National Security State

( Tomdispatch.com) – Yoda, the Jedi Master in the Star Wars films, once pointed out that the future is all too difficult to see and it’s hard to deny his insight. Yet I’d argue that, when it comes to the U.S. military and its wars, Yoda was just plain wrong. That part of the future […]

Afghanistan

Post-Afghanistan, Nation (Un)Building Comes Home

Tom Engelhardt

( Tomdispatch.com) – They weren’t kidding when they called Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires.” Indeed, that cemetery has just taken another imperial body. And it wasn’t pretty, was it? Not that anyone should be surprised. Even after 20 years of preparation, a burial never is. In fact, the shock and awe(fulness) in Kabul and Washington […]

Afghanistan

Will the End of the Afghanistan War provoke Reconsideration of American Militarism?

Foreign Policy in Focus

By David Bacon | – ( Foreign Policy in Focus) – Many in the U.S. media continue to credit the good intentions of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, while belaboring its failure over 20 years to achieve any of them. But to say that the United States wanted a progressive, liberal democratic, and secular government […]

Afghanistan

The Taliban reportedly have control of US biometric devices – a lesson in life-and-death consequences of data privacy

The Conversation

By Margaret Hu | In the wake of the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul and the ouster of the Afghan national government, alarming reports indicate that the insurgents could potentially access biometric data collected by the U.S. to track Afghans, including people who worked for U.S. and coalition forces. Afghans who once supported the U.S. have […]

Bush

Top 4 Times US Troops were Bombed under Republican Presidents and No one Resigned or was Impeached

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The silly season has descended permanently on Washington, D.C., so that minor congressmen are calling for the resignation or even impeachment of President Joe Biden over the ISIL-K bombing at Abbey Gate in the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on August 26. Chris Cilizza called out the Nikki Haleys, […]

National Security State

Despite Departure from Afghanistan, America still Has an Archipelago of 750 Military Bases around the World

Tomdispatch

By Patterson Deppen | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – It was the spring of 2003 during the American-led invasion of Iraq. I was in second grade, living on a U.S. military base in Germany, attending one of the Pentagon’s many schools for families of servicemen stationed abroad. One Friday morning, my class was on the […]

National Security State

Generations of Struggle: Lessons on Defending Democracy

Liz Theoharis

By Liz Theoharis | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – My father, Athan G. Theoharis, passed away on July 3rd. A leading expert on the FBI, he was responsible for exposing the bureau’s widespread abuses of power. He was a loyal husband, dedicated father, scholar, civil libertarian, and voting-rights advocate with an indefatigable commitment to defending […]

Children

America’s Child Soldiers: JROTC and the Militarizing of America

Tomdispatch

By Ann Jones | – ( Tomdispatch.com) – Congress surely meant to do the right thing when, in the fall of 2008, it passed the Child Soldiers Prevention Act (CSPA). The law was designed to protect kids worldwide from being forced to fight the wars of Big Men. From then on, any country that coerced […]

Militarization

The Other Big Lie: For 30 Years, we’ve sent our Troops into Unwinnable Wars

Andrew J. Bacevich

( Tomdispatch.com) – “The thirty-year interregnum of U.S. global hegemony,” writes David Bromwich in the journal Raritan, “has been exposed as a fraud, a decoy, a cheat, [and] a sell.” Today, he continues, “the armies of the cheated are struggling to find the word for something that happened and happened wrong.” In fact, the armies […]