Iraq War

By Peter Certo | – ( Otherwords.org) – The war claimed more than lives and treasure — it claimed a future’s worth of lost opportunities. Now, younger generations are demanding them back. By Peter Certo | Most of us who were alive then remember where we were on the morning of the 9/11 attacks. As […]

Iraq War

The US invaded Iraq 20 Years ago–What can Today’s Youths Learn from it?

The Conversation

By Andrea Stanton, University of Denver | – (The Conversation) – The United States invaded Iraq 20 years ago in March 2003, claiming it had to disarm the Iraqi government of weapons of mass destruction and end the dictatorial rule of President Saddam Hussein. U.S. soldiers captured Saddam in December 2003. And a 15-month search […]

Featured

America’s War of Aggression on Iraq, 20 Years Later: Or, Putin the Prequel

Juan Cole

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Who remembers anymore that, in 2003, we were Vladimir Putin? Today, our cable and social-media news feeds are blanketed with denunciations of the president of the Russian Federation for his lawless and brutal invasion of Ukraine. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken met briefly with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in New […]

Afghanistan

How the Bush “War on Terror” Fed US White Nationalism and brought the Terror Home

Andrea Mazzarino

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Recently, an agent of the Department of Homeland Security called me and started asking questions about a childhood acquaintance being investigated for extremism. I put him off. My feelings about this were, to say the least, complex. As a military spouse of 10 years and someone who has long written about […]

Afghanistan

The Ukraine Moment: Lessons from the War on Terror

Karen J. Greenberg

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Ukraine is obviously a powder keg. With each passing day, in fact, the war there poses new threats to the world order. Only recently, Vladimir Putin’s Russia intensified its attacks on civilian targets in that beleaguered land, while threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons and adding Ukraine’s neighbor Belarus to its […]

Climate Crisis

19 Years ago America Really Wanted Iraq’s Basra for its Oil, which is now Making it Uninhabitable

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Poet Robert Frost asked if the world would end by fire or ice. It turns out that it is both, the fire of global heating and the melting of earth’s surface ice and resultant biblical floods. Nowhere is this more clear than in Iraq. Not everyone will suffer equally from […]

Afghanistan

Pact Act is Vindication for Vets after US Denied for Years that Burn Pits in Afghanistan and Iraq made them Ill

The Conversation

By Jason A. Higgins, Virginia Tech | – During a 13-month stint in Iraq that began in 2006, Heath Robinson served as a medic with the Ohio National Guard. Like thousands of others soldiers stationed there, he was routinely exposed to toxic smoke emanating from what are known as burn pits. Located near military bases, […]

Donald Trump

Imperial Detritus: Henry Luce’s “American Century” Comes Undone

Andrew J. Bacevich

( Tomdispatch.com ) – “The American Century Is Over.” So claims the July 2022 cover of Harper’s Magazine, adding an all-too-pertinent question: “What’s Next?” What, indeed? Eighty years after the United States embarked upon the Great Crusade of World War II, a generation after it laid claim to the status of sole superpower following the […]

Arms Sales

Unlike SCOTUS, Iraqi Kurds are Rethinking Lax Gun Laws after Shootings; Will even Iraq be Safer than the US?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Other countries can just adopt rational policies to deal with severe social problems. The United States is locked into various weird metaphysical dogmas that make reasoning about such issues difficult. The second amendment, for instance, has nothing to do with universal gun ownership, whatever ideologues on the Right assert. The […]