Tomgram: Nan Levinson, What Difference Does It Make Who Fights Our Wars?

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And here’s a little story from the Neolithic age we now call “the Sixties” about that moment when the U.S. military was still a citizen’s army with a draft (even if plenty of people figured out how to get exemptions). At a large demonstration, I turned in my draft card to protest the war. Not long after, my draft board summoned me. I knew when I got there that I had read more

Tomgram: Mandy Smithberger, Letting the Pentagon Loose With Your Tax Dollars

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Who doesn’t remember, as a child, making that Christmas wish list for Santa and his elves? As it happens, in this century — and in the post-Christmas season, no less — a Pentagon already sporting the highest budget ever is still making such wish lists, officially known as “unfunded requirements lists,” for the orange-haired Santa in the White House and especially read more

Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Contemplating an Unfounding Father

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You should know that things are already not going well in your country when a majority of the Electoral College, if not of Americans, elects a con man as president, a “businessman” whose greatest success was landing on his feet, money in hand, after his five casinos went up in flames. read more

Tomgram: William Astore, Stamping Out War

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Here’s a word that essentially dropped out of Washington’s dictionary in this century: peace. It used to be part of the rhetoric, at least, of politicians there, but in the era of the war on terror it’s barely made an appearance. In election year 2020, however, it’s back, not as a global phenomenon or as a general term, but very specifically connected to the more than read more

Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Why No Retired Generals Oppose America’s Forever Wars

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In early 2017, U.S. Army Major Danny Sjursen, who first stumbled upon TomDispatch while on duty in Afghanistan in 2011, wrote to the site wondering if he might do a piece for it. He got in touch, in part, because a former Army colonel, Andrew Bacevich, whom he admired, was already regularly read more