What Was I Fighting For?

We are forming a group called Vets for Rethinking Afghanistan. We will voice our dissent in Congress, testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. We will raise awareness about how our military occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq have been counterproductive. We will express the dire need for the Obama administration to provide both an exit strategy and a more clearly defined mission and we will explain how dangerous it is for the US to use humanitarian aid as a bargaining chip to advance a flawed military agenda without giving diplomacy a real chance. Please join us. Read More

No Ordinary Criminal

How is it that an intellectual, poet and psychiatrist like Karadzic could do such a thing? It took me time to understand that this is the wrong question. It is wrong because it takes for granted that people like this–the educated ones, the sophisticated ones, the artists, for God’s sake–should know better. Don’t they have higher moral standards that ordinary people? The answer is no. Read More

War Foretold: Mark Twain and the Sins of Our Race

War is real and frightening and hurtful; it’s not an intellectual argument; it cannot be reduced to a few images and captions and editorials; nothing can ever capture a moment where a mother receives the corpse of a son or the scene of a father kneeling before the shattered body of a daughter. It’s all real, and it’s all our own doing, whether by supporting, financing and fighting the war, or by staying silent as it rages on. Read More