Peace and War

Nan Levinson’s new book is called War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built, but it left me wishing there were a “Where Are They Now” chapter, because it ends around 2008. The book is focused on Iraq Veterans Against the War, but includes Veterans For Peace, Military Families Speak Out, Cindy Sheehan, and others. It’s a story that has been told many times during the past several years, but this version seems particularly well done; read more

In its tradition of sponsoring war advocates, the ​Miller Center is bringing Erik Prince to speak: 

April 15, 11:00 AM​
Television Broadcast: May 3, 2015
ANN HAGEDORN, author of The Invisible Soldiers: How America Outsourced Our Security, and ERIK PRINCE, founder of the famously controversial Blackwater private-security company, discuss and debate whether the U.S. has made a mistake in its growing reliance on private para-military operators. read more

Foreword to America’s Oldest Professions: Warring and Spying (available in Kindle version free this week.)

One of the ways in which we commonly handicap our own struggles to reform the bad practices of the U.S. government is by imagining those practices to be degenerative developments taking us away from a purer and nobler past. As Gary Brumback shows in this book, the United States grew out of the idea that (in Thomas Paine’s phrase) it was “common sense” to launch a war read more

Sherman statue anchors one southern corner of Central Park (with Columbus on a stick anchoring the other):

Matthew Carr’s new book, Sherman’s Ghosts: Soldiers, Civilians, and the American Way of War, is presented as “an antimilitarist military history” — that is, half of it is a history of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s conduct during the U.S. Civil War, and half of it is an attempt to trace echoes of Sherman through major U.S. wars up to the present, read more

This cable was submitted as evidence by the prosecution in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a trial in which Sterling was convicted on entirely circumstantial evidence of leaking to a reporter that the CIA had given nuclear weapons part plans (with flaws added) to Iran. The cable makes crystal clear that the CIA proposed to do the same with Iraq.

There are only two nations beginning with a vowel and containing in adjectival form five letters: IRAQI and OMANI. The United States has neither worried read more

If you’ve followed the trials of James Risen and Jeffrey Sterling, or read Risen’s book State of War, you are aware that the CIA gave Iran blueprints and a diagram and a parts list for the key component of a nuclear bomb.

The CIA then proposed to do exactly the same for Iraq, using the same former Russian scientist to make the delivery. How do I know this? Well, Marcy Wheeler has kindly put all the evidence from the Sterling trial online, including this cable. read more