The Deafness Before the Storm * Briefly noted, highly recommended: Kurt Eichenwald, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a former reporter for the New York Times, wrote a strong but restrained op-ed piece for the Times yesterday describing in more detail than is...
afghanistan
Obama’s Troop Drawdown Is Little, Late, But a Start
In Announcing 15-month, 1/3 Troop Reduction, Is President Ignoring or Responding to Public Opinion and Bipartisan Congressional Trend Against War? The announcement of a 33,000-troop drawdown is more than we would have gotten from the previous president; bu though...
A Reader Replies re: the Killing of Osama bin Laden
Our friend Archie in New Rochelle, New York, takes issue with part of yesterday’s post on the killing of Osama bin Laden. The points Archie makes about bin Laden’s pre-9/11 relationship to the United States—or the U.S.’s to bin Laden—are factually correct (and see...
Mission Accomplished: Bin Laden Is Dead.
Now Focus on Threats Closer to Home.
* [ cross-posted at Daily Kos ] Last September, Levees Not War raised the question whether Hurricane Katrina was a more significant catastrophe than 9/11, more emblematic in terms of chronic ills afflicting the United States. Now the question is raised whether the...
10th Year of Afghan War Begins
America Slogs On, “Dead or Alive” Briefly, sadly noted: Today, October 7, 2010, begins the tenth year of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. How’s that hunt for Osama bin Laden going? How’s that expansion into Pakistan going? How much taxpayer-supplied money has the U.S....
Is Katrina More Significant Than September 11?
Thoughts on Two American Traumas [ Cross-posted at Daily Kos. ] Between 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, which do you think gets most attention, and why? What if the national focus on 9/11 is exaggerated and the nation should focus instead on 8/29—Hurricane Katrina—as the...
As Combat Troops Leave Iraq, Where’s Our National Security?
Out of Iraq, on to Afghanistan The last combat troops have left Iraq, as a convoy of the 4th Stryker Brigade rumbled in the wee hours of August 19, 2010, from Iraq toward U.S. bases in Kuwait. At the end of August, Operation Iraqi Freedom will end and 50,000 advisory...
WikiLeaks’s Afghan War Diary:
A “Pentagon Papers” for Our Time
“In releasing the Pentagon Papers I acted in hope I still hold: that truths that changed me could help Americans free themselves and other victims from our longest war.” —Daniel Ellsberg, Papers on the War (1972) There’s a kind of appropriate, ironic justice that the...
Declare Independence from Endless War
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” —Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., “Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam,” Riverside Church, New York City,...
Afghanistan: More Insane Than a Quagmire
* “. . . the reality, secretly guarded until now, is . . . [that] . . . it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. . . . That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had...
Tax Day: How Much Have You Paid for the War?
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTPKxjgw5N4&feature=player_embedded Most likely you’ve paid $7,334 of the $1.05 trillion that has gone to the Afghan and Iraq wars since 2001. Here is Tom Englehardt’s compelling introduction at TomDispatch.com to a piece (below the...
“Winter of Our Discontent”
In the already-dark of the shortest day of the year, the first day of winter, rather than denying the obvious it feels appropriate to acknowledge a certain lowness of spirits, a mood that the holidays will warm temporarily but not dispel altogether. “Winter of our...
Deeper into Afghanistan: 360 Degrees of Damnation
“we must rebuild our strength here at home . . . . the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.” —President Obama, Dec. 1, 2009 We wanted to take time to try to make sense of President Obama’s speech at West Point last week in which he announced his...
Wrong Call, Mr. President
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.” —Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953 Having taken a long walk after a filling Thanksgiving...
Harm’s Way, or, A Surge of His Own?
The ceremony at Fort Hood yesterday was beautiful, and heart-breaking. The pain was all too real, and the president’s speech was sincere, somber, respectful, and probably healing. But . . . could the ceremony have been designed in part as a warm-up, a stirring of our...
Feingold Asks Obama for Timetable on Withdrawal from Afghanistan
Think Progress calls attention to a report by ABC News that Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) is calling on President Obama for a timetable for when the U.S. will withdraw forces from Afghanistan. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 after the attacks of September...
Five Years of Operation Iraqi Freedom
This picture of a U.S. soldier in the Korengal Valley in the Eastern province of Afghanistan shows the traumatized exhaustion felt most acutely by soldiers in the field in Afghanistan and Iraq after years of war—but also by the American public.