W.J. Astore Once again, Hillary Clinton is in the news for the wrong reason. She used a private email account while she was Secretary of State, rather than an official government email account. As a result, not all of her (unclassified) emails are part of the public record. Many may be “lost,” consigned to the…
b. traven In the run up to the Iraq war in 2002-03, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain worked so hard to get American approval that he was widely labelled as George W. Bush’s “poodle.” But who today yelps loudest when the kings of Saudi Arabia (that poor excuse for a nation) say “bark”?…
Daniel N. White James Fallows, a noted journalist and author of National Defense (1981), is tits on a boar useless these days. That’s my conclusion after reading his Atlantic Monthly cover story, The Tragedy of the American Military, in which he asks, Why do the best soldiers in the world keep losing? It is a truly terrible…
W.J. Astore Over at TomDispatch.com, retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich asks a telling question: Why does Washington continue to rely on policy “experts,” the “best and brightest” as they were called during the Vietnam War, even when events prove their advice to be consistently wrong? As Bacevich puts it (with considerable relish): “Policy intellectuals —…
W.J. Astore Like so many bloated Hollywood movies nowadays, America’s wars may bomb, but they always produce their own sequels. Look at the latest news from Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars have persisted for more than a decade, with several re-releases to include “surges” and repeats. The latest from Iraq is preparations to retake the…
W.J. Astore Christian G. Appy, professor of history at U-Mass Amherst, has written a new and telling book on the Vietnam War: American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (New York, Viking Press). Reading his book made me realize a key reason why the U.S. lost the war: for U.S. leaders it was…
Andy Piascik John Mihalec’s recent column in the Connecticut Post (50 Years Ago: The Start to Vietnam War, February 7) is good for laughs but is seriously lacking as history. Here’s some history that Mihalec, a former speech writer for President Gerald Ford, conveniently left out of his fanciful account. Pinpointing where US aggression in…
b. traven Mission accomplished, George Bush! You succeeded in making Saddam Hussein look like Mahatma Gandhi compared to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the ISIS Caliphate. Your invention of non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) back in 2002 as an excuse to invade the sovereign state of Iraq in 2003 has come back to bite us…
W.J. Astore In America’s war on terror, the groundhog always sees its own shadow, meaning six (or more) years of additional war. War is indeed the new normal in America, as I argue in this article today for TomDispatch.com. War Is the New Normal Seven Deadly Reasons Why America’s Wars Persist By William J. Astore…
W.J. Astore Is the U.S. military doomed? I’d say yes. But it’s not because our troops are uncommitted, our weapons are bad, and our tactics are flawed. Rather it’s because of the conventional wisdom in Washington and the Pentagon that continues to commit our troops to unnecessary and unwinnable wars. This conventional wisdom is perhaps…
The Contrary Perspective 