War Is A Crime

Where do all the Lockheed Martin executives vacation?

At the Last Resort!

Joe Biden and Israel are planning to attack Iran as a Last Resort.

Weapons dealers love nothing better than last resorts. Invading Ukraine was a last resort according to Russia. Shipping endless weapons into Ukraine is a last resort according to the U.S.

Win-win! Just pay no attention to the relentless and deliberate escalation of the past decades. Erase how the Baltics kicked out the Soviets 30 years go. Dude, they’re giving read more

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

If anything saved my life when I was young, it was books. Library books, to be exact. These days, about to turn 78, I walk past one of my bookshelves, notice the several volumes of history I’ve collected on the Ottoman Empire — I was always curious about it! — and think sadly, I’m never going to get to you, am I? But when I was young, there was only one issue: making read more

The Jan. 6 hearings are clearly running over a month. Let’s call it a month. There are many countries in which the U.S. has organized, facilitated, or supported one or more coup attempts. Let’s count each country just once. And let’s go back only to the year 2000. Here’s a list of countries and the dates of attempted or successful overthrows. An asterick indicates success:

Yugoslavia 1999-2000 *
Ecuador 2000 *
Afghanistan 2001 *
Venezuela 2002 * and 2018, 2019, 2020
read more

For years I’ve appreciated the Global Peace Index (GPI), and interviewed the people who make it, but quibbled with exactly what it does. read more

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

In my home in the early 1950s, we lived Life to the fullest (with the Saturday Evening Post and Look thrown in for good measure). In fact, from those largely print media years — we got our first black-and-white TV in 1953 — I can still remember a Life cover photo showing the pained face of an American soldier caught up in the Korean War. read more

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

How far are we? Who really knows? Let’s just say that we’re somewhere significantly down the road to extremity, all-American style. With a hung (and wrung-out) Congress and a lame (and aged) president, our tripartite government is looking ever less “tri” and ever more “part.” And it increasingly read more

In 2015, Alice Sabatini was an 18-year-old contestant in the Miss Italia contest in Italy. She was asked what epoch of the past she would have liked to live in. She replied: World War II. Her explanation was that her text books go on and on about it, so she’d like to actually see it, and she wouldn’t have to fight in it, because only men did that. This led to a great deal of mockery. Did she want to be bombed or starved or sent to a concentration camp? What was she, stupid? Somebody photoshopped read more

For many years, substantial military operations have been conducted by mercenaries, ranging from professional soldiers hired to fight wars for European potentates in the 14^th century to the combat forces of Blackwater, a private company employed by the U.S. government to undertake violent activities in the “War on Terror” of the early 21^st century.

Today, the Wagner Group, a shadowy Russian read more

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

Yes, Afghanistan went down the drain and Washington’s global war on terror ended (more or less) in disaster 20 years after it began. But the urge to militarize the planet? Not a chance in an American read more