Let me put American life in the Age of Terror into some kind of context, and then tell me you're not ready to get on the nearest plane heading anywhere, even toward Yemen. In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, according to the FBI. In that year, there were 34,017...
Once is an anomaly; twice is the beginning of a pattern. Right now, we're seeing the same sequence of events for the second time in less than a decade, and it looks like the signature American way of war in our time is coming into focus. In 2003, when the Bush...
Almost every day, reports come back from the CIA's "secret" battlefield in the Pakistani tribal borderlands. Unmanned aerial vehicles – that is, pilotless drones – shoot missiles (18 of them in a single attack on a tiny village last week) or drop bombs and...
Americans have largely stopped thinking about Iraq, even though we still have approximately 110,000 troops there, as well as the largest "embassy" on the planet (and still growing). We've generally chalked up our war in Iraq to the failed past, and some...
Sometimes it pays to read a news story to the last paragraph where a reporter can slip in that little gem for the news jockeys, or maybe just for the hell of it. You know, the irresistible bit that doesn't fit comfortably into the larger news frame, but that can be...
Back in 2007, when Gen. David Petraeus was the surge commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, he had a penchant for clock imagery. In an interview in April of that year, he typically said: "I'm conscious of a couple of things. One is that the Washington clock is moving more...
There's something viral about the wondrous new weaponry an industrial war system churns out. In World War I, for instance, when that system was first gearing up to plan and produce new weapons by the generation, such creations – poison gas, the early airplane, the...
Here's a bit of cheery news: Last week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates met with the nation's top defense company executives, including the CEOs of those mega-military-industrial combines Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and called for a "closer partnership." He also...
A country programmatically gripped by fear – yes, that's us for more than eight years now. Fear of terrorism to be exact, even as truly terrible things happened in this land and elsewhere, from hurricane Katrina in 2005 to last week's devastating Haitian earthquake,...
