War

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On July 6, 1917, Auda Abu Tayy led his Howeitat tribesmen in a successful attack on the Ottoman port of Aqaba in what is now Jordan but was then the Ottoman Empire. The Arabs of the Hejaz or Western Arabia and the Transjordan had allied with the British to revolt […]

Donald Trump

In Pandemic, Trump Must Choose Between a Global Ceasefire and America’s Long Lost Wars

Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies

As President Trump has complained, the U.S. does not win wars anymore. In fact, since 1945, the only 4 wars it has won were over the small neocolonial outposts of Grenada, Panama, Kuwait and Kosovo. Americans across the political spectrum refer to the wars the U.S. has launched since 2001 as “endless” or “unwinnable” wars. […]

Donald Trump

Stop Saying more have died from Coronavirus than in Vietnam: US War Killed a Million There

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The rash of headlines blaring that the coronavirus has now killed more than died in the Vietnam War betrays an incredible amnesia and national tunnel vision that takes the breath away. Implicitly, these comparisons are with the 58,220 US military personnel who died fighting in Vietnam. But somehow the over […]

Donald Trump

Will the Corruption of Trump’s America End on a Ventilator or in a Mushroom Cloud

Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies

Little by little, Americans are understanding just how badly our government has let us down by its belated and disastrous response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and how thousands more people are dying as a result. But there are two other crises we face that our government is totally unprepared for and incapable of dealing with: […]

Epidemics

Real Security: Wasted Pentagon Trillions that We Could have Spent on Health Care and Pandemic Preparedness

Tom Engelhardt

It is not like we’ve won any wars since 1945, anyway

Donald Trump

US is Closed for Non-Essential Industries: Shouldn’t Trump’s Wars be Halted, Too?

Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies

( Pressenza ) – At least 70 countries have signed on to the March 23 call by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres for a worldwide ceasefire during the Covid-19 pandemic. Like non-essential business and spectator sports, war is a luxury that the Secretary General says we must manage without for a while. After U.S. leaders […]

Militarization

A General once Warned against Military-Industrial Complex: Today’s West Point Mafia is It

Danny Sjursen

(Tomdispatch.com ) – Every West Point class votes on an official motto. Most are then inscribed on their class rings. Hence, the pejorative West Point label “ring knocker.” (As legend has it, at military meetings a West Pointer “need only knock his large ring on the table and all Pointers present are obliged to rally […]

Donald Trump

The World Can’t Afford Washington’s Pet Wars and Sanctions in a Time of Plague

John Feffer

(Foreign Policy in Focus) – During World War I, soldiers all along the Western front held a series of informal truces in December 1914 to commemorate Christmas. It was early in the war, and opposition had not yet hardened into implacable enmity. The military command, caught by surprise, could not impose complete battlefield discipline. An […]

Donald Trump

How we gave up our Health, Environment and Diplomacy for Wars, Walls and Plutocracy

H. Patricia Hynes

Greenfield, MA (Special to Informed Comment) -Budgets are moral documents (or immoral, depending on priorities). So also is tax policy. Consider Trump’s proposed $1.3 trillion discretionary budget for 2021. In snapshot, the Pentagon gets 55% and every other need of 331 million people–from health, education, agriculture, transportation, environmental protection to housing–is left with 45%. As […]