W.J. Astore One of the first acronyms I learned in the military was KISS. No, not the heavy metal band. No, nothing romantic either. It stands for “keep it simple, stupid.” The lesson: don’t think too much. That leads to “analysis paralysis.” Be decisive! Act, if need be, with extreme prejudice, a preference expressed vulgarly…
W.J. Astore At the New York Times, Robert Draper had a fascinating article last month on how Republican candidates for president are positioning themselves on foreign policy. Rand Paul excepted, all of the Republican candidates are calling for a more “aggressive” U.S. foreign policy, one that promises more military interventions and higher military spending. The…
The Crash, Burn, Repeat of America’s Militarized Foreign Policy Tom Engelhardt (courtesy of TomDispatch.com) Let’s take a moment to consider failure and its options in Washington. The U.S. has been warring with the Islamic State (IS) for more than a year now. The centerpiece of that war has been an ongoing campaign of bombings and air…
Nile Stanton At the reliably up-to-date and highly informative website Breaking Defense, Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. reported that on June 16th, Lt Gen James Kowalski, Deputy Commander of the US Strategic Command, told a group, “We have to recognize that there are two authoritarian nuclear-armed regimes [China and Russia] dominating the Eurasian landmass, and they…
W.J. Astore Here are a few excerpts from my latest article at TomDispatch.com. I urge you to read the entire article here. Thank you! War on drugs. War on poverty. War in Afghanistan. War in Iraq. War on terror. The biggest mistake in American policy, foreign and domestic, is looking at everything as war. When a war…
W.J. Astore I’ve been writing for TomDispatch.com and the amazing Tom Engelhardt since 2007. When I wrote my first article, “Saving the Military from Itself: Why Medals and Metrics Mislead,” I never imagined I would come to write 37 more for Tom and his site over the next eight years. TomDispatch has given me an…
W.J. Astore There was a time when American democracy, however imperfectly practiced, and American ideals served to inspire peoples and independence movements around the world. Heck, even Ho Chi Minh in the 1940s confessed his admiration for Thomas Jefferson and the U.S. Declaration of Independence. But now it seems all that really matters in our…
W.J. Astore The more the United States has come to talk about dominance, the less dominant we’ve become. To compensate, we’ve become a steroidal nation, to include the violent side effects associated with steroid use (just look at the latest stories out of the NFL about spousal and child abuse, or our steroidal police forces,…
W.J. Astore When Hannah Arendt, the famous German-American political philosopher, criticized American involvement in the Vietnam War, she said that our foreign policy “experts” fell prey to using excessive means to achieve minor aims in a region of marginal interest to the United States. You could say the same of most of America’s foreign interventions…
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 