War

( Tomdispatch.com ) – “To defend civilization, defeat Russia.” Writing in the unfailingly bellicose Atlantic, an American academic of my acquaintance recently issued that dramatic call to arms. And lest there be any confusion about the stakes involved, the image accompanying his essay depicted Russian President Vladimir Putin with a Hitler mustache and haircut. Cast […]

Houthi

Yemen in the Shadow of Transition: Pursuing Justice Amid War (Review)

Marc Martorell Junyent

Review of Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Yemen in the Shadow of Transition: Pursuing Justice Amid War (London: Hurst and Co., 2022). Greifswald, Germany (Special to Informed Comment) – In a context of war, do accountability and justice need to wait until the end of the conflict? In her well-researched and original book Yemen in the Shadow […]

Peace

America has staged 392 military Interventions since 1776; How Can we Have fewer in Future?

Tomdispatch

By Nan Levinson | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – I like to sing and what I like best is to do so at the top of my lungs when I’m all alone. Last summer, taking a walk through the corn fields in New York’s Hudson River Valley with no one around but the barn swallows, […]

Pentagon

Is America’s bottomless Corporate Welfare for Arms Industry actually Making us Less Safe?

William D. Hartung

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Late last month, President Biden signed a bill that clears the way for $858 billion in Pentagon spending and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy in 2023. That’s far more than Washington anted up for military purposes at the height of the Korean or Vietnam wars or even during […]

Pentagon

Why does the Pentagon Budget Really Keep Growing? When Democracies Pursue Imperial Dominance it doesn’t End Well

William J. Astore

( Tomdispatch.com) – Imagine this scenario for a moment: a “great power” watches another major power fight a war in a nearby nation for 10 years before its army limps home defeated and, not so very long after, that country implodes. A little over a decade later, by then unofficially the “last superpower” on planet […]

NATO

Can NATO and the Pentagon Find a Diplomatic Off-Ramp From the Ukraine War?

Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies

( Code Pink) – NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, known for his staunch support for Ukraine, recently revealed his greatest fear for this winter to a TV interviewer in his native Norway: that the fighting in Ukraine could spin out of control and become a major war between NATO and Russia. “If things go wrong,” […]

nuclear weapons

Imagining a World Without Nuclear Weapons

H. Patricia Hynes

Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – January 22 marks the second anniversary of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, a global lifeboat supported by 70% of the world’s countries. Meanwhile, the US Department of Energy’s 2023 budget request for nuclear weapons’ upgrade is more than $21 billion and close to $8 […]

Russia

The Ukraine Crisis: A Classic Security Dilemma

Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies

( Code Pink) – On December 27 2022, both Russia and Ukraine issued calls for ending the war in Ukraine, but only on non-negotiable terms that they each know the other side will reject. Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Kuleba proposed a “peace summit” in February to be chaired by UN Secretary General Guterres, but with the […]

Afghanistan

America’s Night Raids in Afghanistan: An Ongoing Nightmare

ProPublica

By Lynzy Billing. Video by Mauricio Rodríguez Pons | – Prologue March 2019 • Rodat District, Nangarhar Province This story contains graphic descriptions and images of war casualties. ( ProPublica ) – On a December night in 2018, Mahzala was jolted awake by a shuddering wave of noise that rattled her family’s small mud house. […]