Daniel N. White Why do we need to read history? Why does history matter? Because history helps us to hear the little voices, to discriminate among them, and to silence, perhaps, some of the more troublesome ones. And to act on those little voices, the right ones, when they tell us something important. For an…
Michael Murry I watched Rachel Maddow’s new documentary (“Why We Did It”) on why the U.S. went to war in Iraq in 2003. Her answer was “oil,” which is true enough as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go nearly far enough. First of all, a matter of style: I found her breathless “now it…
W.J. Astore Rachel Maddow at MSNBC aired a new documentary last night on why we went to war against Iraq in 2003. In a word: oil. Bush and Cheney were looking to overthrow Saddam Hussein as a prerequisite to controlling and privatizing Iraqi oil production. Pre-war planning in the U.S. as well as Great Britain…
W.J. Astore The Pentagon brass and bureaucrats can’t win foreign wars, but they sure as hell kick ass in domestic budgetary wars. That point is clear from Mattea Kramer’s new article at TomDispatch.com. Allowing the Pentagon a largely untouchable second budget to fund the ongoing military occupation of Afghanistan is an invitation both to prolong…
b. traven Anyone who pays the least bit of attention to what is going on would know that Russia had to act on our provocation. This thing will decide the next election in this country. Obama and the neo liberals have gotten themselves in a situation that will make them look like fools and the…
Brandon Lingle [Reprinted from the New York Times by permission of the author] At an outpost surrounded by blast walls and scrub brush, I huddled in an auditorium with two dozen other airmen to watch the Super Bowl streamed via a jerry-built cellphone Wi-Fi connection. “We probably have a worse broadcast than Kandahar,” said a…
W.J. Astore Mark Danner has a probing article at TomDispatch.com on the career arc of Dick Cheney, the self-selected Vice President under George W. Bush. Cheney’s approach to history, an attitude he shared with Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld, was the idea he could make his own reality, independent of history. Previous precedents on waterboarding…
W.J. Astore As a historian, I like to think we learn valuable lessons from history. Those who don’t learn from the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them, or so my students tell me, paraphrasing (often unknowingly) the words of George Santayana. We applaud that saying as a truism, yet why do we…
W.J. Astore A great book on the brutality of war and its aftershocks is Scott Anderson’s Triage (Scribner, 1998). Anderson, a war journalist and author, captures the inhumanity of war as well as its lingering effects on war veterans themselves and the people in their lives. One particular passage in Triage captures the intrinsic nature…
Daniel N. White. Introduction by William Astore. Unbeknownst to most Americans, the U.S. military has embraced special forces (SEALs, Green Berets, and the like) and has been deploying them globally to at least eighty different countries. There’s an allure to special forces and the special ops community captured in the country’s admiration of SEAL Team…
The Contrary Perspective 