Clay Bonnyman Evans NBC news anchor Brian Williams has been suspended for six months without pay, after falsely claiming that a helicopter he was riding in over Iraq on March 24, 2003 was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade. The public has been savage in practically demanding the newsman’s crucifixion for telling a “white lie” — for that’s what…
b. traven Mission accomplished, George Bush! You succeeded in making Saddam Hussein look like Mahatma Gandhi compared to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the ISIS Caliphate. Your invention of non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) back in 2002 as an excuse to invade the sovereign state of Iraq in 2003 has come back to bite us…
W.J. Astore In America’s war on terror, the groundhog always sees its own shadow, meaning six (or more) years of additional war. War is indeed the new normal in America, as I argue in this article today for TomDispatch.com. War Is the New Normal Seven Deadly Reasons Why America’s Wars Persist By William J. Astore…
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…
W.J. Astore The United States continues to insert the bodies of its troops into leaky Iraqi and Afghan dikes. That’s the image that came to mind with the recent news from Iraq and Afghanistan. More American “advisers” and weapons being sent to Iraq. The revival of night raids by U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan. No…
Michael Murry I wrote this poem in 2005, two years after U.S. President George (Deputy Dubya) Bush’s notorious “Mission Accomplished” proclamation. With the U.S. Military hopelessly mired in the twin quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan and desperately searching for any face-saving way out, I understood the predictable predicament, since I served eighteen months as a…
Why You Should Expect More Bombs to be Dropped Everywhere By William J. Astore Read the entire article at TomDispatch.com When you do something again and again, placing great faith in it, investing enormous amounts of money in it, only to see indifferent or even negative results, you wouldn’t be entirely surprised if a neutral observer…
Peter Van Buren [Originally posted at Reuters here] America’s new strategy for resolving the Sunni-Shi’ite crisis in Iraq? The Surge — again. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey sounds as if he were reading off the 2007 script, echoing the divide-and-conquer strategy that was the basis for the Surge: “If you can separate those [Sunni] groups,”…
America the Dutiful By Michael Murry In the Land of the Fleeced and the Home of the Slave Where the cowed and the buffaloed moan Where seldom we find an inquisitive mind And the people pay up with a groan While at home on the range when the firing begins Not a word of encouragement…
By Peter Van Buren. Introduction by b. traven. Peter Van Buren is a former State Department Officer who has an impish sense of humor. He used that to devastating effect in his book, We Meant Well, on our misbegotten venture in Iraq. For telling the unvarnished truth about his service in Iraq, Van Buren was…
The Contrary Perspective 