“I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.” — Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Kurt Vonnegut’s famous novel about the World War II bombing of the German city of Dresden appeared the year I graduated from West Point. While dimly […]
Our Longest War is Ending without Victory, but will we Even Notice?
“Ours is the cause of freedom. We’ve defeated freedom’s enemies before, and we will defeat them again… [W]e know our cause is just and our ultimate victory is assured… My fellow Americans, let’s roll.” — George W. Bush, November 8, 2001 ( Tomdispatch.com) – In the immediate wake of 9/11, it fell to President George […]
Has the DC Foreign Policy Blob swallowed Joe Biden? We don’t need to be the World’s Policeman
( Tomdispatch.com ) – You may have noticed: the Blob is back. Beneath a veneer of gender and racial diversity, the Biden national security team consists of seasoned operatives who earned their spurs in Washington long before Donald Trump showed up to spoil the party. So, if you’re looking for fresh faces at the departments […]
America after Trump must Confront MLK’s ‘Giant Triplets of Racism, Extreme Materialism, and Militarism’
By Andrew Bacevich | – ( Tomdispatch.com) – When Martin Luther King preached his famous sermon “Beyond Vietnam” at Riverside Church in New York City in April 1967, I don’t recall giving his words a second thought. Although at the time I was just up the Hudson River attending West Point, his call for a […]
‘Wealth Accumulates and Men Decay:’ Can America learn the Lessons of Iraq and Vietnam
( Tomdispatch.com ) – In choosing a title for his final, posthumously published book, the prominent public intellectual Tony Judt turned to a poem by Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, published in 1770. Judt found his book’s titlein the first words of this couplet: Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey Where wealth […]
Time to bring the Troops home from Afghanistan, no Matter who Does it
Let’s open up and sing, and ring the bells out Ding-dong! the merry-oh sing it high, sing it low Let them know the wicked witch is dead! ( Tomdispatch.com) – Within establishment circles, Donald Trump’s failure to win re-election has prompted merry singing and bell-ringing galore. If you read the New York Times or watch […]
Can America escape the cave of Trump’s Quirky Isolationism?
( Tomdispatch.com ) – The so-called Age of Trump is also an age of instantly forgotten bestselling books, especially ones purporting to provide the inside scoop on what goes on within Donald Trump’s haphazard and continuously shifting orbit. With metronomic regularity, such gossipy volumes appear, make a splash, and almost as quickly vanish, leaving a […]
Generals to the End: Patton and Westmoreland walk into a Bar . . .
( Tomdispatch.com ) – I’ve written a fair number of pieces for TomDispatch, but this one is a bit different — some might even say strange — so Tom asked me to introduce it myself. By almost any measure, we Americans are living through trying times. As a nation, we are long accustomed to being […]
How Biden could Turn it all around in Two weeks if he Wins
( Tomdispatch.com) – Assume Joe Biden wins the presidency. Assume as well that he genuinely intends to repair the damage our country has sustained since we declared ourselves history’s “Indispensable Nation,” compounded by the traumatic events of 2020 that demolished whatever remnants of that claim survived. Assume, that is, that this aging career politician and […]
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