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By Keith Bolender
$21.00
By Michael Paul Mason
$16.50
$23
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Here’s some good news: The White House is currently in a “vigorous debate” over whether or not to sign the Ottawa Treaty, an international agreement to ban land mines, as pressure from Capitol Hill and NGOs pushes the administration to reconsider the country’s decade-old refusal to sign.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By William Pfaff — Washington once again finds itself dangerously entangled with the hostile policies, nationalistic interests and supporters, and personal ambitions of a foreign figure whom it counted on to serve American interests.
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youtube.com via AP
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Call it vigilante relief work or kidnapping, 10 American Baptists are in jail in Port-au-Prince after attempting to take 33 children out of Haiti in what they claim was an effort to “do the right thing.”
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By Fred Branfman — One of our beacons of integrity has flickered out. Our world has suddenly become a little darker, a little colder, a little more bitter and a little more insane.
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Flickr / Eustaquio Santimano
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Vietnam is spending billions on Russian submarines and fighter jets. Calm down, Dick Cheney. Vietnam cares more about the prawn market than World War III. The real superpower fretting over this is China. ... (continued)
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Staff Sgt. Cohen A. Young, U.S. Air Force
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By William Pfaff — The people who are running the war in Afghanistan are contemplating an air attack on one of Pakistan’s principal cities, the capital of its largest province, for reasons that defy logic.
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White House / Lawrence Jackson
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By William Pfaff — There was much disappointment on Tuesday night about Barack Obama’s decision to widen the war in Afghanistan, but there can have been no real surprise.
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U.S. Army / Spc. David J. Marshall
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By T.L. Caswell — By escalating an unnecessary conflict, President Barack Obama runs the risk of damaging many more Americans through PTSD and other human consequences of warfare. We are heaping upon members of the military more responsibility, more work, more war, more physical and psychological trauma.
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By William Pfaff — With Vietnam, John F. Kennedy counted on the fact that one of the most effective ways to take a decision is to postpone it until it no longer is relevant. This is what Barack Obama has been able to do until now.
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AP / Ahmad Masood, pool
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By Robert Fisk — Could there be a more accurate description of the Barack Obama-Gordon Brown message of congratulations to the fraudulently elected Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan? Now we have the venal, corrupt, sectarian Karzai in power after a poll far more ambitiously rigged than the Iranian version, and – yup, we love him dearly.
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Collage of photos taken by Alexander Gardner / Truthdig / Pete Souza
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After the former U.S. senator’s death on Sunday morning, we look back at a 2009 conversation between him and Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer.
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Truthdig
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By Narda Zacchino —
George McGovern has some advice for President Barack Obama: Get U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. “I’m convinced that war is going to turn sour. I’m convinced we’re not going to prevail there,” he said.
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A new book on Ramparts Magazine, “A Bomb in Every Issue,” marks the significant contribution of the alternative San Francisco-based publication that gave a viable and legitimate voice to 1960s radicalism. Check out the NYT’s review of it here.
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AP / Emilio Morenatti
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By Fred Branfman — The Obama administration has already begun to escalate the fighting in Pakistan, a policy that could make even the Nixon-Kissinger destruction of Cambodia seem like a pleasant memory.
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AP / Caleb Jones
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By Chris Hedges — War memorials and museums are temples to the god of war. They sanitize the savage instruments of death that turn young soldiers and Marines into killers, and small villages in Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq into hellish bonfires.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The hawks urging President Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan have no interest in his domestic policy. The 20th century is a graveyard of good ideas that lost out to war.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — Communism once was, as the Islamic terrorist threat is today, presented as an undifferentiated revolutionary impulse that could never be diplomatically accommodated without sacrificing our own security or, indeed, our freedom. The various communist nations and movements, like those currently led by a polyglot collection of Islamist radicals, were stripped of any complexity, be it in their national identity or ideology.
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www.flickr.com/laugurinn
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Former CBS anchor Dan Rather has come up short—$70 million short, in fact—in his bid to sue his ex-employers at the network for relieving him of his desk duty following a 2004 report he delivered about then-President George W. Bush’s National Guard service during the Vietnam War era.
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AP / Alex Brandon
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By Robert Scheer — What if eight years ago the World Trade Center had been leveled by a small nuclear bomb that took out most of lower Manhattan as well? How many millions of innocent civilians would we have killed in retaliation?
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AP / David Guttenfelder
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By Robert Scheer — True, he doesn’t seem a bit like Lyndon Johnson, but the way he’s headed on Afghanistan, Barack Obama is threatened with a quagmire that could bog down his presidency. LBJ also had a progressive agenda in mind, but it was soon overwhelmed by the cost and divisiveness engendered by a meaningless, and seemingly endless, war in Vietnam.
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By William Pfaff — Instead of reading ecology and novels on his vacation, the president should read Charles de Gaulle, who ended the dreadful insurrection in Algeria. Obama and his advisers have a dramatic and ahistorical view of Afghanistan—that “There is no alternative to victory.”
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Peter Richardson’s fascinating new book explores the short, unruly life of Ramparts Magazine and its extraordinary effect on American politics and media.
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army.mil
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By Stanley Kutler — Vietnam’s primary lesson remains intact: American power is not without limits, both in terms of defeating an enemy and in terms of its domestic support. The primary lesson of Vietnam seems to be that it is a lesson lost. And now we have some of the same intractable problems in Afghanistan.
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AP / File
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One of the news industry’s longest-living legends, Walter Cronkite, died of cerebrovascular disease Friday at the age of 92. Over the course of his storied career as the anchor of CBS News, Cronkite covered some of the biggest events of the 20th century. He himself coined his famous and often-quoted sign-off line: “And that’s the way it is. ... ”
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AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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By Stanley Kutler — Public figures understandably fuss over their reputations and how they will be remembered. Recent news brought to mind two prominent figures of their moment: Colin Powell and Robert McNamara.
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AP photo
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By Robert Scheer — It was the stark evil Robert McNamara perpetrated as secretary of defense that must indelibly frame our memory of him. To not speak out fully because of respect for the deceased would be to mock the memory of the millions he caused to be maimed and killed in a war that he later freely admitted never made any sense.
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Taylor Jones, Politicalcartoons.com —
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Flickr / cliff1066
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On Tuesday, the National Archives made public more than 150 hours of tape and tens of thousands of pages of previously unreleased documents from the Nixon administration. Some of the gems include new details into Watergate and Vietnam as well as three newly declassified pages on Israel’s secret plans to build a nuclear weapon.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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When the United States finished bombing Laos back in the early 1970s, it left behind an estimated 80 million unexploded bombs. They are still exploding, maiming an average of 300 people a year in the sparsely populated country. What horrors will our current adventures bring decades from now?
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blog.wired.com
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By William Pfaff — Last September, during the American presidential campaign, I wrote a column declaring that the United States had again invaded Cambodia, only this time “Cambodia” was Pakistan. President George W. Bush had ordered U.S. ground attacks on the Taliban inside Pakistan’s Tribal Territories, without Pakistan’s authorization.
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army.mil
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By William Pfaff — An account from the Taliban side of the Afghanistan war, which was published in The New York Times on May 5, provides devastating evidence of the failure that almost certainly will eventually overtake the United States and NATO.
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AP photo / Evan Agostini
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By Amy Goodman — It was some garden party. Eighteen-thousand people packed into Madison Square Garden Sunday night to celebrate the first 90 years of Pete Seeger’s life.
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cbsnews.com
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On Sunday’s “Face the Nation,” President Obama did his best to convince CBS’ Bob Schieffer, and by extension the American people, that he knows what he’s doing in escalating U.S. military operations in Afghanistan—and that this won’t be his Vietnam.
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The clock is ticking for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to come up with a plan to deal with the banks that actually works. Meanwhile, some of the United States’ current struggles seem beside the point to European countries that already have a strong social safety net. And finally on this week’s list of “Left, Right & Center” hot topics is President Obama and Afghanistan: Is this a disaster waiting to happen?
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Susan Jacoby’s lucid new book reminds us that the Hiss case offered a vengeful postwar right a golden opportunity to tar the New Deal as a crypto-communist conspiracy—and why it still matters.
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By Eugene Robinson — Advice to solve the financial crisis before even thinking about health care, energy or education is either misguided or disingenuous. Fortunately, Obama seems to be ignoring all the chatter.
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truthdig.com
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The renowned filmmaker visited USC’s Annenberg School for Communication on March 3 to talk with Truthdig editors Robert Scheer and Kasia Anderson and their students about “Wall Street,” his 1987 classic—suddenly all too relevant again—and to give a panoramic take on his body of work and what the future holds for the movie industry.
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By William Pfaff — Except for the brief NATO intervention in Kosovo and Serbia, all of the significant U.S. military expeditions since the Cold War have been fought against Asians, and we have lost nearly all of them.
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By William Pfaff — John Kenneth Galbraith once warned that U.S. foreign policy suffers from institutional rigidity with a “strong commitment to error.” What better proof than the planned surge in Afghanistan?
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By William Pfaff — Barack Obama’s is a restoration presidency. His job in office, as during the campaign, is to summon up the better America that was abandoned or repudiated during the past eight years by his predecessor.
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inquisitr.com
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Attorney general nominee Eric H. Holder Jr. has announced a groundbreaking hypothesis on waterboarding: It’s torture. The position, which contradicts piles of Bush-era law literature defending the practice, is just one step in an avowed process to fix many of the problems riddling current Justice Department policy.
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Sherry Buchanan, previously the author of “Vietnam Zippos,” gathers together drawings, poems, letters and oral histories by 10 Viet Cong artists and offers a radically different view of the fighters whom Americans branded as Reds, gooks and fanatical killers.
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By Amy Goodman — Strong voices for peace have left us this year, people who used their art for social change, often at a high personal price.
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By Joe Conason — To understand the philosophy of government that Dick Cheney brought to Washington over the past seven years, it is most instructive to see “Frost/Nixon,” with Frank Langella’s remarkable reanimation of Tricky Dick for a generation that never knew him.
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USAF / Michael B. Keller
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By Scott Ritter — Iraq is not Vietnam, yet there are parallels between the two wars. The American military dominated the battlefield in both conflicts, and yet America the nation emerged the loser in each. A “decent interval” is now needed for American troops to withdraw.
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White House / Eric Draper
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By Eugene Robinson — The history-be-my-judge interviews that President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been giving recently help me understand their choices—but also reinforce my confident belief, and my fervent hope, that history will throw the book at them.
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