Peter Van Buren A guy on Facebook I don’t know wrote a version of what has become a kind of set-piece article in today’s America. Here’s a portion: Losing The War of Attrition or How To Turn Any Normal Person Into A Broken, Angry Radical You are one of the millions who are employed at…
With a President who vociferously defends his use of Twitter to circumvent political norms, evade his ostensible “handlers,” and to stoke racial and xenophobic tensions, Twitter has become an important free-speach frontier. But Twitter is a private company and has chosen to silence accounts it deems abusive or dangerous. Not Donald Trump’s support for armed…
by Peter Van Buren This article originally appeared on Peter Van Buren’s We Meant Well blog. -Ed. The next time a candidate or reporter asks during a debate about education or healthcare “But how are you going to pay for that?” I would like the person being questioned to respond “The same way we find…
Peter Van Buren This post originally appeared on January 21, 2016 in Peter Van Buren’s blog. In an Op-Ed printed in the Washington Post, former General David Petraeus says it is time to “unleash our airpower in support of our Afghan partners in the same way that we support our Iraqi and Syrian partners against…
Peter Van Buren Editor’s Note: TCP is especially proud to offer an original article by Peter Van Buren, author of We Meant Well, a compelling account of U.S.-led rebuilding efforts in post-invasion Iraq. Van Buren, who worked closely with American troops in Iraq, knows the bloody nature of war, which makes him doubly aware of…
W.J. Astore Francis Bacon is famous for the aphorism, “Knowledge is power.” Yet the reverse aphorism is not true. The United States is the most powerful nation in the world, yet its knowledge base is notably weak in spite of all that power. Of course, many factors contribute to this weakness. Our public educational systems…
W.J. Astore When I was a teenager, America’s two biggest allies in the Middle East were Israel and Iran. We considered the Shah of Iran to be a strong ally in the region, and sold him some of our most advanced weaponry, including the F-14 Tomcat fighter with its powerful radar as well as HAWK…
W.J. Astore In the early 1970s, the US counted Iran as a close ally. A big fan of warplanes and weapons, I recall the US selling the F-14 Tomcat, the plane flown by Tom Cruise in “Top Gun,” as well as HAWK surface-to-air missiles and other advanced weaponry to the Shah of Iran. Back then,…
b. traven In 1937 my father died and my mother was left penniless with three young boys under twelve. She didn’t go to pieces, or maybe she did and I just didn’t know, but we moved to poorer quarters and she got a job handing out samples of food in the big local department store…
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,”…
The Contrary Perspective 