Ivan Eland: In the wake of the death of the man responsible for most of President John F. Kennedy’s soaring public phrases, a reassessment is needed of the Kennedy administration, which has been consistently overrated by the media and public.
Elections a Setback for Peace
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Tom Hayden: The peace bloc – activist groups, anti-war Congress members, writers and artists, here and across the NATO – can exercise a massive drag against the war-making machine through 2012 as long as the wars remain deeply unpopular.
Expand the Role of the Citizen-Soldier Without a Draft
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Ivan Eland: Yet although the presence of conscription does not seem to prevent U.S. entry into questionable wars—for example, the Korean and Vietnam Wars—it does seem to create a peace lobby to end such debacles.
U.S. Wars Are Bankrupting the World
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David Swanson: The endless and infinite “war on terra” is bankrupting the planet. I don’t mean moral bankruptcy; that goes without saying. I mean financial bankruptcy.
WikiLeaks Wins Information War: New Torture, Civilian Casualties Revealed
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Tom Hayden: Like all Americans, the Peace and Justice Resource Center needs the peeling back of secrecy covering the Pentagon’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Civilian Casualties: Hundreds of Thousands in Iraq, Tens of Thousands in Afghanistan But Who’s Counting?
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Tom Hayden: One of the great scandals of the Long War in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is the often-deliberate fog of confusion smothering public knowledge of civilian casualties.
Will Militarization of the First Amendment Undermine the Republic?
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Ivan Eland: Why has this reverence for the military arisen and become patriotic when it runs counter to the nation’s founders’ suspicions of large standing armies and foreign military adventures? A skeptic would attribute the excessive exaltation to guilt.
Public Mobilization for a Nuclear-Free World
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Lawrence S. Wittner: One of the ironies of the current international situation is that, although some government leaders now talk of building a nuclear weapons-free world, there has been limited public mobilization around that goal—at least compared to the action-packed 1980s.
Scapegoating War Crimes in Af-Pak on Drugs
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Jeremy Kuzmarov: It might not be Reefer Madness redux, but the blame being put on drugs for civilian deaths in Afghanistan today has that same air of hysteria about it.
This Year, Contractor Deaths Exceed Military Ones in Iraq and Afghanistan
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T. Christian Miller: More private contractors than soldiers were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent months, the first time in history that corporate casualties have outweighed military losses on America’s battlefields.
Church of Misfits Harbors American War Resister
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Tom Hayden: Next week the Canadian parliament is expected to hear a bill proposing humanitarian grounds for granting asylum in the country. Watson’s application for permanent resident status is on hold. About 40 other American war resisters are seeking asylum in Canada, where nearly 80,000 were given protection during the Vietnam War.
Fixing the World Not Our Responsibility
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Steve Hochstadt: The main problem has been the the policy of intervention. We can’t create a safe world by sending more arms overseas.
Rule of Empires: Who Built & Endured Them, and Why They Fail — Review
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Jim Cullen: Parsons’s most important contribution to a discourse of empire: his attention to the issue of assimilation-which runs between conquering and subjecting.
Soldiers With Brain Trauma Denied Purple Hearts
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T. Christian Miller: Army commanders have routinely denied Purple Hearts to soldiers who have sustained concussions in Iraq, despite regulations that make such wounds eligible for the medal.
Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt
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Charles Hayes: Today I feel very differently about the Vietnam War than I did in my youth, but my own feelings of guilt during that time give me a unique kind of insight into the psychology of courage and commitment. America has never had a shortage of courageous citizens willing to take up arms and fight to the death for reasons and causes beyond their own understanding. Arlington Cemetery in Virginia serves as proof. But my sense of the decades since the end of World War II is that America has and is experiencing a courage crisis of shameful origin and of tragic consequence.
General McChrystal, General Petraeus, and General Confusion
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Michael Hunt: This might be a good time to put a stop to general confusion and to that end assert firm civilian control, order the brass back to the Pentagon, and above all ask if the militarization of our society is consistent with our historic values.
Histrionics Over the Mosque: Symbolism Crowds Out Reality
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Ivan Eland: The American media, and to a lesser extent the world media, focus on symbolism at the expense of underlying reality. And sometimes they can’t even make sense of the symbolism. The artificially generated controversy over a proposed mosque within about two blocks of the site of the 9/11 attacks is illustrative of this ignorance.
Converting Military Restraint in Wars into an Effective National Strategy
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Ivan Eland: The US should attempt to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world by ending meddling in places such as Yemen and Somalia and withdrawing forces rapidly from Iraq and Afghanistan.
U.S. Policy in Iraq Urged Indiscriminate Shooting of Civilians, Say Three Former Soldiers
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Sherwood Ross: Three former U.S. soldiers involved in the infamous “Collateral Murder” helicopter gunship attack on Baghdad civilians in July 2007, say that attack was nothing out of the ordinary.
Watch “Deficit Hawks” Rush to Defend Pentagon Bloat
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Randy Shaw: The Republican Party and Democratic so-called “deficit hawks” attack any proposed defense cuts as “job killers.” Yet this alliance refused to save the jobs of hundreds of thousands of teachers, and have backed tax and spending policies that have cost the nation millions of jobs in recent years.
What to Do About the Wars
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Ivan Eland: Most analysts believe that the U.S. government will renegotiate the status of forces agreement with any new Iraqi government—making the heroic assumption that there is a new Iraqi government by next year—to leave some forces permanently in that country.
Nuke U: How the University of California Is Helping to Blow Up the World
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Norman Solomon: Sixty-five years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, the University of California imprimatur is an air freshener for the stench of preparations for global annihilation.
Parade Rest
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Mike Price: I’m an old guy with a bad leg, a mine-shattered spine, and a damn hose in my nose. I have no choice. The case of emphysema I won for smoking several million cigarettes has moved into its final stage. All life may be terminal, but emphysema writes its own last act.
Elisabeth Bumiller: Wrong on the Tonkin Gulf Incident
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Joseph Palermo: If Bumiller really believes that her peers in the establishment press in February/March 1968 were expressing “widespread skepticism” about the facts concerning the Gulf of Tonkin Incident then shouldn’t she have been a little more “skeptical” herself when her good friend Condi Rice (along with Rummy and Cheney and the rest of the gang) were launching their own pretext for invading Iraq?
Howard Zinn’s the Bomb
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David Swanson: The late Howard Zinn’s new book The Bomb is a brilliant little dissection of some of the central myths of our militarized society.
Pentagon’s Growing Robot Capability an Ominous Development
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Sherwood Ross: The Pentagon is rapidly improving its ability to fight wars with robots. This capability is “bringing about the most profound transformation of warfare since the advent of the atom bomb,” says Scientific American, and raises “a host of ethical and legal issues.”
Look at Our Yellow Ribbons
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Tina Dupuy: What strikes me about the photo is that they really knew how to end wars back then. For example: they used to end wars…back then. There was a global conflict followed by a resolution. Beginning. Middle. End. Done. Birthrate skyrockets.
The Presidents and the McGenerals
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Kenneth Weisbode: Gen. McChrystal is far from the first general to scoff at the White House. His fate echoes that of Generals MacArthur and McClellan but the comparison ends there, says historian Kenneth Weisbrode, because today there’s a greater reliance on the military in foreign relations.
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