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…
W.J. Astore I teach a course on the Holocaust, so I’ve had ample opportunity to confront the use of euphemisms by the Nazis to cloak their murderous intent. The most infamous euphemism was “the final solution to the Jewish question,” which of course refers to the mass murder–the extermination–of all Jews everywhere. But there were…
W.J. Astore Are we fighting a war on terror, or a war against predators? Surely the latter is more accurate. We see terrorists as predators. We fear them as such. They’re hiding in the weeds, morphing into the background, only to emerge to kill innocents with seemingly arbitrary (and thus very scary) rapacity. Therefore, following…
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 tradition of the citizen-soldier is still alive in this country — just look at our National Guard units. But the burden of military service is obviously not equally shared, with the affluent and famous tucked away safely at home. How many people remember that Jimmy Stewart, legendary Hollywood actor, flew dangerous combat missions in…
W.J. Astore A few years ago I was talking to an experienced U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, a battalion commander in Iraq. He compared the Iraqi situation to a Rubik’s Cube – a puzzling array of shifting loyalties, interconnected tribes, and religious sects. At the time, I thought it was a telling metaphor. But the metaphor…
The Contrary Perspective 