Thank You for Your Service by Rich Schwartzman November 16, 2011 It was another Veterans Day without me wearing the display cap with my old chevrons and campaign ribbons. I put that cap together in the mid-1980s to help me deal with survivors guilt. I had spent 16 months in Southeast Asia, but I was at U-Tapao in Thailand, not a base in Vietnam. U-Tapao was a major B-52 base where ...
The Road to the Permanent Warfare State, Part 7 by Gregory Bresiger November 15, 2011 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 |Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 |Part 12 |Part 13 In later years, NSC-68 would be held up by revisionist historians as the inevitable ...
Drone Warfare Is Fraught with Danger by Sheldon Richman October 24, 2011 One can understand why Libyans would celebrate the end of the Qaddafi dictatorship. But the American people should nonetheless be concerned about what the U.S. government did in North Africa. On the day Qaddafi was killed, the New York Times reported that “the death … is the latest victory for a new American approach to war: few if any troops ...
The Road to the Permanent Warfare State, Part 6 by Gregory Bresiger October 22, 2011 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 |Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 |Part 12 |Part 13 If there is a single factor which more than other explains the predicament in ...
Korea Shows All That Is Wrong With U.S. Foreign Policy by Laurence M. Vance October 19, 2011 The tension on the Korean peninsula escalated late last year when South Korea began live-firing drills off its coastline. That was after North and South Korea shelled each other for the first time since the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War. U.S. forces in the area went on high alert even as the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George ...
Why Did the United States Invade Afghanistan? by Tim Kelly October 12, 2011 The tenth anniversary of the U.S. led war in Afghanistan came and went with very little attention from the mainstream media. U.S. policymakers are nevertheless confronted with many questions regarding that conflict, such as its affordability, the effectiveness of various strategies, and even whether U.S. forces should remain in that country at all. Those are all important issues, but the ...
Pat Buchanan versus The Good War by Tim Kelly September 23, 2011 Patrick J. Buchanan, in Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War (reviewed in Freedom Daily in three parts, beginning here), charges British statesmen with blundering into wars that resulted in the devastation of Europe and the fall of their empire. It is not surprising that this book has a caused a stir, for it draws into ...
Peace Prize-Winner Obama Savages Somalia by Sheldon Richman September 20, 2011 A human catastrophe is taking place in Somalia, the result of drought, famine — and the savage war conducted by the Obama administration, complete with a CIA training facility and prison. According to the Guardian, 150,000 desperate Somalis, mostly women and children, have walked more than 60 miles to a crowded refugee camp in Kenya in the past three ...
Dying to Corrupt Afghanistan by James Bovard September 19, 2011 American soldiers are dying so that Afghan politicians can continue looting U.S. tax dollars. Foreign aid has long been notorious for creating kleptocracies governments of thieves. The $50+ billion foreign aid that the United States has dumped on Afghanistan over the past decade is a textbook case of how foreign handouts drag a nation down. Corruption has been a huge ...
The Road to the Permanent Warfare State, Part 5 by Gregory Bresiger September 17, 2011 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 |Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 |Part 12 |Part 13 I deplore the hysterical sort of anti-Communism which, it seems to me, is gaining ...
Libya Is Nothing for Obama to Be Proud Of by Sheldon Richman September 2, 2011 A fascinating example of the mindset of American mainstream journalists is provided by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who wrote a glowing piece this week praising the U.S. government’s humanitarian intervention in Libya. It’s entitled “Thank You, America!” Kristof’s article comes across as a glorious paean to the U.S. government — how good and wonderful the government ...
Memorial Day Reflections and Revisionism by James Bovard August 26, 2011 On Memorial Day, the media do their usual sacralizing of war. Instead, it should be a day for the ritualized scourging of politicians. During the last 60 years, their lies have resulted in the unnecessary deaths of almost 100,000 thousand American soldiers and millions of foreigners. And yet, people still get teary-eyed when politicians take the stage to talk ...