Originally posted at TomDispatch. It was the end of the road for Chuck Hagel last week and the Washington press corps couldn’t have been more enthusiastic about writing his obituary. In terms of pure coverage, it may not have been Ferguson or the seven-foot...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Introduction, Sunday, November 24, 2014: When I scanned the front page of the New York Times one recent morning and spotted this headline, “In a Shift, Obama Extends U.S. Role in Afghan Combat,” I instantly wanted to pick...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Let’s play a game, the kind that makes no sense on this single-superpower planet of ours. For a moment, do your best to suspend disbelief and imagine that there’s another superpower, great power, or even regional power...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Sometimes, to see the big picture you need to focus on the smallest part of it, as Nick Turse does in the latest of his dispatches on the U.S. military in Africa. He takes a look at that military in Chad. Yep, I said “in...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In a September address to the United Nations General Assembly, President Barack Obama spoke forcefully about the “cycle of conflict” in the Middle East, about “violence within Muslim communities that has become the...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Last week, the New York Times front-paged a story about plans for "Iraq" to mount "a major spring offensive against Islamic State fighters." Its goal, among other things: to take back the country’s second largest...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Let me tell you my modest post-9/11 dream. One morning, I'll wake up and see a newspaper article that begins something like this: "The FBI is attempting to persuade an obscure regulatory body in Washington to change its rules of...
Sometimes it seemed that only two issues mattered in the midterm election campaigns just ended. No, I’m not talking about Obamacare, or the inequality gap, or the country’s sagging infrastructure, or education, or energy policy. I mean two issues that...
More than a few times I’ve found myself in a crowd of Vietnam veterans, and more than a few times at least one of them was wearing a curious blue or yellow t-shirt. Once that shirt undoubtedly fit a lean physique of the late 1970s or early 1980s, but by the time I saw...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. We’re now passing through a no-name election season of a particularly lusterless sort, but don’t count on that for 2016. Here, in fact, is a surefire prediction for that moment, which (given the nature of modern...
