Yesterday, the Merchants of Death Tribunal concluded with a verdict of “guilty” for all those U.S. dealers and exporters of weapons globally. Yes, the merchants of death are guilty as sin, even as they account for 40% of the global trade in deadly weaponry. Who says nothing is made in America today? We make plenty of things that go “bang.”
In our culture today, it’s considered “patriotic” to make loads of money, especially by selling guns. Just look at the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its enablers in Congress and all the gun companies domestically.
Assault weapons are highly profitable, much more so than pistols, and isn’t it all about making money? Thoughts and prayers to those innocents caught in the crossfire, of course. No worries–more “good guys with guns” will save us from the bad guys with guns.
If we Americans embrace (or, refuse to stop) the sale of firearms, especially dangerous assault weapons, domestically, indeed, if we fetishize it with ideas of potency and manliness, is it any surprise we brag of weapons sales overseas and our dominance of that trade? If we don’t care (or care enough) about the safety of our own children, why should we care about dead kids in Gaza?
Our culture is violent and sick, and until we reform it, there’s little hope of meaningful change.
That said, it’s encouraging to hear of a ceasefire in Gaza. Perhaps the Trump administration can achieve a ceasefire in Ukraine as well. The problem is there always seems to be another war or wars looming on the horizon for the U.S., more conflicts that America’s merchants of death can make a killing on.
America has the war but not the peace
If there’s an American Leo Tolstoy out there, he couldn’t write a book on this epoch with the title of War and Peace. Today’s version for America has a single-word title: War.
Peace is rarely if ever mentioned in mainstream political discourse and culture. That’s not surprising. Roughly 60% of U.S. federal discretionary spending goes to the Pentagon, Homeland Security, nuclear weapons, and weapons shipments to places like Israel and Ukraine. President Biden once said: Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value. Looks like America values war very highly indeed.
Until we stop valuing and valorizing war and start embracing peace, the merchants of death will continue to thrive. Sure, they’re guilty, but so are we all if we keep feeding them our money and keep looking to them for “safety” and “security.”
Yesterday, I posted the following comment to a fine article that addressed America’s nuclear triad and the reality that we really only need the Navy’s nuclear submarine force for deterrence:
My old service, the Air Force, will fight for new ICBMs and new “stealth” bombers just because they always want MORE. More money, more bases, more planes, more power. Doesn’t matter if America needs them or not. Doesn’t matter if new nuclear weapons may end the world. What matters is dominance, especially Air Force dominance over the U.S. Navy and Army.
“Nothing can stop the U.S. Air Force” in its budgetary battles at the Pentagon.
Honestly, this is self-evident to me. The Air Force always wants more planes, especially offensive aircraft like fighters and bombers. The Army always wants more divisions, more equipment, a bigger Army. The Navy always wants more ships.
Who cares if it costs $700 million per plane? Or even a billion? It’s a bomber and the Air Force wants it! (The B-21 Raider)
Within the armed services, there are special interests. So, for example, the Navy carrier enthusiasts fight for their hegemony while the submariners fight to keep their slice of the budgetary pie. Within the “old” Army, the combat branches (infantry, armor, artillery) fought to ensure their continued relevance (and money). Now there’s an entire special ops and forces community, a military within the military, along with a new Space Force, a cyber command, various intelligence “communities,” all fighting for more budgetary authority and power.
Everyone always wants MORE. Victory in the U.S. military is measured by who wins the Pentagon budgetary battles, not who wins in Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan.
Service parochialism is encouraged at the highest levels and is instilled by the service academies. A friend of mine’s daughter recently received her acceptance letter to West Point. The letter stressed the proud tradition of the Army, and though it mentioned service, it said nothing about the Constitution and the oath of office. Each service academy stresses loyalty to service branch. Duty, honor, country takes a back seat to bleeding Air Force blue or Army green.
Pride in service isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can be blinding on issues like building new ICBMs and stealth bombers. The default Air Force position is to support more missiles and bombers “just because.” Because they’re “our” toys, part of “our” mission, bringing with them bases, command billets, influence, and all the rest.
Service parochialism ensures a military that is wasteful, overly conservative, and dysfunctional. Too much bleeding of Army green or Air Force blue has led to too much real bleeding of red.
Except a Nuclear Apocalypse Would Be Unimaginably Worse
The wildfires in LA are horrific. People are losing everything. Thousands of structures have been consumed by flames. Ash, soot, smoke, poison the air. It’s devastating. Just look at this photo taken from space.
It looks like a nuclear apocalypse. Yet as devastating as the LA fires have been, a nuclear apocalypse would be unimaginably worse. A thousand times worse. A million times worse.
We see something like the wildfires in LA—as bad as they are, they remain on a scale that is comprehensible. We can fathom them. They will eventually be contained.
One atomic bomb like the one used at Hiroshima would be a thousand times worse (and don’t forget the blast wave and radiation as well as the fires). A thermonuclear weapon, a hydrogen bomb or warhead, would be one hundred thousand times worse. Unimaginable. Unfathomable. Unsurvivable.
There’s much to be learned from these wildfires in LA. Much more action needs to be taken to prepare for similar events in the future. Perhaps they might serve as a reminder as well of how much worse the fires could and would be from a man-made inferno in a nuclear war.
America, it’s high time we stopped building more nuclear weapons and started investing in improvements to our infrastructure, to disaster preparedness, to meet the climate-driven catastrophes that we know are coming.
America needs more fire trucks, more fire crews, even something seemingly as simple as more water. We don’t need more infernal (and inferno-producing) nuclear weapons.
If one side is armed with cap guns and the other with bazookas, would we call that a “war” between roughly equal powers?
I thought of this as I turned to Antiwar.com to see that President Biden has approved yet another massive arms shipment to Israel, to the tune of $8 billion. Here’s the report:
The sale includes AIM-120C-8 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, Hellfire AGM-114 missiles, 155 MM artillery rounds, small-diameter bombs, JDAM kits, and 500-pound bombs. Many of these munitions have been used by Israel during its campaign of extermination in Gaza, including in attacks on civilian targets.
In June, CNN reported that Israel used US small-diameter bombs in an attack on a school that killed 40 civilians. In October, The Washington Post noted, “The Biden administration has received nearly 500 reports alleging Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons for attacks that caused unnecessary harm to civilians in the Gaza Strip.”
Remember when human rights used to matter (just a little bit)? Remember when genocide was considered morally reprehensible—a murderous wrong? The U.S. government simply ignores human rights except when they advance a particular agenda. And genocide? It’s OK when it’s couched as Israel doing it in the cause of “defending” its “right to exist.”
If your “right to exist” involves denying millions of others their right to exist, have you not bought that “right” with blood money?
Of course, we’re all told by the “experts” that the situation in the Middle East is immensely complicated. Certainly, the history of the region is complex. But what’s happening there today to the Palestinians isn’t complex. In Israel, Zionism has run amuck as Israel grabs land, water, oil and gas rights, indeed everything it can, in the cause of creating a Greater Israel. It just doesn’t matter to most Israelis, and the U.S. government as well, that two million Palestinians will be killed, wounded, or displaced. Might makes right here, accentuated by media spin and government propaganda.
Speaking of the Middle East, I watched a superb documentary recently: “This Is Not a Movie: Robert Fisk and the Politics of Truth.” I highly recommend it. Fisk was a foreign affairs journalist for The Independent. When I lived in Britain from 1992 to 1995, I used to read his articles in that paper. He lived in Beirut and covered the Middle East, ultimately spending forty years living in and writing about the region. The documentary follows him on assignment, demonstrating what a principled and brave man he was. Fisk did journalism the old fashioned way: he got out among the people, he journeyed to the front lines, he saw the dead bodies from massacres (indeed, in one horrific moment, he was forced to climb over a “barricade” of dead bodies, a nightmarish moment for him, as one would expect).
There are very few journalists like Fisk left today. A truth-seeker, he was unafraid to criticize the powerful when they deserved it. He always sought to understand what was happening through knowledge gleaned at firsthand, carrying his trusty notebook and a pen or pencil.
Check out the documentary on Fisk. You’ll learn a lot and be inspired by a man of considerable courage and unimpeachable integrity
“Peace” is a word rarely heard in American discourse. No matter the year, there are wars and rumors of war for America. This is obviously unhealthy for society, for the environment, for everything, an idea caught by a Vietnam War-era slogan, “War is not healthy for children and other living things.”
About all that war is “healthy” for is the continued growth of the military-industrial-congressional complex, the MICIMATT that truly runs much of America. As America’s war budget soars to $900 billion and as America dominates the world’s market in weaponry, accounting for 40% of that deadly trade, acts of violence and extremism continue to rise. The U.S., for example, has provided roughly $200 billion over the last three years to support Ukraine and Israel, most of it in the form of deadly weaponry. This is sold to the American people as a job-creator.
Back in 2021, I wrote about endless war feeding extremism in America for the Eisenhower Media Network. You can read the entire report here; what follows in an excerpt of what I wrote.
Endless War Fosters and Favors Extremism
Written in 2021
Since the attacks of 9/11/2001, America has been at war. A U.S. military vision of global reach and global power morphed into a global war on terror (GWOT). The GWOT led to invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq—wars that were based on lies and which promoted atrocity. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, the leading issue publicly in America’s decision to invade in 2003. Afghanistan had no direct role in the 9/11 attacks; indeed, 15 of the 19 Al Qaeda terrorists were Saudi nationals. Yet the Afghan War was waged both in the false name of avenging 9/11 and of preventing such attacks in the future.
Both wars cost thousands of American lives killed, tens of thousands grievously wounded, and both failed. Temporary gains secured by U.S. troops at high cost in “surges” in Iraq and Afghanistan proved fragile and reversible, two words used by General David Petraeus himself, and at the time, to qualify them.
Nevertheless, whether these wars were led by Petraeus or a series of otherwise forgettable generals, progress proved elusive even as real money was being squandered (the two wars are estimated to have cost America more than $6.4 trillion by May of 2021). Yet as Army Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling wrote in 2007, a private losing a rifle suffers quicker and more adverse punishment than generals who continually lose wars.
America’s wars have proven to be losers, shamefully so, yet no senior leaders have been punished or even demoted. Bewildered troops returning home from these meaningless wars often discovered grim prospects despite slogans of “support our troops” and “20%-off mattress sales” ostensibly held in honor of veterans and their service.
Donald Trump, a reality TV star and failed casino owner, gained popularity and eventually the presidency in part by promising to end America’s wasteful and winless wars overseas. It was a promise he failed to keep. Nevertheless, Trump’s message about wasteful and fruitless wars was noteworthy, demonstrating the domestic impact and blowback of open-ended and disastrous foreign military interventions.
Winless, seemingly endless, and often brutal wars have had a brutalizing impact on the troops who served. A state of constant war, James Madison warned, is corrosive to democracy. Wars without progress, wars without purpose, wars unsupported by the people (Congress has not issued a formal declaration of war since World War II), breed alienation, bitterness, and dismay. They also foster extremism.
Nearly one in five of the Capitol rioters charged for their actions on January 6, 2021 were military veterans. White supremacy is a known and increasing problem in the U.S. military. In response to riots and extremism, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in February 2021 ordered military units to observe a one-day stand-down to address extremism. Remarkably, troops had to be reminded that attempts to seize seats of power in the U.S. government, as during the Capitol riot, were contrary to their oaths to the Constitution and against the law.
And it’s not just rank-and-file service members who apparently require lessons in civilian primacy. A letter signed by 124 retired generals and admirals warned of Marxism and socialism within the U.S. military and questioned President Joe Biden’s mental and physical fitness to serve as commander-in-chief. The civil-military divide manifested by this letter echoed a similar one in France where right-wing military officers warned of a civilizational struggle within France allegedly being aggravated by Muslim immigration and Islamism.
Extremism within the U.S. military undeniably exists; manipulation by senior leaders spouting big lies remains a serious concern, as do groups such as QAnon and the Oath Keepers that specialize in radicalization via misinformation. Yet the ultimate source of radicalization within the U.S. military, and possibly within wider U.S. society, is war itself.
Wars that are waged without the people’s support, under false pretenses, and with no profit to society other than to America’s military-industrial-congressional complex are conducive to rampant corruption and societal decay.
Endless wars and the deep wounds that come from them have served as an ideal incubator of extremism in America. The first and most vital step in ending extremism, therefore, is to end these undeclared wars and the resentments, violence, and hatred they breed.
On Twitter/X, I stumbled across this useful image that visually captures the U.S. political scene:
The modification I’d make to this illustration is with the caption. It’s not only Republicans who turn everything rightwards—Democrats help too. Consider Kamala Harris’ embrace of Dick and Liz Cheney during her campaign of ill-fortune. Or her embrace of military lethality and her celebration of Israel’s “right” to “defend” itself as it wages genocide in Gaza.
It’s Republicans and Democrats who are turning this country rightwards even as Democrats block any appreciable movement in progressive or “leftist” directions.
Mainstream Democrats will always say they need to do this as allegedly it’s the only way they can win, which is pure BS, as Harris’ defeat recently shows. It’s the old “fake left, run right” tactic, and corporate-friendly Democrats keep using it, if only to keep the money flowing.
No matter. Liberal magazines like The Nation are telling me that Harris lost because of “bigotry,” not because she embraced the Cheneys and left workers behind. I guess President Obama won two terms because of bigotry?
Given this “ratchet effect,” America desperately needs a political revolution, as Bernie Sanders in 2016 was wont to say, as rightist Hillary Clinton ran against Trumpist Donald Trump. (Trump makes populist noises, but his guiding light is self-aggrandizement.)
As Democrats offer rightist candidates like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, Republicans give us a plutocratic “man of the people” (never mind the contradiction here) like Trump. Facing that grim “choice,” sensing that Clinton and Harris and Democrats like them are not what they say are, many Americans opt for the scrutable plutocrat and his friends. Elon Musk, anyone?
And thus America’s problems are ratcheted up.
P.S. A hearty “Happy New Years!” to all my readers wherever you are!
One of my favorite bumper stickers has this message: If you think you can trust the government, ask an Indian (Native American). It’s a good reminder.
Lately, the mainstream media has warned us against conspiracy theorists. Against distrusting government and media narratives. And yet recently (and finally!) the Wall Street Journal came clean in an article that probed President Biden’s declining stamina and mental health. The article is recounted here with venomous humor by Jimmy Dore.
I wrote in 2019 that Biden’s debate performance then, with his rambling about turning on record players and the like, suggested a diminishing capacity to serve as president. Many people shared those concerns, but the Democrats carefully stage-managed Biden, keeping him largely in Covid lockdown as he ran for the presidency and won. Over the last four years, we’ve witnessed many, many episodes of Biden’s continuing decline, most clearly during his debate earlier this year with President-elect Trump. Yet, until that debate, and even after in some cases, we were told not to believe our lying eyes about Biden’s sorry performance.
Now, with lame duck Biden slowly making his way out the door (assuming he doesn’t lose his way), we’re finally being told by the Wall Street Journal that he really wasn’t up to the job for the last four years.
I wonder why people don’t trust the government?
Another example: Recently, the government “discovered” the U.S. military had 2000 troops in Syria, not the 900 or so that Pentagon spokespeople had been telling us about for the last couple of years. What happened? Where did these extra 1100 troops come from? Not only can’t the Pentagon pass a financial audit (seven straight years of failures!), it can’t even count its troops.
Of course, the Pentagon knew all along that it had 2000 or so troops in Syria. They simply lied to us, full stop.
Will anyone be called on the carpet and punished for this lie? Of course not. When you lie for the government, you get promoted. When you reveal truth to the American people (Edward Snowden, for example), you get punished.
So, while not everything is a conspiracy, it’s always a good idea to question authority. Incredibly, whether led ostensibly by Biden or Trump, the federal government is something less than trustworthy. And if you don’t believe me, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to explore the white man’s many broken promises to Native Americans.
I caught this headline in the morning send-out for the New York Times:
It Can Be Lonely to Have a Middle-of-the Road Opinion on the Middle East
Some college students and faculty members are seeking space for nuanced perspectives on the Israel-Hamas war on deeply divided campuses.
See, it’s a “war” between Israel and Hamas, and what’s really needed here is “space” for “nuanced perspectives.”
Don’t you want to have “a middle of the road opinion” on genocide in Gaza? Don’t you want to explore all the “nuances” of Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza, where the death toll is likely to have reached 200,000 and counting? (Or not counting, since apparently Palestinian deaths don’t count for much.)
Here are some “nuances”: As Chris Hedges recently noted, the genocide in Gaza resembles that of Armenians during World War I. It’s happening in the open, unlike the Holocaust which the Nazis tried to hide, yet not enough people, especially in the West, are seeking to stop it.
In fact, the U.S. government is deeply complicit in the genocide in Gaza, arming Israel and providing military and diplomatic cover at a cost of scores of billions of dollars (when you factor in maintaining two carrier strike groups in the region as well as all the weapons shipments to Israel).
The intent is obvious: the creation of a Greater Israel in which Gaza and the West Bank cease to exist as lands for a Palestinian state. The “nuance” here is a “no-state solution,” as Palestinians are killed or forced from their land in the name of Israel’s “right to exist.” The fall of the Syrian government, meanwhile, sees Israel expanding into the Golan Heights and beyond, also in the name of protecting Israel.
It’s a land grab, a water grab, a gas reserves grab, a power grab, all for Israel and its big brother, the USA. It’s an illustration of Thucydides’ lesson that “The strong do what they will; the weak suffer what they must.” Israel, supported wholeheartedly by the U.S. government, is strong; the Palestinians (and now the Syrians) are weak; so the latter suffer.
The New York Times article suggests I should be looking for “middle ground” here, but I have news for them: Israel has already seized and occupied it.
The new “Superman” movie trailer has dropped, and it hit me in the feels.
I grew up watching reruns of those old “Adventures of Superman” episodes starring George Reeves. Then Christopher Reeve came along and embodied the character to perfection in the 1978 film. (To me, Reeve will always be the definitive Superman, just as Sean Connery is the definitive James Bond.) I’ve seen other Superman movies and shows; my wife and I enjoyed watching “Smallville,” a coming-of-age story for the character that was generally thoughtful and interesting. More recently, Henry Cavill made a compelling Superman, though he lacked the easy charm of Christopher Reeve.
I don’t know what it is about Superman—he’s always been my favorite superhero. I think it’s his nobility, his grace, his compassion for the weakest among us. The new trailer shows a flicker of a scene where Superman rescues a young girl from certain death. That, in a flash, is Superman.
There’s one scene in “Superman” with Christopher Reeve that stays with me: when he tells Lois Lane (played with a perfect mix of wide-eyed wonder and hardboiled cynicism by Margot Kidder) that he’s come to fight for “truth, justice, and the American way” and Lane laughs, telling him he’s going to end up fighting every elected official in the country. In a post-Watergate climate, that line resonated with me then; it hits home even more so today.
As a teenager in the 1970s, I had hopes America stood for something, even after the disastrous wars in Southeast Asia, the crimes of Nixon and Kissinger, and all the rest. I thought my country aspired to be something better than what it was.
It’s exceedingly hard to entertain such notions in 2024. America’s war budget just hit nearly $900 billion as Biden/Trump and the Congress continue to support mass murder in Gaza.
I wish a real Superman existed to step in front of all the missiles and bombs we send to Israel that are being used to kill young girls and boys. Better yet, why can’t we be our own Superman and stop the flow of these awful weapons that enable the worst atrocities? Why don’t we act?
Truth, justice, and the American way: words that used to mean something to me. Words that can mean something again, if only we could channel some of the heart, the goodness, and the strength of will of a comic book character known as Superman.
It’s always the right time to stop building more weapons of mass destruction
William Astore and Matthew Hoh
[Note to readers: Back in early September, Congressman Mike Turner penned an op-ed for the “liberal” New York Times supporting a massive “investment” in new nuclear weapons. Matt Hoh and I quickly submitted letters to the Times to protest this op-ed and its arguments; the Times ignored them. We then wrote our own op-ed below, shopping it to various mainstream media outlets without success. Here it finally appears for the first time.]
*****
Representative Mike Turner’s essay on nuclear weapons in The New York Times (We Must Invest in Our Aging Nuclear Arsenal, September 6, 2024) is dangerously loyal to counterproductive US national security policies and narratives.
Turner’s lamentation over foreign nuclear weapons programs ignores destabilizing US arms control choices this century. The US spends more on nuclear weapons than the rest of the world combined. Its $1.7 trillion modernization program (the Sentinel ICBM; the B-21 Raider bomber; Columbia-class nuclear submarines) has done little more than upset the decades-long nuclear deterrence balance among nations.
In his essay, Turner neglects to mention the US government’s unilateral withdrawal from multiple arms control treaties. Then-Senator Joe Biden rightly predicted the effects of George W. Bush’s abandonment of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty: “A year ago [in 2000], it was widely reported that our intelligence community had concluded that pulling out of ABM would prompt the Chinese to increase their nuclear arsenal tenfold.” The Chinese are now clearly headed in that escalatory direction.
To prevent the apocalyptic consequences of yet another nuclear arms race, the US should act to decrease “investments” in new weapons while cutting current arsenals by negotiating and enacting new arms reduction treaties. Together, the US and Russia already possess ten thousand nuclear warheads, enough to destroy life on earth and several other earth-sized planets. We need desperately to divest from nuclear weapons, not “invest” in them.
Consider as well that America’s current nuclear triad, especially the Navy’s Trident submarine force, is potent, survivable, and more than sufficient to deter any conceivable adversary.
Simply put, the US must stop building genocidal nuclear weapons. It must instead renew international efforts and treaties to downsize these dreadful and dangerous arsenals. Spending yet more trillions on more world-shattering nukes is worse than a mistake—it’s a crime against humanity.
Here we are haunted by the words of Hans Bethe, who worked on the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb during World War II. The first reaction Bethe said he’d had after Hiroshima was one of fulfillment—that the project they had worked on for so long had succeeded. The second reaction, he said, was one of shock and awe: “What have we done? What have we done,” he repeated. And the third reaction: It should never be done again.
That is the imperative here. The US must act so that future Hiroshimas will never happen.
It’s not America’s fate alone that’s at stake here, but the fate of humanity itself, and indeed most life on earth, as only a few dozen thermonuclear warheads exploding would likely produce nuclear winter and an eventual “body count” in the billions.
During the First Cold War, one heard it said: “Better dead than red.” That mentality remains, even as the “reds” today are more capitalist than communist. Meanwhile, the weapons makers for the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC), in their greed, are the adversary within. From Israel and events in Gaza, we’ve learned the MICC will literally empower a people to commit mass murder. With more and newer thermonuclear weapons, the MICC may yet kill the world.
Higher quarterly profits will mean little when everybody is dead.
During the Vietnam War, a US Army major was heard to say: “We had to destroy the town to save it [from communism].” If America can destroy towns in Vietnam to “save” them from communism, if it can facilitate the destruction of Gaza to “save” it from Hamas, it can similarly destroy the earth to “save” it from China, or Russia, or some other “threat.” That is the indefensible (il)logic of building yet more weapons of mass destruction.
Contra Congressman Turner, there is no logical, sensible, defensible reason for America’s proposed “investment” in new nuclear weapons. But there are nearly two trillion reasons why it’s going forward, because that’s the projected total cost of modernizing America’s nuclear triad. Money talks—loudly, explosively, perhaps catastrophically.
Today, more than half of US federal discretionary spending is devoted to war and weapons. Americans, in essence, live both in a permanent war state and a persistent state of war. As bad as that reality is, a state of nuclear war is unimaginable and must not be allowed to happen.
At the height of the Cold War, one of us served in Cheyenne Mountain, America’s nuclear command center, and witnessed a simulated nuclear attack on the US. Even on the primitive monitors the Air Force had back in 1986, seeing Soviet missile tracks crossing the North Pole and terminating at American cities was unforgettable.
A generation earlier, Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” tragically noted in 1965 that it was 20 years too late to control nuclear arms. Those efforts, he said, should have been started “the day after Trinity” in July of 1945.
Let’s not make it 80 years too late. Congressman Turner is exactly wrong here. We must cut America’s nuclear arsenal and pursue new nuclear disarmament treaties. Never should our children be haunted as we were (and still are) by the darkness and doom of radioactive mushroom clouds.
William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and historian, is a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network.
Matthew Hoh, a former Marine Corps captain and State Department official, resigned in protest in 2009 against America’s ill-conceived war in Afghanistan. He is Associate Director at the Eisenhower Media Network.
Bracing Views 