What Will Obama Inherit?
Tom Engelhardt
Inauguration day! Gazillions of Americans descended on Washington. The rest of us were watching on TV or checking out streaming video on our computers. No one was paying attention to anything else. Every pundit in sight was nattering away all day long, as they will tomorrow and, undoubtedly, the next day about whatever comes to mind until we get bored. And in the morning, when this post is still hanging around in your inbox, you’ll be reading your newspaper on… well, you know… the same things: Obama’s speech! So many inaugural balls! Etc., etc. So I’m thinking of this post as a freebie, a way to lay out a little news about the world that no one will notice. And all I can say — for those of you who aren’t reading this anyway, and in the spirit of the clunky 1951 sci-fi classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still […]
Eco-Explosives, a Bleeding BEAR, and the Armani-Clad Super Soldier
Nick Turse
[Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.] On paper, every session looked like gold to me. Technology and the Warfighter. Neuroscience and Its Potential Applications. Lethality Technologies. Autonomous/Unmanned Systems. (Robots!) But when I got to the luxury hotel in sunny Orlando, Florida, for the 26th Army Science Conference, all that potentially glittered, it often seemed, was nowhere to be found — except, perhaps, in the threads of the unlikeliest of military uniforms. I expected to hear about nefarious new technologies. To see tomorrow’s killing machines in a dazzling exhibit hall. To learn something about the Army’s secret plans for the coming decades. To be awed — or disgusted — by a peek at the next 50 years of war-making. What I stumbled into, however, seemed more like a cross between a dumbed-down academic conference and a weekend wealth expo, paired with an […]
How to Turn Over a New Inaugural Leaf
Tom Engelhardt
We consider ours a singular age of individual psychology and self-awareness. Isn’t it strange then that our recent presidents have had nothing either modest or insightful to say about themselves in their first inaugural addresses, while our earliest presidents in their earliest moments spoke openly of their failings, limitations, and deficiencies. In fact, the very first inaugural address — George Washington’s in New York City on April 30, 1789 — began with a personal apology. In a fashion inconceivable in a country no longer known for acknowledging its faults, our first president, in his very first words, apologized to Congress for his own unworthiness to assume the highest office in the new country he had helped to found. “On the other hand,” he said, “the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced […]
The Untold Story of Why the U.S. Is Bound to Fail in Afghanistan By Ann Jones The first of 20,000 to 30,000 additional U.S. troops are scheduled to arrive in Afghanistan next month to re-win the war George W. Bush neglected to finish in his eagerness to start another one. However, "winning" the military campaign against the Taliban is the lesser half of the story. Going into Afghanistan, the Bush administration called for a political campaign to reconstruct the country and thereby establish the authority of a stable, democratic Afghan central government. It was understood that the two campaigns — military and political/economic — had to go forward together; the success of each depended on the other. But the vision of a reconstructed, peaceful, stable, democratically governed Afghanistan faded fast. Most Afghans now believe that it was nothing but a cover story for the Bush administration's real goal — to […]
Be Careful What You Wish For
Michael Klare
Only yesterday, it seems, we were bemoaning the high price of oil. Under the headline “Oil’s Rapid Rise Stirs Talk of $200 a Barrel This Year,” the July 7 issue of the Wall Street Journal warned that prices that high would put “extreme strains on large sectors of the U.S. economy.” Today, oil, at over $40 a barrel, costs less than one-third what it did in July, and some economists have predicted that it could fall as low as $25 a barrel in 2009. Prices that low — and their equivalents at the gas pump — will no doubt be viewed as a godsend by many hard-hit American consumers, even if they ensure severe economic hardship in oil-producing countries like Nigeria, Russia, Iran, Kuwait, and Venezuela that depend on energy exports for a large share of their national income. Here, however, is a simple but crucial reality to keep in […]
Bush's Legacy of Destruction
Tom Engelhardt
It may finally be 2009, but in some ways, given these last years, it might as well be 800 BCE. From the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE, the palace walls of the kings who ruled the Assyrian Empire were decorated with vast stone friezes, filled with enough dead bodies to sate any video-game maker and often depicting — in almost comic strip-style — various bloody royal victories and conquests. At least one of them shows Assyrian soldiers lopping off the heads of defeated enemies and piling them into pyramids for an early version of what, in the VCE (Vietnam Common Era) of the 1960s, Americans came to know as the “body count.” So I learned recently by wandering through a traveling exhibit of ancient Assyrian art from the British Museum. On the audio tour accompanying the show, one expert pointed out that Assyrian scribes, part of an impressive imperial […]