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By Wellford Wilms
$19.00 Buy direct from the publisher - Use Truthdig discount code TD35
By Joe Conason
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1968 Dodge Charger R/T | Scott Crawford (CC BY-ND 2.0)
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By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch —
To this day, we’ve never quite taken in the moment when Soviet imperial rot unexpectedly—above all, to Washington—became imperial crash-and-burn. Left standing, the United States—the Cold War’s victor—seemed like an empire of everything under the sun. It was as if humanity had always been traveling toward this spot.
Posted on May 8, 2013
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pasukaru76 (CC BY 2.0)
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By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch —
The U.S. is now the sole planetary Top Gun in a way that empire-builders once undoubtedly fantasized about: alone and essentially uncontested. By all the usual measuring sticks, it should be supreme in a historically unprecedented way. And yet it couldn’t be more obvious that it’s not.
Posted on Oct 10, 2012
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AP/Jason Redmond
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By Alexander Reed Kelly — “Why it is so hard to tell the truth today?” I asked Vietnam veteran and anti-war hero Ron Kovic one summer night over drinks in midtown Manhattan.
Posted on Aug 19, 2012
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How I See Life (CC-BY)
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By Noam Chomsky, TomDispatch —
In the years of America’s conscious, self-inflicted decline at home, “losses” have continued to mount elsewhere.
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By William Pfaff — I heard a brilliant young Harvard scholar, influential in the Obama administration, explain that the future of successful American action in Central Asia lies in a “surge” of civilian political and developmental action to rescue the people of the region from their present backwardness.
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By William Pfaff — Looking backward, there is a great deal to be said for leaving well enough alone, which is more difficult than one might think.
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AP / Karim Kadim
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Moqtada al-Sadr is back, issuing an ultimatum to American troops and contractors: Leave Iraq by the end of the year or he will revive his Mehdi Army and relaunch attacks on the United States’ post-withdrawal presence in the country.
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By William Pfaff — The struggle is under way to re-establish American control over the successors to those despots whom popular uprisings have ousted from Tunisia and Egypt, threatening the careers of still other abusive absolute monarchs and presidents-for-life (and their offspring).
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By David Sirota — Just as you cannot be sorta pregnant, you cannot kinda support democracy, and only when it does what you want. That’s not “supporting democracy”; that’s imperialism.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By William Pfaff — Like his royal British forerunners, the president, through his advisers and their policies, brings imperial ambitions to the largest and most populous continent.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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President Obama may have marked 2011 on his calendar to begin pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, but his commander there, Gen. David Petraeus, isn’t so sure. Withdrawal, Petraeus said in an interview with NBC, must be “conditions-based.”
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White House / Lawrence Jackson
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With civilian casualties in Afghanistan up sharply this year, President Hamid Karzai has asked President Obama for a “strategic review” of the way the war there is being fought.
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AP / Javier Galeano
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A week shy of his 84th birthday, Fidel Castro took to the podium Saturday to address the Cuban parliament on the threat of nuclear war, his first such address in more than four years.
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AP / Nabil al-Jurani
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Even the mightiest of empires must let go. Seven years after the invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, the U.S. on Saturday handed over all combat duties to Iraqi security forces, fulfilling President Obama’s promise to end U.S. combat operations by the close of August.
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White House / Lawrence Jackson
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With 66 deaths so far in July, the month will go down as the deadliest yet for U.S. troops in the nine-year-old war in Afghanistan. The July toll brings the 2010 total so far to at least 265 American military personnel killed.
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AP / Juan Karita
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President Evo Morales is pressing forward with his nationalization program in Bolivia, seizing four private electric companies Saturday morning. The government now controls 80 percent of the country’s power generation.
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U.S. Navy / MC3 Joshua Cassatt
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Tens of thousands of Okinawans joined a rally on Sunday, demanding that a U.S. Marine air base be moved off Okinawa. The protest comes amid speculation that the U.S. government is ready to accept an alternative plan to relocate the base to another part of the Japanese island.
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AP / Rafiq Maqool
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Though some analysts thiink the military conflict in Afghanistan will “trail off” by 2011, the United States’ BFF—the British army—has announced it will maintain a presence, and be “militarily engaged,” in the war-torn country for at least an additional five years
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AP / Juan Karita
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In a press conference before a meeting of Latin and Caribbean countries in Cancun, Mexico, Evo Morales proposed a new Organization of American States “without empire” that would remove Canada and the U.S. from the organization’s roster.
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AP / Jae C. Hong
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The U.S. has deployed an additional 4,000 troops to Haiti as aftershocks rocked the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince on Wednesday. The American troop count will reach 16,000 by the weekend as relief efforts hit full stride in the earthquake-ravaged country.
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seplan.am.gov.br
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Citing the fact that industrialized countries cause much more environmental destruction than loggers and farmers in the Amazon, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has called on Western countries—“gringos”—to help halt deforestation.
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news.yahoo.com
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Amid continuing protests by Japanese civilians on Okinawa, President Obama has announced he will create a “high-level working group” to discuss the future of a U.S. Marine Corps air base on the island, a move that appears to be aimed at mending relations with Japan.
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news.yahoo.com
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With a new populist government in place in Tokyo, the people of Okinawa are stepping up their protest against the relocation of a U.S. Marine Corps air base on the island. They want the base gone altogether.
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A new documentary by Oliver Stone called “South of the Border” follows his earlier trajectory of “Salvador” (1984), “Comandante” (2003), and “Looking for Fidel” (2004) as he talks to several Latin American leaders to understand what is happening on the continent and how U.S. perceptions of our own backyard are skewed.
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telegraph.co.uk
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With the death of a U.S. service member Friday, August now stands as the deadliest month ever for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Forty-five American troops have been killed so far this month, a disturbing sign that conditions in the nearly decade-long war are not getting any better.
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AP / Franklin Reyes
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Just in time for his 83rd birthday, former Cuban President Fidel Castro made his presence known once again, by signaling his displeasure with the United States’ handling of the recent financial catastrophe. He spoke out in an Op-Ed article published Thursday in Cuba’s government-run newspapers.
Posted on Aug 13, 2009
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wordpress.com
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“Decapitation strategies don’t work.” Those words, uttered by the newly named U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, mark a shift in the military strategy in Afghanistan. Yes, indeed—it seems to have taken the Pentagon eight years to realize that “you’re going to have to convince people, not kill them.”
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enjoyfrance.com
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By William Pfaff — There is an important current in conservative U.S. opinion that believes Western Europe to be under something like a siege, or a potential siege, by its large Muslim immigrant population. I should actually say that it’s not just American conservatives, although they write alarmed books about the impending Muslim domination of Europe, and the collapse of European Christianity and identity. They fear the Decline of the West.
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Author, scholar and Truthdig contributor Chalmers Johnson passed away Nov. 20. In his honor, we are reposting this 2009 book review, which, like much of Johnson’s work, remains relevant to this day.
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We certainly saw evidence that President Eisenhower’s famous warning about the dangers of an insatiable U.S. “military-industrial complex” rang true during the Bush administration, but how about now?
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nytimes.com
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Updated: Well, not exactly a real pullout, but a plan to be announced by the Obama administration on Friday is expected to withdraw “combat” troops from Iraq by Aug. 31, 2010, officially ending U.S. combat operations in the war-torn country while keeping 50,000 ambiguously labeled “support troops” there.
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nytimes.com
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Although allegations of physical abuse against reporter Muntazer al-Zaidi, better known as the guy who chucked his shoes at the head of the guy who invaded his country, were widely reported in recent days, it took until today for an Iraqi judge to officially rule that al-Zaidi was beaten while in custody. The system works!
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AP photo / Andre Penner
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In a summit that celebrated the absence of the U.S. on its guest list, Latin American leaders met in Brazil to discuss a post-U.S. hegemonic world. The talks, which centered on the “demise” of the capitalist model, also snubbed former colonizing nations Portugal and Spain in a further demonstration of the increasing political autonomy of the region.
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U.S. Air Force / Tech. Sgt. Jeremy Lock
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The U.S. has finally decided that it is “well past time” for Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe to be shown the door. This after he stole an election in June, subverted a power-sharing arrangement and run his once-prosperous nation into the ground.
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livableworld.org
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The anti-Iraq war organization Council for a Livable World has announced its support for the recently completed U.S.-Iraq security agreement. The group’s news release urges support for the resolution, which it believes is “the best way for the United States to leave Iraq promptly and responsibly.”
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signonsandiego.com
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Maybe it was the past eight years, or maybe it was the past three months, but a new report by the U.S. intelligence community estimates that American global power is on the decline, and will be for the next two decades as upcoming powers like China and India gain greater international standing.
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AP photo / Hadi Mizban
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Nothing says “go home” like 10,000 people yelling at you in a language you don’t quite understand. And nothing says “go home” with more irony than an effigy of your president hanging at the very spot where a statue of Saddam was famously toppled after the fall of Baghdad in 2003.
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AP photo / Allauddin Khan
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The legacy of George Bush’s two “wars of liberation” may already be judged as foreign policy blunders, but the real costs of war remain even after the truism of failed empire. In Afghanistan, acid attacks on at least 15 female students mark a worrisome trend in women’s rights there. And in Iraq, an Iraqi soldier opened fire on a patrol of U.S. troops, killing two.
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guardian.co.uk
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Former Secretary of State and current dance sensation Colin Powell graced the stage of a London hip-hop concert “in celebration of African culture.” The song he sang and danced to? A Nigerian hit about people spending money gleaned from U.S. Internet scam victims.
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AP photo / Seth Wenig
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The most explicit anti-capitalist analysis of the U.S.‘s proposed bailout of major finance firms is not domestic, but rather international. A cadre of left-leaning leaders in Latin America is ramping up criticism of Bush’s crony capitalism, arguing that the U.S. economic crisis was caused by the driving logic of American imperialism: fast money at the expense of the poor.
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Tony Blair went to “The Daily Show” to talk about politics but found himself defending the Iraq war much more than he might have liked. The former politician, who still seems desperate to sell the nobility of invading and occupying Iraq, also managed to include some of the tired 9/11 rhetoric from Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign.
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Flickr / YouLocalDave
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The theory that the Bush administration wanted Iraq for its oil has just gotten a major boost. It turns out that the U.S. State Department sent over a team of lawyers and consultants to help the Iraqi government work out several high-profile no-bid contracts with five Western oil giants.
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picasaweb / gohaitimission
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The U.S. is under heavy criticism by human rights groups for withholding funds for clean water projects in Haiti as leverage for U.S.-led political reform in the country. A total of $54 million in loans to Haitians—70 percent of whom already lack daily access to potable water—is being delayed.
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blog.kir.com
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By Mark Engler —
How has the Bush administration changed the world economically, and what it will mean for the next administration? Also, if Bush-style “imperial globalization” is rejected in January, what will American ruling elites try to turn to—Clinton-style economic globalization?
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Now seems as good a time as any to revisit the genius of Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator.” In this climactic scene, Chaplin rails against the menace of war and hopes for a world where people actually care about each other.
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David Swanson —
The courts aren’t likely to be of any help in stopping the Iraq war. And this White House seems incapable of rational thought on the subject. Clearly, the legislative branch is the way to go. But what exactly can it do?
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The Iraqi parliament is expected to vote on a U.S.-crafted law that would open the nation’s oil industry to exploitive foreign control. If the bill passes, it would give foreign investors up to 75 percent of Iraq’s oil profits until costs are recouped, and then twice the industry standard after that. This law is a naked admission that the U.S. invaded Iraq, at least in part, for its oil.
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In this excerpt from the Truthdig interview, Gore Vidal speaks with Robert Scheer about the Kennedy assassination, Castro and imperialism. For the full video, go to www.truthdig.com and click on “interviews.”
Posted on Nov 24, 2006
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