W.J. Astore Yes, I know it’s a harsh claim that Members of Congress don’t care about sending your son or daughter off to war. Partly that’s because more than half of them are millionaires. And if they’re not millionaires now, they will be when they leave office and cash in as lobbyists and similar Beltway…
b. traven In his new “memoir” Robert Gates bites the hand of President Obama, who foolishly let him stay on as Secretary of Defense from the incompetent administration of George W. Bush. In Gates’s book, which lavishes praise on the steadfastness and intelligence of Bush in pushing war, Gates faults his new boss Barack Obama…
W.J. Astore At TomDispatch.com, Tom Engelhardt has an especially fine exposé of the National Security State as a religion with its own priesthood, holy books, dogma, and true believers/followers. I recommend reading the entire article, but I do want to highlight some implications of his argument. Like the Catholic Church (and I’m Catholic), the National…
L.N. Davout. Introduction by William Astore. Back in 1990-1991, my good friend Louis-Nicholas Davout [a pseudonym] and I debated the merits of the war to expel Iraq from Kuwait. At the time, Davout was a graduate student in Political Science at a major research university, whereas I was a captain in the Air Force teaching…
Daniel N. White. Introduction by W.J. Astore. Is the United States an empire or umpire? This is the intriguing question raised and interrogated in the latest probing article by Dan White. Since I’m a baseball fan as well as a student of the U.S. military, let me take a swing at an answer. An umpire…
b. traven What can I say after reading this article by Ann Jones on the horrific costs of war to our young troops? I do not belong in this century anymore. I do not recognize the time warp that has put me elsewhere. The country I grew up in [the USA of the 1920s and 1930s] was…
Veterans Day has become a day of sales and promotions instead of a time of reflection about the costs of war and the sacrifices of our troops. The great virtue of Ann Jones’s new book, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars — The Untold Story is that it truly makes us…
Daniel N. White Henry G. Gole, a retired U.S. Army colonel, published a fine book, Soldiering (Potomac Press, 2006) that deserves a much wider readership than it has earned to this date. Gole, son of an immigrant father from a German-speaking part of Slovenia, joined the Army in 1952 and went off to Korea as…
I started writing for TomDispatch, a remarkable contrarian site founded and edited by Tom Engelhardt, a fine editor/writer and even finer gentleman, in October 2007. My first article was on the Petraeus surge and how President Bush and his administration were hiding behind the absurdly bemedaled and beribboned uniform of that general. Tom Engelhardt’s generous…
W.J. Astore Note to readers: I wrote these words in November 2008, just after Obama was elected President for the first time. I’ve decided not to edit them. Perhaps they capture the thoughts (however flawed) of one American who was trying to understand the mess we had made of Iraq. Straight Talk on Iraq: Of…
The Contrary Perspective 