W.J. Astore Former Army Ranger Rory Fanning has a thoughtful article at TomDispatch.com on why young men should not join the Army to fight the war on terror in distant lands. Here’s an excerpt: Believe me, it [the Afghan War] was ugly. We were often enough targeting innocent people based on bad intelligence and…
Michael Gallagher Thanks to my Irish heritage, I have my fair share of the melancholy of the bogs. It’s true we Irish joke a lot, but that doesn’t mean we’re optimistic. Our best jokes are invariably ironic—e.g. when a priest becomes a bishop, he’s never thereafter served a bad meal or told the truth—and so…
W.J. Astore Nick Turse has a revealing new piece at TomDispatch.com on the rise of Special Forces and SOCOM (Special Ops Command) within the U.S. military. (For a telling critique of America’s excess of enthusiasm for Special Forces, see last year’s article here by Dan White for The Contrary Perspective.) What are we to make…
W.J. Astore On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a powerful speech (“Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence”) that condemned America’s war in Vietnam. Exactly one year later, he was assassinated in Memphis. What follows are excerpts from MLK’s speech. I urge you to read it in its entirety, but I’d…
Originally posted on The Contrary Perspective:
Egyptian Students Protesting the Decision to Exonerate Mubarak of Murder b. traven and W.J. Astore It’s time to eliminate U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies. It is they who are most responsible for setting up the extremist and jihadist organizations that are creating havoc throughout the world community. Amazingly, the…
Walter Stewart (Major General, US Army, retired) My essay explains why America is losing its wars and offers a simple solution – one requiring nothing more than moral courage on the part of our most senior military officers. 1. America is losing its wars because they are unconstitutional to begin with. They are unconstitutional because…
b. traven We talk a lot about war on this blog but we only talk about the deaths as numbers killed. We don’t talk about the intimate details of how a mother, a father, a spouse and children, and other relatives and loved ones can handle that horror. The government and the media like to…
W.J. Astore A popular headline in the media is to describe the Afghan War as “America’s longest,” as in this brief summary today from Foreign Policy: The war in Afghanistan, America’s longest, is now formally over. The 13-year war, which claimed more than 2,200 American lives and cost more than one trillion dollars, ended quietly…
W.J. Astore The passionate discussion generated by our last article, America’s Military Academies Are Seriously Flawed, was heartening. Our military academies will not be improved if we merely accept the status quo, with allowance for minor, mainly cosmetic, reforms. But truly radical reforms are difficult to achieve since the academies are so deeply rooted in…
W.J. Astore U.S. military academies are neither Spartan in being dedicated to war, nor are they Athenian in recognizing humanism (even the humanism of war). They are Archimedean. They focus on engineering and the machinery of war. But two millennia ago even Archimedes with his clever war machinery could not save Syracuse from defeat at…
The Contrary Perspective 