War Made Invisible – How America Hides the Human Toll or Its Military Machine
Recent Articles:
- The Winner at the DNC’s Latest Meeting? Israel, Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide
- Why are Democratic leaders still ignoring voters on Israel?
- While Distancing from AIPAC, Most 2028 Democratic Hopefuls Are Still Embracing Israel
- DNC Approach to Israel Is Political Malpractice and Moral Failure
- Daniel Ellsberg Speaks to Us as the War on Iran Continues
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Escalation Scam: Troops in Afghanistan
The president has set a limit on the number of US troops in Afghanistan. For now.
That's how escalation works. Ceilings become floors. Gradually.
A few times since last fall, the Obama team has floated rising numbers for how many additional US soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan. Now, deployment of 21,000 more is a done deal, with a new total cap of 68,000 US troops in that country.
But "escalation" isn't mere jargon. And it doesn't just refer to what's happening outside the United States…
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Abstract Quality Journalism for War
The New York Times used three square inches of newsprint on Tuesday to dispatch two US Army soldiers under the headline "Names of the Dead." Their names – Peter K. Cross and Steven T. Drees – were listed along with hometowns, ranks and ages. Cross was 20 years old. Drees was 19.
They were, the newspaper reported, the latest of 706 Americans "who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations." There wasn't enough room for any numbers, names or ages of Afghans who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations.
That's the way routine death stories go. But, of course, no amount of newsprint or airtime can do more than scratch the human surface…
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Full-Spectrum Idiocy: GOP and Chavez on Iran
When approaching Iran, the Republican Party line and the Hugo Chavez line are running in opposite directions — but parallel. The leadership of GOP reaction and the leadership of Bolivarian revolution have bought into the convenient delusion that long-suffering Iranian people require assistance from the U.S. government to resist the regime in Tehran.
Inside Iran, advocates for reform and human rights have long pleaded for the U.S. government to keep out of Iranian affairs. After the CIA organized the coup that overthrew Iran's democracy in 1953, Washington kept the Shah in power for a quarter century. When I was in Tehran four years ago, during the election that made Mahmoud Ahmadinejad president, what human rights activists most wanted President Bush to do was shut up.
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Obama and Anti-War Democrats
Days ago, a warning shot from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue landed with a thud on Capitol Hill near some recent arrivals in the House. The political salvo was carefully aimed and expertly fired. But in the long run, it could boomerang.
As a close vote neared on a supplemental funding bill for more war in Iraq and Afghanistan, The San Francisco Chronicle reported that "the White House has threatened to pull support from Democratic freshmen who vote no." In effect, it was so important to President Obama to get the war funds that he was willing to paint a political target on the backs of some of the gutsiest new progressives in Congress.
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Words and War
It takes at least tacit faith in massive violence to believe that after three decades of horrendous violence in Afghanistan, upping the violence there will improve the situation.
Despite the pronouncements from high Washington places that the problems of Afghanistan can’t be solved by military means, 90 percent of the spending for Afghanistan in the Obama administration’s current supplemental bill is military…
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The March of Folly, Continued
To understand what's up with President Obama as he escalates the war in Afghanistan, there may be no better place to look than a book published 25 years ago. "The March of Folly," by historian Barbara Tuchman, is a chilling assessment of how very smart people in power can do very stupid things — how a war effort, ordered from on high, goes from tic to repetition compulsion to obsession — and how we, with undue deference and lethal restraint, pay our respects to the dominant moral torpor to such an extent that mass slaughter becomes normalized in our names…
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A Progressive Challenge to Jane Harman
There are many reasons progressives will mobilize behind the campaign of Marcy Winograd, who announced on Monday that she'll challenge incumbent Congresswoman Jane Harman in the 2010 Democratic primary.
Some will speak of Harman's pro-war record. Some will recall her support for warrantless wiretapping, followed by her irony-free indignation when it turned out that NSA snoops had taped her own phone conversations. Some will recount Harman's long public silence after being briefed on torture by the US government…Read the full column. -
We Need a Green New Deal
In the Arctic, sea ice is melting. In the United States, houses are foreclosing.
And in Washington, the Senate is becoming a real-life Bermuda Triangle for progressive agendas.
Proposals for major limits on carbon emissions aren't getting far in the Senate, where the corporate war on the environment has an abundance of powerful allies…
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