Pentagon

By William J. Astore | ( Tomdisptach.com ) | – – Overseas, the United States is engaged in real wars in which bombs are dropped, missiles are launched, and people (generally not Americans) are killed, wounded, uprooted, and displaced. Yet here at home, there’s nothing real about those wars. Here, it’s phony war all the […]

Pentagon

Youth, Gun Safety and the Pentagon

contributors

H. Patricia Hynes | (Informed Comment) | – – To my astonishment, I began receiving daily news updates from the Pentagon, innocuously named the Early Bird Brief, about a month ago. One particularly perverse news brief warrants mention: the number of out-of shape and unfit youth is an imminent national security crisis, (not because they […]

Militarization

American Crusade: The War on Terror and the Ruins of the Middle East

contributors

by James Carroll | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – – America may be sinking ever deeper into the moral morass of the Trump era, but if you think the malevolence of this period began with him, think again. The moment I still dwell on, the moment I believe ignited the vast public disorder that is now […]

Donald Trump

Ultimate Blowback: A Planet Boiling With Unintended Consequences

Tom Engelhardt

( Tomdispatch.com) | – – You want to see “blowback” in action? That’s easy enough. All you need is a vague sense of how Google Search works. Then type into it phrases like “warmest years,” “rising sea levels,” “melting ice,” “lengthening wildfire season,” or “future climate refugees,” and you’ll find yourself immersed in the grimmest […]

Donald Trump

Pentagon bloats the Federal Budget and Small-Gov’t Marks don’t Care

Juan Cole

By William D. Hartung | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – – Imagine for a moment a scheme in which American taxpayers were taken to the cleaners to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and there was barely a hint of criticism or outrage. Imagine as well that the White House and a majority of […]

Militarization

Generational Wars and Short Memories: The 9/11 Hijackers Were Iraqis, Right?

Rebecca Gordon

San Francisco (Tomdispatch.com) | – I was teaching the day the airplanes hit the World Trade Center. It was the second meeting of “The Communist Manifesto for Seminarians,” a course for my fellow graduate students. By the time I got to class, both towers had collapsed. A few hours later, Building 7 came down as […]

Donald Trump

Trump’s $700 Bn. Bag of Goodies for the Military-Industrial Complex

contributors

By Danny Sjursen | ( Tomdispatch.com ) | – – Think of it as the chicken-or-the-egg question for the ages: Do very real threats to the United States inadvertently benefit the military-industrial complex or does the national security state, by its very nature, conjure up inflated threats to feed that defense machine? Back in 2008, […]

Pentagon

Ending America’s Disastrous Role in Syria

contributors

By Jeffrey D. Sachs | ( Project Syndicate) | – – America’s official narrative has sought to conceal the scale and calamitous consequences of US efforts to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. That is understandable, because US efforts are in blatant violation of international law, which bars UN member states from supporting military action to […]

Featured

Let’s remember the Schoolchildren US & Russian bombs are killing, too

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The US-backed Saudi-led war on Yemen is keeping two million children out of school (Yemen is a country of 27 million). Worse, schools and schoolchildren have repeatedly been struck from the air by Saudi, UAE, Moroccan and Jordanian pilots using American-supplied planes and bombs, in a […]