Since the attacks of September 11, protection from terrorism has become the United States’ national obsession. Demands for security from the terrorists that seemingly menace the country at every turn have led the U.S. military to occupy two countries and expand the hundreds of bases that it maintains in dozens of foreign nations.
Reflection on why [...]

Barack Obama came into the office of the presidency proclaiming hope and change and a personal adherence to the teachings of Jesus Christ, who preached a message of peace, love and nonviolence. Yet any hope that Obama’s professed religious beliefs might lead him to put an end to the endless wars was short-lived. Indeed, rather [...]

As we enter our ninth year of the War in Afghanistan with an escalated force, and continue to occupy Iraq indefinitely, and feed an endlessly growing Surveillance State, reports are emerging of the Deficit Commission hard at work planning how to cut Social Security, Medicare, and now even to freeze military pay.  But a new [...]

Written by Juan Cole

By Chalmers Johnson
However ambitious United States President Barack Obama’s domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous [...]

The global reach of the US military today is unprecedented and unparalleled. Officially, more than 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in approximately 900 military facilities in 46 countries and territories (the unofficial figure is far greater). The US military owns or rents 795,000 acres of land, with 26,000 buildings and structures, valued at $146bn (

“War is peace” was one of the memorable slogans on the facade of the Ministry of Truth, Minitrue in “Newspeak,” the language invented by George Orwell in 1948 for his dystopian novel 1984. Some 60 years later, a quarter-century after Orwell’s imagined future bit the dust, the phrase is, in a number of ways, eerily [...]

by Norman Solomon
8 June 2009
It takes at least tacit faith in massive violence to believe that after three decades of horrendous violence in Afghanistan, upping the violence there will improve the situation.
Despite the pronouncements from high Washington places that the problems of Afghanistan can?t be solved by military means, 90 percent of the spending [...]

The Age
21 January 2008
AMNESTY International has said that Israel’s use during the Gaza offensive of white phosphorus ? banned under international law for use near civilians ? was “clear and undeniable”.
Tension eased in Gaza early yesterday as a fragile ceasefire entered its third day. There were no reports of shooting or rockets for the first [...]

By William Pfaff
Since the return of democracy in Spain, Spain?s political leaders and political society have demonstrated an extraordinary determination to start anew, after the crisis-afflicted 75 years that began with what the Spaniards have called ?the catastrophe? ? the collapse of the Spanish empire under blows from an exuberant and adolescent United States that [...]