Tag: Afghanistan

Of U.S. Military Interventions, Alien Disaster Movies, and Star Wars

Neoliberalism, Interventionism, the Resource Curse, and a Fragmenting World

Despite troop reductions, the Pentagon's war budget is increasing.

Yet another triumph of “humanitarian intervention,” and, as the long and often ghastly record reveals, not an unusual one, going back to its modern origins four centuries ago.

In movie terms, you could think of Washington’s war policies in the post-9/11 era as pure “play it again, Sam.”

Even in troubled Afghanistan, there are alternatives whose sum could potentially slice through this Gordian knot of a policy problem.

We have no idea what it means at this point in history to turn a region, city by city, country by country, into something like a vast failed state and then continue to bomb the rubble.

Investigative journalist Allan Nairn knows firsthand how the U.S. uses mass killing as a routine tool of foreign policy. The horrifying tactics of Islamic State, he says, are an imitation of what we have been doing and what we have been teaching our international proxies for generations.

Head of US forces in Afghanistan Gen. Campbell continues string of lies about US gunship attack that destroyed Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, claiming it was a case of 'mistaken targeting', but history of US hospital bombings belies his assertion that the US 'doesn't intentionally bomb hospitals.'

We waded into conflicts in the Middle East we did not understand, propelled forward by fantasy. And our folly spawned a death spiral of political, social and economic collapse, widespread poverty, massive displacement, misery and radical jihadism.