War Is A Crime

Aida Touma – Sliman is a Member of Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, and Chairwoman of the Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality. She joins us from Israel but recently toured the United States. Her lengthy resume includes three years as editor in chief of Al-Ittihad, the only Arabic daily newspaper in Israel, and for the past 9 years she has served as secretary of the World Peace Council. Touma – Sliman will be speaking at the read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

In July 1999, Chalmers Johnson began the prologue to Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire this way: “Instead of demobilizing after the Cold War, the United States imprudently committed itself to maintaining a global empire. This book is an account of the resentments read more

War is a self-perpetuating habit that harms its users and can provide a certain momentary high. At a peace conference in Canada recently I heard a number of people refer to themselves as “recovering Americans.” The degree to which many people imagine wars are launched and continued for rational reasons is a major misunderstanding; war cannot be explained without irrationality.

But any metaphor can be taken in a misleading direction, and I think that has been done with war and alcohol.

What? read more

By Dave Lindorff

Why did the US military have a vertical-take-off F-35B launched from an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean make an attack on a Taliban position in Afghanistan?

Nobody’s mentioning several things about this Pentagon-touted first-ever US military “combat use” of the most expensive and supposedly sophisticated fighter-bomber ever produced at a current price of over $115 million per plane for the B model.

The first point is why it happened at all. The plane is not actually meant read more

We expect 17-year-olds to have learned a great deal starting from infancy, and yet full-grown adults have proven incapable of knowing anything about Afghanistan during the course of 17 years of U.S.-NATO war. Despite war famously being the means of Americans learning geography, few can even identify Afghanistan on a map. What else have we failed to learn?

The war has not ended.

There are, as far as I know, no polls on the percentage of people in the United States who know that the war is still read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

In the Heart of a Dying Empire
The Adolts in the Room (and No, That Is Not a Typo!)
By Tom Engelhardt

When you think about it, Earth is a relatively modest-sized planet — about 25,000 miles in circumference at the Equator, with a total surface area of 197 million square miles, almost three-quarters of which read more

I confess that the idea of fighting for “the soul of the Democratic Party” has always sounded as sensible to my ear as fighting for the soul of a cow plop, and plans to improve the world through the Democratic Party about as strategic as a preemptive compromise. The following statement from the Democratic Party has given me second thoughts:

“We declare again that all governments instituted among men derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; that any government not based upon read more

September 28, 2018, marks 100 years since the stupidest parade I’ve ever heard of. And this is a world awash in stupid. Donald Trump wanted to hold an insane weapons parade in Washington this November. That was dumb. But so was, on a far lesser scale, the move by various peace groups to de-prioritize going ahead with a massive celebration of having helped get the parade cancelled. I suppose the thinking is that we have got just too many victories for peace to be bothered with inspiring people read more

By Dave Lindorff

 

Whatever your view of Brett Kavanaugh, let’s get one thing clear:  While he’s hoping to become the ninth justice of the US Supreme Court, he is not on trial. He is facing a confirmation hearing by the Judicial Committee of the US Senate.

Republican backers of this clearly flawed and truth-challenged candidate are insisting indignantly, in the case of mounting charges from alleged victims, that he’s entitled to a “presumption of innocence” as several read more

Hawes Spencer is a journalist who has reported for the New York Times, NPR, the Hook, and other publications. He has taught journalism at Virginia Commonwealth University and James Madison University. For over two decades, Hawes Spencer edited two weekly newspapers in Charlottesville, Virginia, both of which he co-founded: C-ville Weekly and The Hook. As the editor of the Hook, his staff delivered 149 awards from the Virginia Press Association during read more