Originally posted at TomDispatch. Here’s a little portrait of the United States in June 2020, a passage from a New York Times report on the National Guard’s treatment of a recent protest march of people chanting "We can’t breathe!" in Washington, D.C.:...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Consider it strange. The U.S. has been fighting in Somalia on and off (mostly on) since the early 1990s. (Who, of a certain age, doesn’t remember the "Black Hawk Down" fiasco?) Almost 30 years later, at a time when the U.N....

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Someday, America’s Afghan Wars – the first was against the Soviet Union, 1979-1989; the second began with the post-9/11 invasion of that country and has never ended – may be seen as follies of an unprecedented sort. Certainly,...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. There was certainly a hint that the previous century was not going to unfold in a particularly propitious manner when World War I, “the war to end all wars” (a phrase famously attributed to American President Woodrow...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. I’m sure you still remember them. The president regularly called them “my generals.” They were, he claimed, from “central casting” and there were three of them: retired Marine Corps General John Kelly,...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Though my father served in World War II (an experience he would seldom talk about), I was never in a war myself, nor has the rest of my family been. Nothing strange there. It’s typical, in fact, of American life since the draft was...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Nick Turse began covering what might be thought of as the secret history of American war in this century – the rise and spread of American Special Operations forces – for TomDispatch in 2011. That was the year when he first revealed...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. It’s been almost eight years since Chalmers Johnson died.  He was the author of, among other works, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire and Dismantling the Empire. He was also a TomDispatch stalwart and...

Who doesn’t remember, as a child, making that Christmas wish list for Santa and his elves? As it happens, in this century – and in the post-Christmas season, no less – a Pentagon already sporting the highest budget ever is still making such wish lists, officially...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Here’s a word that essentially dropped out of Washington’s dictionary in this century: peace. It used to be part of the rhetoric, at least, of politicians there, but in the era of the war on terror it’s barely made...