War

By Tom Engelhardt | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – – MOAB sounds more like an incestuous, war-torn biblical kingdom than the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, aka “the mother of all bombs.” Still, give Donald Trump credit. Only the really, really big bombs, whether North Korean nukes or those 21,600 pounds of MOAB, truly get his […]

Afghanistan

Taliban Attackers Kill at Least 140 Soldiers at Afghan Base: Officials

contributors

TeleSur | – – Afghan President Ashraf Ghani visited the base on Saturday, and in a statement condemned the attack as “cowardly” and the work of “infidels.” At least 140 Afghan soldiers were killed by Taliban attackers apparently disguised in military uniforms, officials said on Saturday, in what would be the deadliest attack ever on […]

Donald Trump

Is Trump Taking Us to War Everywhere?

contributors

By Olivia Alperstein | (Otherwords.org) | – – No one expected Trump to be a peace president, but he seems bent on taking us to the verge of World War III. No one ever expected Donald Trump to be a peace-loving president. On the campaign trail, he endorsed torture, said he’d bomb the families of […]

Bashar al-Assad

Washington’s Supreme Hypocrisy on Chemical Weapons and Civilian Deaths

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The use of chemical weapons by the Syrian Army in Idlib is an atrocity and the pictures of dead children tug at the heart. But the outrage of American politicians inside the beltway about it draws on the myths of American exceptionalism and Alzheimer’s of the […]

Militarization

How our Standing Wars are Warping Us

contributors

Tom Engelhardt | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – – On successive days recently, I saw two museum shows that caught something of a lost American world and seemed eerily relevant in the Age of Trump. The first, “Hippie Modernism,” an exploration of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s (heavy on psychedelic posters), was appropriately enough […]

Cold War

The Untold Violence of the Pax Americana

contributors

John W. Dower | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – – [This essay is adapted from “Measuring Violence,” the first chapter of John Dower’s new book, The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War Two.] On February 17, 1941, almost 10 months before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Life magazine carried a lengthy essay by […]

Donald Trump

Why would Trump Spend $54 Billion More on the Pentagon? To Start a War, Obviously.

contributors

By John Feffer | ( Foreign Policy in Focus The president apparently wants to put the U.S. on a permanent war footing to sustain his unpopular presidency. So, let me see if I’ve got this right. North Korea has been pushing its ally China to rein in the United States. Pyongyang is worried that Washington […]

Displaced and Refugees

Top 5 Lessons Saudi should learn from its Failed Yemen War

contributors

By Mohammed Nuruzzaman | (Informed Comment) | – – Top 5 Lessons Saudi Arabia Learns from the Yemen War Saudi Arabia’s Yemen war has reached a dead end. Launched in late March 2015 to restore President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi to power, either by subduing or by eliminating the Iran-backed Houthi rebels and their allies, […]

Donald Trump

Is Trump at war with Oceana this Week, or Eastasia?

contributors

Rebecca Gordon | Tomdispatch.com | – – In his inaugural address, President Trump described a dark and dismal United States, a country overrun by criminal gangs and drugs, a nation stained with the blood seeping from bullet-ridden corpses left at scenes of “American carnage.” It was more than a little jarring. Certainly, drug gangs and […]