Originally posted at TomDispatch. What a strange world we’re in! Imagine that only recently Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of the remaining 1,000 U.S. military personnel from Syria (launching a bloodbath in Kurdish-controlled areas on its northern border...
Bases, Bases, Everywhere, and Not a Base in Sight
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In January 2004, Chalmers Johnson wrote this about what he called America’s “empire of bases” or its “Baseworld”: “As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize – or do not want to...
Why Those ‘Endless Wars’ Must Never End
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Here’s the strange thing for the self-proclaimed greatest power in history, the very one that, in this century, has been fighting a series of unending wars across significant parts of the planet: if you exclude Operation Urgent...
Drone Strikes and Tears
Originally posted at TomDispatch. It wasn’t until this sentence in the sixth paragraph of the September 23rd New York Times article on the killing of Afghan civilians that the wedding slaughter was even mentioned: “But Haji Attaullah Afghan, head of the...
What the Dismantling of the Berlin Wall Means 30 Years Later
Originally posted at TomDispatch. You know, it’s strange. There are certain moments that you and everyone in your generation never forget. For instance, I can tell you exactly where I was – eating a 25-cent hamburger in a diner that might have been called the Yankee...
The Militarization of Everything
Originally posted at TomDispatch. We’re in an age in which the president who miraculously “captured” ISIS in “a month,” or so he recently claimed, and has tweeted his fervent desire to end America’s “endless wars” and...
The Forgotten Trauma of a Forgotten War
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Thanks to the looming impeachment crisis, the already Trumpian news cycle – the media has dealt with The Donald as no human being in history – is reaching a bizarre crescendo. And so is a president who seems to spend most of his White...
The Hypersonic Race to Hell
Originally posted at TomDispatch. My life, in a sense, has been an arms race. The atomic bomb was initially tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 15, 1945, five days short of my first birthday. Less than a month later, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and...
The Imperial Debris of War
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Today’s piece by Stephanie Savell, co-director of the invaluable Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute, goes hand-in-hand with the release of a new report by that very group, "The Human and Financial...
A Wasteful Weapon for America’s Forever Wars
How are you with numbers? I can deal with $1.5 million. I think I can even imagine $1.5 billion, a sum a thousand times greater. But how about a million times greater: $1.5 trillion? That happens to be the estimated cost of the Pentagon’s program to build, deploy, and...