Michael Murry President Barack Obama’s most recent speech launching yet another self-declared Personal Presidential Crusade against yet another Evil Muslim Acronym (ISIS/ISIL/IS, whatever) reminds me of something that General David Petraeus, Commander of the International Security Assistance Forces in Afghanistan once said regarding his mission objectives and his prospects for achieving them: “I think no…
W.J. Astore In April 2009, I wrote an article for TomDispatch.com recounting Mary McCarthy’s critique of the American experience in Vietnam, and how her lessons applied to President Obama’s “surge” in Afghanistan. A central lesson cited by McCarthy was the American desire never to be labeled a loser. That desire explains, at least in part,…
W.J. Astore In April of 2009, I wrote the following article for TomDispatch.com on the situation in Afghanistan. During his 2008 campaign for President, Obama had claimed that Afghanistan was the right war to be fighting, and that Bush and Company had taken their eye off the Afghan ball when they chose to invade Iraq…
My Opposition to the Vietnam War Greg Laxer. Introduction by William Astore. This week, historians have marked the 100th anniversary of World War I, a cataclysm that resulted in the deaths of more than nine million soldiers and the collapse of four empires. Yet there’s another grim anniversary that has gone mostly unmarked: the 50th…
W.J. Astore Readers of The Contrary Perspective are privileged to read the searing “polemical” poetry of Mike Murry. A Vietnam veteran, Murry writes insightfully and powerfully about U.S. culture and history. His poems are challenging in the best way, because they challenge us to think again about America’s legacy and the harm we often inflict,…
By Bill Dyer Forty five years ago this month, American troops engaged in an 11 day frontal assault on a hill over looking the A Shau Valley, thought to be a major supply and staging area for the North Vietnamese Army, operating under the cover of triple canopy jungle and thickets of elephant grass. The…
W.J. Astore Eleven years after my freshman essay on the Vietnam War in 1982, I found myself at Oxford in a Strategic Studies Seminar. For that seminar, I wrote the following paper on People’s War and Vietnam. Based on deeper reading and more reflection than my freshman essay, I concluded that the Vietnam War had…
W.J. Astore Much like my father, I can be a pack rat. Going through old files, I found a “blue book” exam that I took as a college freshman in 1982. The essay question I had to answer was whether the U.S. could have won the Vietnam War. Recall that in 1975, South Vietnam had…
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…
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…
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