The U.S. public wants out of Iraq. The Iraqis themselves want the occupation to be over. What’s a poor U.S. soldier to do? As the Iraq War drags into its fifth year, the U.S. army finds itself in an untenable situation. Whatever welcome the Iraqis extended to the troops has worn exceedingly thin. Roadside bombs… Continue reading No Thanks
War needs a why. Yes, war is ultimately senseless. But soldiers will not fight and die without a reason. “Their’s not to reason why, their’s but to do and die,” wrote the poet Tennyson in The Charge of the Light Brigade. But soldiers rarely volunteer these days simply to serve as cannon fodder. The public,… Continue reading Mission Incomprehensible
Many Americans look across the Pacific at China and see nothing but a vast digestive tract. A billion-plus people are developing quite an appetite: for oil to run their factories, for sheet glass to sheathe their skyscrapers, for grain to feed themselves and their livestock. Behind every recent resource depletion, it seems, lurks a growing… Continue reading Too Big to Fail
Last year in Hamdania, west of Baghdad, eight U.S. soldiers abducted an Iraqi man from his home, threw him in a ditch, and shot him. The soldiers placed an AK-47 and a shovel near his body. They wanted to make it seem as though he were an insurgent digging holes to plant roadside bombs. Planting… Continue reading Tampering with the Evidence
What is the world coming to when a wonky slide show wins an Oscar for best documentary? The Inconvenient Truth is about just that: what the world is coming to. And Hollywood is sufficiently freaked out by the prospect of eco-apocalypse to bestow its highest honor on such a low-tech cinematic undertaking. Al Gore might… Continue reading Just Climate Change
Back in the early 1990s, an editor at Harper’s asked me for suggestions of progressive foreign policy analysts who could participate in one of their roundtable discussions. I provided a short list, with Noam Chomsky on top. The editor thanked me politely but said that the Chomsky suggestion wouldn’t fly. In so many words he… Continue reading On Chomsky
At the beginning of Chinese filmmaker Jiang Yimou’s popular movie Hero , a martial arts master arrives at the court of the powerful Xin ruler. The master swordsman, an orphan who goes by the moniker Nameless, harbors a secret desire to assassinate the king on behalf of his own wronged territory, the nation of Zhao.… Continue reading The Rise and Fall of Nations
It’s not been a good time to be a journalist. Outside the United States, reporters literally take their lives into their own hands to cover dangerous stories. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 55 journalists died in 2006, a steady increase over the last several years. The mafia-style hit of Anna Politkovskaya in Russia… Continue reading Targeting Journalists
At Saturday’s anti-war demonstration in Washington, my 84-year-old mother slipped as she stepped off a curb and fell backward. A young man in a small knot of anarchists caught her and gently restored her to the vertical. And on we marched. Leave no grandmother behind! We shout at the television. We complain to our spouses,… Continue reading The Point of Protest
You’re astride a donkey, and it’s not going anywhere. You’ve got carrots in your pocket and a stick in your hand. Which to use? In the ideal world, the donkey would take a few steps forward to get the carrot that you dangle in front of its nose. If it slows down or gets distracted… Continue reading Bait and Switch