Pentagon

(Tomdispatch.com) – In early March, an estimated 7,500 American combat troops will travel to Norway to join thousands of soldiers from other NATO countries in a massive mock battle with imagined invading forces from Russia. In this futuristic simulated engagement — it goes by the name of Exercise Cold Response 2020 — allied forces will […]

Pentagon

The Art of the Deal, Pentagon-Style: Wars Without Victories, Weapons Without End

William J. Astore

By William J. Astore | – (Tomdispatch.com) – The expression “self-licking ice cream cone” was first used in 1992 to describe a hidebound bureaucracy at NASA. Yet, as an image, it’s even more apt for America’s military-industrial complex, an institution far vaster than NASA and thoroughly dedicated to working for its own perpetuation and little […]

Donald Trump

American Apocalypse: The Rapture of a U.S. Foreign Policy Off the Rails

Danny Sjursen

By Danny Sjursen | – (Tomdispatch.com) – In March 1906, on the heels of the U.S. Army’s massacre of some 1,000 men, women, and children in the crater of a volcano in the American-occupied Philippines, humorist Mark Twain took his criticism public. A long-time anti-imperialist, he flippantly suggested that Old Glory should be redesigned “with […]

Pentagon

Why the Pentagon never Wins Wars any More but Needs Bigger and Bigger nearly trillion-dollar Budgets

Tomdispatch

By Mandy Smithberger | – (Tomdispatch.com) – Call it a colossal victory for a Pentagon that hasn’t won a war in this century, but not for the rest of us. Congress only recently passed and the president approved one of the largest Pentagon budgets ever. It will surpass spending at the peaks of both the […]

Donald Trump

The Emperor’s Clothes: The Absurdity of the US-Iran Conflict

Bahman Fozouni

Sacramento, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment) – The leaders of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, and the United States, President Donald Trump, share an identical strategic aim: ending the US’s military presence in the Middle East. I cannot recall any other conflict where the antagonists fully agree on a specific end goal. This fact alone makes the […]

Afghanistan

The Global War of Error: and No, that is not a Typo

Tom Engelhardt

( Tomdispatch.com) – Yes, our infrastructure stinks, our schools are failing, this country’s a nightmare of inequality, and there’s a self-promoting madman in the White House, so isn’t it time to take pride in the rare institutional victories America has had in this century? Arguably, none has been more striking than the triumphal success of […]

Afghanistan

Trump threatens Armageddon on yet Another Country: Crimes against Humanity in Afghanistan

Nick Turse

(Tomdispatch.com) – On February 4, 2002, a Predator drone circled over Afghanistan’s Paktia province, near the city of Khost. Below was al-Qaeda’s founder Osama bin Laden — or at least someone in the CIA thought so — and he was marked for death. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it later, both awkwardly and […]

Afghanistan

An Afghan Perspective on 18 Years of Washington’s Lies about the War and our Suffering

contributors

By Basit Muhammadi | – (Special to Informed Comment) – On December 9, The Washington Post revealed interviews with American officials in Afghanistan who intentionally falsified facts regarding the 18-year conflict. In one of the interviews, Bob Crowley, a counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2003, remarked that data “was altered to present the […]

Colonialism

When an Imperial U.S. first Tried to Crush a Muslim Movement: Massacres in the Philippines

Danny Sjursen

(Tomdispatch.com) – For a decade and a half, the U.S. Army waged war on fierce tribal Muslims in a remote land. Sound familiar? As it happens, that war unfolded half a world away from the Greater Middle East and more than a century ago in the southernmost islands of the Philippines. Back then, American soldiers […]