A Message Written in Blood That No One Wants to Hear

Imagine for a moment that almost once a week for the last six months somebody somewhere in this country had burst, well-armed, into a movie theater showing a superhero film and fired into the audience. That would get your attention, wouldn’t it? James Holmes times 21?  It would dominate the news.  We would certainly be consulting experts, trying to make sense of the pattern, groping for explanations. And what if the same thing had also happened almost once every two weeks in 2011? Imagine the shock, imagine the reaction here. Well, the equivalent has happened in Afghanistan (minus, of course, the superhero movies).  It even has a name: green-on-blue violence. In 2012 — and twice last week — Afghan soldiers, policemen, or security guards, largely in units being trained or mentored by the U.S. or its NATO allies, have turned their guns on those mentors, the people who are funding, […]

How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta

Down the road only a few generations, the millennium of Magna Carta, one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights, will arrive.  Whether it will be celebrated, mourned, or ignored is not at all clear. That should be a matter of serious immediate concern.  What we do right now, or fail to do, will determine what kind of world will greet that event.  It is not an attractive prospect if present tendencies persist — not least, because the Great Charter is being shredded before our eyes. The first scholarly edition of Magna Carta was published by the eminent jurist William Blackstone.  It was not an easy task.  There was no good text available.  As he wrote, “the body of the charter has been unfortunately gnawn by rats” — a comment that carries grim symbolism today, as we take up the task the rats left unfinished. […]

Your Security’s a Joke (and You’re the Butt of It)

When my daughter was little and I read to her regularly, one illustrated book was a favorite of ours.  In a series of scenes, it described frustrating incidents in the life of a young girl, each ending with the line — which my tiny daughter would boom out with remarkable force — “that makes me mad!”  It was the book’s title and a repetitively cathartic moment in our reading lives.  And it came to mind recently as, in my daily reading, I stumbled across repetitively mind-boggling numbers from the everyday life of our National Security Complex. For our present national security moment, however, I might amend the book’s punch line slightly to: That makes no sense! Now, think of something you learned about the Complex that fried your brain, try the line yourself… and we’ll get started. Are you, for instance, worried about the safety of America’s “secrets”?  Then you […]

The Lessons Washington Can't Draw From the Failure of the Military Option

Americans may feel more distant from war than at any time since World War II began.  Certainly, a smaller percentage of us — less than 1% — serves in the military in this all-volunteer era of ours and, on the face of it, Washington’s constant warring in distant lands seems barely to touch the lives of most Americans. And yet the militarization of the United States and the strengthening of the National Security Complex continues to accelerate.  The Pentagon is, by now, a world unto itself, with a staggering budget at a moment when no other power or combination of powers comes near to challenging this country’s might. In the post-9/11 era, the military-industrial complex has been thoroughly mobilized under the rubric of “privatization” and now goes to war with the Pentagon.  With its $80 billion-plus budget, the intelligence bureaucracy has simply exploded.  There are so many competing agencies and […]