War

(Al-Bab.com) – The war in Yemen is complicated and it can be difficult to keep track of what’s happening on the ground, not to mention the related peace efforts. A new report from the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies is a useful starting point for anyone wanting a quick catch-up – well, relatively quick, since […]

Saudi Arabia

Will Saudi Arabia ever End its Catastrophic War on Yemen?

Open Democracy

By Helen Lackner | – ( OpenDemocracy.net ) – While Saudi Arabia seeks an exit from the Yemen war, it is deepening its involvement in the South instead. Last year saw some significant changes in Saudi strategy in Yemen. Following on the UAE departure, the new Deputy Defence Minister, Khalid bin Salman, the crown prince’s […]

Australia

Some Technology is Too Dangerous: Iran’s Accidental Ballistic Launch and Australia’s Climate Inferno are Trying to Tell us Something

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – The first month of 2020 has been full of lessons—if we are willing to listen. With over 200 brush fires burning in Australia and an area as big as West Virginia already scorched, Australia’s problems are hardly confined to the subcontinent. In a telling irony the plumes […]

Congress

The War Powers Act isn’t Restraining the President: Congress Must de-Fund Wars

Harry Blain

(Foreign Policy in Focus) – By any measure, the War Powers Act has failed to constrain presidential warmaking. A simpler step would be to stop funding wars. Practically speaking, the Trump administration’s extrajudicial assassination of a top Iranian general was probably legal. The rationale is straightforward: Congress has steadily settled on a constitutionally dubious theory […]

Arms Sales

Is Iran Conflict a War for the Arms Corporations? Congress Needs to End Profiteering

OtherWords

By Sarah Anderson | – (Otherwords.org) – Surging stock prices for military contractors gave several CEOs an early payday after Trump’s Iran aggression. The prospect of war with Iran is terrifying. Experts predict as many as a million people could die if the current tensions lead to a full-blown war. Millions more would become refugees […]

War

Is the ‘War on Terror’ actually a War on Education and the Young?

Tomdispatch

By Andrea Mazzarino | – (Tomdispatch.com) – One day in October 2001, shortly after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, I stood at the front of a private high school classroom. As a new social studies teacher, I had been tasked with describing violence against women in that country. I showed the students an article from the […]

Afghanistan

Is American Exceptionalism Killing the Planet? The Many Abuses of Endless War

William J. Astore

( Tomdispatch.com) – Ever since 2007, when I first started writing for TomDispatch, I’ve been arguing against America’s forever wars, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere. Unfortunately, it’s no surprise that, despite my more than 60 articles, American blood is still being spilled in war after war across the Greater Middle East and Africa, even […]

War

Military Spouses and the True Costs of our Forever Wars

Tomdispatch

By Andrea Mazzarino | – (Tomdispatch.com) – There is some incongruity between my role as an editor of a book about the costs of America’s wars and my identity as a military spouse. I’m deeply disturbed at the scale of human suffering caused by those conflicts and yet I’ve unintentionally contributed to the war effort […]

Chemical Weapons

On Armistice Day: How WW I is at the Root of our Total Wars– Poison Gas, Aerial Bombing, Machine Guns

H. Patricia Hynes

Watching Londoners reveling in the streets on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, the war critic and pacifist Bertrand Russell commented that people had cheered for war, then cheered for peace –“ the crowd was frivolous still, and had learned nothing during the period of horror.” (1) (Informed Comment) – World War 1 was the first […]