Pentagon

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – At the Trumpless GOP debate Thursday evening, the candidates once again promised to bankrupt us with military and intelligence spending and to commit vast war crimes with reckless disregard for the lives of women, children and non-combatant men, of the sort not openly plotted since the […]

Democratic Party

6 National Security Questions the Establishment Candidates don’t want to Answer

contributors

By Andrew J. Bacevich | ( Tomdispatch.com To judge by the early returns, the presidential race of 2016 is shaping up as the most disheartening in recent memory. Other than as a form of low entertainment, the speeches, debates, campaign events, and slick TV ads already inundating the public sphere offer little of value. Rather […]

Foreign Policy

‘We had to destroy the Country to save it, Sir!’ The US Imperial Treadmill in Iraq etc.

contributors

By Tom Engelhardt | ( Tomdispatch.com) One of the charms of the future is its powerful element of unpredictability, its ability to ambush us in lovely ways or bite us unexpectedly in the ass. Most of the futures I imagined as a boy have, for instance, come up deeply short, or else I would now […]

Foreign Policy

The Collapsed Iraqi Army: How to Succeed at Failing, Pentagon-Style

contributors

By Nick Turse | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – – There’s good news coming out of Iraq… again. The efforts of a 65-nation coalition and punishing U.S. airstrikes have helped local ground forces roll back gains by the [so-called] Islamic State [group] (IS). Government forces and Shiite militias, for example, recaptured the city of Tikrit, while […]

Foreign Policy

A radical solution to Daesh/ ISIL: Stop Intervening in the Middle East

contributors

Peter Van Buren | (Tomdispatch.com) | – – How can we stop the [so-called] Islamic State [group]? Imagine yourself shaken awake, rushed off to a strategy meeting with your presidential candidate of choice, and told: “Come up with a plan for me to do something about ISIS!” What would you say? What Hasn’t Worked You’d […]

Pentagon

How We Learned to Stop Worrying About People and Love the Bombing

contributors

By Rick Shenkman | (Tomdispatch.com) | – – After Senator Ted Cruz suggested that the United States begin carpet bombing Islamic State (IS) forces in Syria, the reaction was swift. Hillary Clinton mocked candidates who use “bluster and bigotry.” Jeb Bush insisted the idea was “foolish.” Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, tweeted: “You […]

Democratic Party

When did Justifying Large Scale Civilian Deaths in Bombardments become a Bipartisan Consensus?

contributors

By Stephen Zunes | (Foreign Policy in Focus) | – – There’s a bipartisan effort to justify the killing of civilians in the “war on terrorism.” There has been a lot of consternation expressed in the media at a series of statements by Republican presidential candidates during their most recent debate and elsewhere in which […]

Barack Obama

Did Obama Really “Surrender the Middle East to Putin?”

contributors

By Brian Glyn Williams | (Informed Comment) | – – A perusal of the “writing on the hall” commentary of the Right Wing in the last two months–since a small Russian force of 2,000 was inserted into the remaining Syrian government-controlled portions of Syria on September 30th–leads to one inevitable conclusion. Namely, that Obama’s “inactivity, […]

Barack Obama

Obama: Is the Media Hyping the threat from Daesh/ ISIL?

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – President Obama gave an interview on National Public Radio on Monday in which he attempted to reassure the US public about the threat of Daesh (ISIL, ISIS). Poor Obama was constrained to defend the point that “ISIL isn’t the Soviet Union” and we are not engaged […]