If you are 18 years old and an antiwar protester, old militarists will say that you’re too young and naïve and ignorant to understand the complexities of foreign policy and should just shut up. But if you’re 18 years old, and you don’t know anything about anything, they are happy to send you to go kill people in those very same foreign conflicts you don’t know anything about.
Recently I heard an airline gate agent reading the familiar announcement that active-duty military personnel were welcome to board before everyone else and I asked myself, why?
Obama wants to leave 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan after 2014. Except for a “contingency force,” which will stay longer. Then we’ll be gone. Well, not really.
Obama’s attorney general announced that the Department of Justice will not prosecute anyone for the murders of CIA detainees during the Bush years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, despite this and Guantanamo, most Americans still think Obama is likeableâa key factor in this year’s campaign.
A soldier serving in Afghanistan was killed while Skyping with his wife. (We don’t know whether he was shot or died of some other cause.) How will your death be live-streamed?
After a soldier slaughters 16 civilians in Afghanistan, President Obama as usual blames the “bad apple” while exonerating the military as a whole.
As the U.S. withdraws from an Iraq it destroyed, it wonders how Iraqis will do on their own.
It’s true that the lawn around the Vietnam war memorial is in trouble. But at least soldiers who died in Afghanistan will have died for something useful.
