The 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is sure to bring televised images of somber reflection. Looking back is, in some ways, easier for commentators and pundits than wrestling with the current state of Washington’s so-called “war on terror.”
From the coups that ousted Mohammed Mossadeq, Jacobo Arbenz, and Salvador Allende in the Cold War to the waterboarding of suspected terrorists in the Global War on Terror, the CIA has built a solid reputation as an extralegal agent of international sabotage and murder. Since the agency’s creation in 1947, successive U.S. presidents and their national security advisors have furthered this reputation, using the CIA for dirty work and then denying any wrongdoing in public, while the truth waits for decades until files are declassified.
Much of the public subconsciously feels that it’s in debt to its leaders for not only defending it, but assuming responsibility for killing in war.
Did nuclear weapons tests damage the atmosphere in ways that we have yet to be able to quantify?
The Philippines, Australia, and even China helped the United States defeat imperial Japan in World War II.
Many in Pakistan reflexively call for a “strongman” to quell violence in Karachi and the rest of the country.
The recent deficit deal includes potentially deep cuts in U.S. security spending. One likely but perhaps counterintuitive outcome would be staffing reductions in foreign development programs and in diplomatic missions. The deal will also hit the budgets of domestic security programs like border patrols, the Coast Guard, and the Secret Service. These are not the sort of security cuts decried by hawkish lawmakers who fear that potential cuts to the military will hollow out the U.S. armed forces and cripple the military industry.
“The existing concentration camps changed their character upon contact with prisoners of war,” writes Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands.
Reality TV today has nothing on a show from the 50s that hosted both a prominent Hiroshima victim and the co-pilot of the Enola Gay.
Russia expressed optimism about its pipeline project from Russia to North Korea to South Korea.