Originally posted at TomDispatch. MOAB sounds more like an incestuous, war-torn biblical kingdom than the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, aka "the mother of all bombs." Still, give Donald Trump credit. Only the really, really big bombs, whether North...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Let’s skip the obvious. Leave aside, for instance, the way Donald Trump’s decision to launch 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles against a Syrian air base is but another example of what we already know: that acts of war are now...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In 2003, not long after the American invasion, Dahr Jamail, a youthful freelance journalist from Alaska, headed to Iraq. He wasn’t then a reporter for anyone or, put another way, he was at that moment perhaps the most...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Human whats? In the Middle East and elsewhere, the Trump administration has begun to signal that human rights aren’t exactly on its agenda. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has taken the lead in this process in a round of...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. On successive days recently, I saw two museum shows that caught something of a lost American world and seemed eerily relevant in the Age of Trump. The first, “Hippie Modernism,” an exploration of the counterculture of the...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Recently, the historian Marilyn Young, an old friend, died. She spent her life writing about America’s wars and a country at war. Her New York Times obituary quoted this telling passage from a speech she gave to the Society for...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. U.S. Marines are, for the first time, deploying to Syria (with more to come). There’s talk of an “enduring” U.S. military presence in Iraq, while additional U.S. troops are being dispatched to neighboring Kuwait with...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. The other day, I walked across much of Manhattan Island on the street where I grew up. Once upon a time, in a space of just four blocks along that very street there were four movie theaters (no small wonder in the 1950s). Only The...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Every now and then, I think back to the millions of people who turned out in this country and across the globe in early 2003 to protest the coming invasion of Iraq. Until the recent Women’s March against Donald Trump, that may...
Let’s think about the logic of it all for a moment. The 2016 Pentagon budget came in at just over $600 billion and that royal sum, larger than the combined military investments of the next seven countries, was hardly the full measure of the money U.S. taxpayers spent...
