nineteen years ago, the administration of George W. Bush responded to the 9/11 attacks by invading Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. And, yes, you won’t be shocked to learn that the Taliban is stronger now than at any time since...
In this mystifying moment, the post-electoral sentiments of most Americans can be summed up either as "Ding dong! The witch is dead!" or "We got robbed!" Both are problematic, not because the two candidates were intellectually indistinguishable or...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. War: what is it good for? Apparently, in Washington’s world of think tanks, the answer is: the bottom line. In fact, as the Biden presidency approaches, an era of great-power competition between the United States and China is...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. I was never in the military myself, but I did spend time at a U.S. military base and I have to admit that it remains a treasured experience among my memories. Sometime in the 1950s, my father ran a gas station on Governors Island in...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Yes, his first act on returning to the White House from Walter Reed Medical Center was to step out on a balcony and rip off his face mask to display to the world that thoroughly contagious look of his. He’s been a killer...
The MQ-9 Reaper, a drone armed with Hellfire missiles, has been a workhorse in Washington’s forever wars across the Greater Middle East and Africa, but its days could be numbered. According to Air Force Magazine, that service "has grown skeptical that the Reaper...
Suckers? Give me a break. It’s perfectly clear that Donald Trump considers just about every last one of us a sucker (including the members of his base) and that’s not news at all. It's only news when he calls the military dead of past wars "suckers" and...
