What a way to end a war! Apologies all around! We're so damn sorry -- or actually, maybe not! I'm thinking, of course, about CENTCOM commander General Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr.'s belated apology for the | Continue reading
As a parting shot, on its way out of Afghanistan, the United States military launched a drone attack that the Pentagon called a “righteous strike.” The final missile fired during 20 years of occupation, that | Continue reading
As a religious studies professor, I know a parable when I see one. Consider the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the final events in this country's war in Afghanistan as just such a | Continue reading
The costs and consequences of America’s twenty-first-century wars have by now been well-documented -- a staggering $8 trillion in expenditures and more than 380,000 civilian deaths, as calculated by Brown University’s Costs of War project. | Continue reading
Yoda, the Jedi Master in the Star Wars films, once pointed out that the future is all too difficult to see and it’s hard to deny his insight. Yet I’d argue that, when it comes | Continue reading
Over the past weeks, multiple crises have merged: a crisis of democracy with the most significant attack on voting rights since Reconstruction; a climate crisis with lives and livelihoods upended in the Gulf Coast and | Continue reading
Disagreements over how to assess the American exodus from Afghanistan have kept the pundits busy these last weeks, even though there wasn’t much to say that hadn’t been said before. For some of them, however, | Continue reading
The collapse of the American project in Afghanistan may fade fast from the news here, but don't be fooled. It couldn't be more significant in ways few in this country can even begin to grasp. | Continue reading
They weren't kidding when they called Afghanistan the "graveyard of empires." Indeed, that cemetery has just taken another imperial body. And it wasn't pretty, was it? Not that anyone should be surprised. Even after 20 | Continue reading
GREENVILLE, CA — At 10 a.m. on July 22nd, I interviewed a New York University professor about using autonomous robots, drones, and other unmanned devices to suppress structural and wildland fires. I sent the interview | Continue reading
In recent months, Washington has had a lot to say about China’s ever-expanding air, naval, and missile power. But when Pentagon officials address the topic, they generally speak less about that country's current capabilities, which | Continue reading
It ended in chaos and disaster. Kabul has fallen and Joe Biden is being blamed (by congressional Republicans in particular) for America's now almost-20-year disaster in Afghanistan. But is the war on terror itself over? | Continue reading
It was the spring of 2003 during the American-led invasion of Iraq. I was in second grade, living on a U.S. military base in Germany, attending one of the Pentagon’s many schools for families of | Continue reading
For the last decade and a half, I’ve been teaching ethics to undergraduates. Now -- admittedly, a little late to the party -- I’ve started seriously questioning my own ethics. I've begun to wonder just | Continue reading
With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question any more of the existence of an American | Continue reading
Admittedly, I hadn't been there for 46 years, but old friends of mine still live (or at least lived) in the town of Greenville, California, and now... well, it's more or less gone, though they | Continue reading
My father, Athan G. Theoharis, passed away on July 3rd. A leading expert on the FBI, he was responsible for exposing the bureau’s widespread abuses of power. He was a loyal husband, dedicated father, scholar, | Continue reading
Congress surely meant to do the right thing when, in the fall of 2008, it passed the Child Soldiers Prevention Act (CSPA). The law was designed to protect kids worldwide from being forced to fight | Continue reading
“The thirty-year interregnum of U.S. global hegemony,” writes David Bromwich in the journal Raritan, “has been exposed as a fraud, a decoy, a cheat, [and] a sell.” Today, he continues, “the armies of the cheated | Continue reading
This summer, it seemed as if we Americans couldn’t wait to return to our traditional July 4th festivities. Haven't we all been looking for something to celebrate? The church chimes in my community rang out | Continue reading
Some years ago, a newspaper article credited a European visitor with the wry observation that Americans are charming because they have such short memories. When it comes to the nation’s wars, however, he was not | Continue reading
As a ROTC cadet and an Air Force officer, I was a tiny part of America’s vast Department of Defense (DoD) for 24 years until I retired and returned to civilian life as a history | Continue reading
It was all so long ago, in a world seemingly without challengers. Do you even remember when we Americans lived on a planet with a recumbent Russia, a barely rising China, and no obvious foes | Continue reading
For half a century we have been arguing about “the Vietnam War.” Is it possible that we didn’t know what we were talking about? After all that has been written (some 30,000 books and counting), | Continue reading
My wife and I were recently driving in Virginia, amazed yet again that the GPS technology on our phones could guide us through a thicket of highways, around road accidents, and toward our precise destination. | Continue reading
Sometimes, as I consider America's never-ending wars of this century, I can't help thinking of those lyrics from the Edwin Starr song, "(War, huh) Yeah! (What is it good for?) Absolutely nothing!" I mean, remind | Continue reading
Earlier this month, a Honduran court found David Castillo, a U.S.-trained former Army intelligence officer and the head of an internationally financed hydroelectric company, guilty of the 2016 murder of celebrated Indigenous activist Berta Cáceres. | Continue reading
It's the summer of 2026, five years after the Biden administration identified the People’s Republic of China as the principal threat to U.S. security and Congress passed a raft of laws mandating a society-wide mobilization | Continue reading
In San Francisco, we’re finally starting to put away our masks. With 74% of the city's residents over 12 fully vaccinated, for the first time in more than a year we’re enjoying walking, shopping, and | Continue reading
America has an accountability problem. In fact, if the Covid-19 disaster, the January 6th Capitol attack, and the Trump years are any indication, the American lexicon has essentially dispensed with the term "accountability." This should | Continue reading
Fifty years ago, on June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon stood before the White House press corps, staffers at his side, to announce “a new, all-out offensive” against drug abuse, which he denounced as “America’s | Continue reading
Yes, once upon a time I regularly absorbed science fiction and imagined futures of wonder, but mainly of horror. What else could you think, if you read H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds under the | Continue reading
President Biden’s first Pentagon budget, released late last month, is staggering by any reasonable standard. At more than $750 billion for the Defense Department and related work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy, | Continue reading
“I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”-- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) Kurt Vonnegut’s famous novel about the World War II bombing of | Continue reading
Groton and New London, Connecticut, are home to about 65,000 people, three colleges, the Coast Guard Academy, 15 nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarines capable of destroying the world many times over, and General Dynamics’ Electric Boat, a | Continue reading
It was May 2017. The Saudis were growing increasingly nervous. For more than two years they had been relying heavily on U.S. military support and bombs to defeat Houthi rebels in Yemen... | Continue reading