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Obama's Choice: Failed War President or the Prince of Peace?

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Nick Turse - Oct. 22 (Opinion) - More than 100 years after their early counterinsurgency efforts on two tiny islands in the Philippines, U.S. troops are still dying there at the hands of Muslim guerillas. More than 50 years later, the U.S. still garrisons the southern part of the Korean peninsula as a result of a stalemate war and a peace as yet unmade. More recently, the American experience has included outright defeat in Vietnam, failures in Laos and Cambodia; debacles in Lebanon and Somalia; a never-ending four-president-long war in Iraq; and almost a decade of wheel-spinning in Afghanistan without any sign of success, no less victory.

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Pox Americana

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Matt Bivens - Oct. 04 (Opinion) - There are many possible responses to the news that we have committed more than four trillion public dollars to Wall Street. Mine is a roar of admiration. Four trillion dollars! Holy hell! I didn't even know that was possible! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

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Afghanistan: NATO's Graveyard?

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By John Feffer - Sep. 30 (Opinion) - Celebrating its 60th birthday this year, NATO is looking peaked and significantly worse for wear. Aggressive and ineffectual, the organization shows signs of premature senility. Despite the smiles and reassuring rhetoric at its annual summits, its internal politics have become fractious to the point of dysfunction. Perhaps like any sexagenarian in this age of health-care crises and economic malaise, the transatlantic alliance is simply anxious about its future. Frankly, it should be.

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Fighting against ourselves in Afghanistan

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:34:02 -0700

Salon - Sep. 23 -

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Red Snow Warning

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Chip Ward, - Sep. 14 (Special Report) - Pink snow is turning red in Colorado. Here on the Great American Desert -- specifically Utah's slickrock portion of it where I live -- hot 'n' dry means dust. When frequent high winds sweep across our increasingly arid landscape, redrock powder is lifted up and carried hundreds of miles eastward until it settles on the broad shoulders of Colorado's majestic mountains, giving the snowpack there a pink hue.

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Measuring Success in Afghanistan

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Tom Engelhardt - Sep. 08 (Opinion) - The problem was that none of the official metrics managed to measure what mattered most in Vietnam. History may not simply repeat itself, but there's good reason to look askance at whatever set of metrics the Obama administration manages to devise. After all, as in the Vietnam years, Obama's people, too, will be mustering numbers in search of "success"; they, too, will be measuring "progress." And those numbers -- like the Vietnam era body counts -- will have to come up from below (with all the attendant pressures). By the time they reach Washington, they are likely to have the best possible patina on them.

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Lost in Military Limbo

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Dahr Jamail, Sarah Lazare - Aug. 09 (Investigative Report) - In April 2008, the Rand Corporation, a military-affiliated think-tank, released a study stating: "Nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan -- 300,000 in all -- report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression

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Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Chalmers Johnson - Aug. 01 (Opinion) - These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony -- that is, control or dominance -- over as many nations on the planet as possible.

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Armageddon at the Top of the World: Not!

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Juan Cole - Jul. 28 (Special Report) - Despite being among the poorest people in the world, the inhabitants of the craggy northwest of what is now Pakistan have managed to throw a series of frights into distant Western capitals for more than a century. That's certainly one for the record books.

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Everything That Happens in Afghanistan Is Based on Lies or Illusions

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Ann Jones - Jul. 17 (News Analysis) - Fixer is the best documentary I've seen on Afghanistan -- so good it's hard to imagine a better one. It's all jagged edges, blurs, and disconnects, catching as it does both the forbidding emptiness of the land and the edginess of war-weary Afghans. One long segment, apparently showing the inside of Parenti's shawl as he conceals a camera from potentially hostile villagers, seems the visual correlative of the feeling that unsettles all outsiders from time to time in this country: the sense of being completely in the dark. In 2006-2007, as the Taliban surged back with kidnappings, murders, bombs, and jihadi suicide attacks, this is how Afghanistan felt. It's the feeling that still drives Hesco sales in the capital.

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Going for Broke: Six Ways the Af-Pak War Is Expanding

Thu, 21 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Tom Engelhardt - May. 21 (Opinion) - General McChrystal comes from a world where killing by any means is the norm and a blanket of secrecy provides the necessary protection. For five years he commanded the Pentagon's super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which, among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh has described as an "executive assassination wing" out of Vice President Cheney's office. (Cheney just returned the favor by giving the newly appointed general a ringing endorsement: "I think you'd be hard put to find anyone better than Stan McChrystal.")

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Killing Civilians: How Safe Do You Actually Want to Be?

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Tom Engelhardt - Apr. 23 (Opinion) - Like obituaries, they follow a simple pattern. Often the news initially arrives buried in summary war reports based on U.S. military (or NATO) announcements of small triumphs -- so many "insurgents," or "terrorists," or "foreign militants," or "anti-Afghan forces" killed in an air strike or a raid on a house or a village. And these days, often remarkably quickly, even in the same piece, come the challenges. Some local official or provincial governor or police chief in the area hit insists that those dead "terrorists" or "militants" were actually so many women, children, old men, innocent civilians, members of a wedding party or a funeral.

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Too Big to Fail

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Chip Ward - Apr. 21 (Opinion) - In nature, nothing is too big to fail. In fact, big is bound to fail. To understand why that's so means stepping away from a prevailing set of beliefs that holds us in its sway, especially the deep conviction that we operate apart from nature's limits and rules.

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The A.I.G. of American Foreign Policy

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Tom Engelhardt - Mar. 30 (Opinion) - As Obama's economic team overseeing the various financial bailouts is made up of figures long cozy with Wall Street, so his foreign policy team is made up of figures deeply entrenched in Washington's national security state -- former Clintonistas (including the penultimate Clinton herself), military figures like National Security Adviser General James Jones, and that refugee from the H.W. Bush era, Defense Secretary Robert Gates. They are classic custodians of empire. Like the economic team, they represent the ancien régime.

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Welcome to Pipelineistan

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Pepe Escobar - Mar. 26 (Special Report) - The SCO has expanded its aims and scope since 2001. Today, Iran, India, and Pakistan enjoy "observer status" in an organization that increasingly aims to control and protect not just regional energy supplies, but Pipelineistan in every direction. This is, of course, the role the Washington ruling elite would like NATO to play across Eurasia. Given that Russia and China expect the SCO to play a similar role across Asia, clashes of various sorts are inevitable.

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Is This Last Gasp for the Israel Lobby and the Neocons?

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Robert Dreyfuss - Mar. 16 (News Analysis) - Is the Israel lobby in Washington an all-powerful force? Or is it, perhaps, running scared? Judging by the outcome of the Charles W. ("Chas") Freeman affair this week, it might seem as if the Israeli lobby is fearsome indeed. Seen more broadly, however, the controversy over Freeman could be the Israel lobby's Waterloo. Let's recap. On February 19th, Laura Rozen reported at ForeignPolicy.com that Freeman had been selected by Admiral Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, to serve in a key post as chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC). The NIC, the official in-house think tank of the intelligence community, takes input from 16 intelligence agencies and produces what are called "national intelligence estimates" on crucial topics of the day as guidance for Washington policymakers. For that job, Freeman boasted a stellar resumé: fluent in Mandarin Chinese, widely experienced in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War, and an ex-assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration. A wry, outspoken iconoclast, Freeman had, however, crossed one of Washington's red lines by virtue of his strong criticism of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Over the years, he had, in fact, honed a critique of Israel that was both eloquent and powerful. Hours after the Foreign Policy story was posted, Steve Rosen, a former official of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), launched what would soon become a veritable barrage of criticism of Freeman on his right-wing blog.

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The Afghan Scam

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Asia Times - By Ann Jones - Jan. 12 (Special Report) - the Bush administration perpetrated a scam. It used the system it set up to dispense reconstruction aid to both the countries it "liberated," Afghanistan and Iraq, to transfer American taxpayer dollars from the national treasury directly into the pockets of private war profiteers. Think of Halliburton, Bechtel, and Blackwater in Iraq; Louis Berger Group, Bearing Point, and DynCorp International in Afghanistan. They're all in it together. So far, the Bush administration has bamboozled Americans about its shady aid program. Nobody talks about it. Yet the aid scam, which would be a scandal if it weren't so profitable for so many, explains far more than does troop strength about why, today, we are on the verge of watching the whole Afghan enterprise go belly up.

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Michael T. Klare, The Problem with Cheap Oil

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Tomdispatch.com - By Michael T. Klare, Tom Engelhardt - Jan. 08 (Opinion) - No less important, diminished oil prices discourage investment in complex oil ventures like deep-offshore drilling, as well as investment in the development of alternatives to oil like advanced (non-food) biofuels. Perhaps most disastrously, in a cheap oil moment, investment in non-polluting, non-climate-altering alternatives like solar, wind, and tidal energy is also likely to dwindle. In the longer term, what this means is that, once a global economic recovery begins, we can expect a fresh oil price shock as future energy options prove painfully limited.

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Body Count Nation

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Tomdispatch.com - By Tom Englehardt - Jan. 07 (Opinion) - Looked at another way, the Bush administration's Global War on Terror and its subsidiary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have, in effect, been a giant Ponzi scheme. At a cost of nearly one trillion taxpayer dollars to date (but sure to be in the multi-trillions when all is said and done), Bush's mad "global war" simply sucked needed money out of our world at levels that made Bernie Madoff seem like a small fry.

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The Grinning Skull: The Homicides You Didn't Hear About in Hurricane Katrina

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

TruthOut - By Rebecca Solnit - Dec. 21 (News Report) - What do you do when you notice that there seems to have been a killing spree? While the national and international media were working themselves and much of the public into a frenzy about imaginary hordes of murderers, rapists, snipers, marauders, and general rampagers among the stranded crowds of mostly poor, mostly black people in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, a group of white men went on a shooting spree across the river.

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Who Are the Taliban? The Afghan War Deciphered

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Tomdispatch.com - By Anand Gopal - Dec. 10 (Special Report) - Almost every suicide attack and kidnapping is attributed to "the Taliban." In reality, however, the insurgency is far from monolithic.

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"We killed her… that will be with me the rest of my life"

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Tomdispatch.com - By Nick Turse - Nov. 25 (News Analysis) - Moments like this call for truth-tellers. For Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. For witnesses willing to come forward. For brave souls ready to expose hidden and forbidden realities to the light of day. Lawrence B. Wilkerson is such a man. He came to national prominence in October 2005 when -- having left his post as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell earlier in the year -- he laid bare some of the secrets of the Bush White House as he had experienced them.

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Operation Enduring Disaster: Breaking With Afghan Policy

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

TruthOut - By Tariq Ali - Nov. 16 (News Report) - Afghanistan has been almost continuously at war for 30 years, longer than both World Wars and the American war in Vietnam combined. Each occupation of the country has mimicked its predecessor. A tiny interval between wars saw the imposition of a malignant social order, the Taliban, with the help of the Pakistani military and the late Benazir Bhutto, the prime minister who approved the Taliban takeover in Kabul.

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Wrecked Iraq What the Good News from Iraq Really Means

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Michael Schwartz - Oct. 27 (Investigative Report) - In reality, though, since there are far fewer foreign reporters moving around a quieter Iraq, far less news is coming out of that wrecked land.

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When war goes corporate

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Chalmers Johnson - Jul. 31 (Opinion) - The military-industrial complex has changed radically since World War II or even the height of the Cold War. The private sector is now fully ascendant. The uniformed air, land and naval forces of the country as well as its intelligence agencies, including the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), the NSA (National Security Agency), the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), and even clandestine networks entrusted with the dangerous work of penetrating and spying on terrorist organizations are all dependent on hordes of "private contractors." In the context of governmental national security functions, a better term for these might be "mercenaries" working in private for profit-making companies.

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