US Promises Sri Lanka Aid Against Tamil Tigers

UNITED NATIONS - As the four-year-old cease-fire in Sri Lanka is on the verge of crumbling, the United States has offered to strengthen its military assistance programs and increase training for government forces if the country's rebel group resumes its separatist war...

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Backtalk, January 24, 2006

Currency WarI read at the IAEA Web site ("Safeguards Statement for 2004"): "As of the end of 2004, 40 non-nuclear-weapon States party to the NPT had not yet brought comprehensive safeguards agreements with the Agency into force as required by Article III of that...

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Conversation with a US Military Officer

At the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., I teach economics to military officers. In general, I love my job and my students. With a median age of about 31, they have much more curiosity than the typical undergrad. That makes sense because, as military...

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Hillary Clinton, War Goddess

As the war in Iraq metastasizes into what General William E. Odom calls "the greatest strategic disaster in United States history," and the cost in lives and treasure continues to escalate, we are already being set up for Act II of the neocons' Middle East...

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Backtalk, January 22, 2006

Gore Channels Taft Raimondo,This is why you're my favorite political writer. No one can accuse you of being a Gore fan (I'm certainly not) but you take the time to commend his honesty when he acknowledges the Democrats' share of the blame for today's sorry state of...

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Our Indian Wars Are Not Over Yet

In the 1940s and 1950s, when the generation of men now ruling over us were growing up, boys could disappear into a form of war play – barely noticed by adults and hardly recorded anywhere – that was already perhaps a couple of hundred years old. In this kind...

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Iran’s Bomb

There's been a lot of talk recently about Israel and/or the United States bombing the nuclear facilities in Iran. I wouldn't worry about that. I believe they are both bluffing. In the first place, just the talk has kicked up the price of oil. In the second place,...

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Forcing the World to Be Saved

Among the critics and reinterpreters of Fourth Generation war, the bad is most powerfully represented by Thomas Barnett’s two books The Pentagon’s New Map and Blueprint for Action. What Barnett advocates is bad in two senses: first, that it won’t work,...

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