Nick Turse. Courtesy of TomDispatch.com. [Editor’s Note: In his recent address to the nation, President Obama expressed his belief in the U.S. as an exceptional nation. Inherent to that belief is the idea the U.S. is a shining city on a hill, a moral exemplar to the world, a beacon of freedom, a nation whose…
W.J. Astore In the movie Out of Africa, Meryl Streep (playing Karen Blixen, who used the pen name of Isak Dinesen) wistfully intones, “I had a farm in Africa.” It’s a considerable understatement given her character’s ambition and energy and drive. Rather than out of Africa, the U.S. military’s new motto is Into Africa, and…
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 In Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, the U.S. military is fairly good at projecting power. Indeed, the military prides itself on “global reach, global power,” achieved through a worldwide system of bases and funded by enormous amounts of “defense” spending. What the U.S. military is not so good at is understanding foreign cultures. Often,…
W.J. Astore Nick Turse has a fine op-ed in the New York Times, “For America, Life Was Cheap in Vietnam.” In it he argues that for Americans involved in the Vietnam War, life was very cheap indeed – Vietnamese lives, that is. Turse has written a powerful book, “Kill Anything that Moves,” that documents the…
W.J. Astore The American way of war has often relied on massive firepower as a way to reduce American troop casualties. This was true of World War II and Korea, which were conventional “big battalion” wars, and it was also true of Vietnam, which was an unconventional war involving much smaller units. The problem in…
In our media and our culture today, there’s an unfortunate tendency to see military service as uniquely efficacious and ennobling, and to see war as necessary and even to view it as antiseptic (notably our so-called “surgical” drone strikes). But real war is dirty. It’s as likely to infect us, to spread sepsis through our bodies…
The Contrary Perspective 