A Washington Post report this week (reposted here) has exposed the US war in Afghanistan as a vile charade. Declassified government papers reveal notes and interviews by hundreds of senior US officials which attest to systematic lies and deception in the conduct of that war. The GW Bush and Obama administrations are directly implicated in…
“U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign,” the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock reports, “making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” Whitlock bases that claim on a collection of candid, confidential interviews with more than 400 military…
This is arguably the ultimate road trip on earth. Marco Polo did it. All the legendary Silk Road explorers did it. Traveling the Pamir Highway back to back, as a harsh winter approaches, able to appreciate it in full, in silence and solitude, offers not only a historical plunge into the intricacies of the ancient…
I suspected from the moment the general election was called that the result would be a large Conservative majority, a calamitous defeat for Labour, and a decisive victory for Brexit. To prevent myself getting too depressed by this grim prospect, I picked out and read two books on crises that were far more dire: one…
Incumbent British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s landslide victory over socialist opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn defied expectations because the former’s supporters — just like his ally Trump’s “across the pond” — largely kept their political opinions to themselves before the vote because of how polarizing the domestic environment had become ahead of what functioned as the…
Boris Johnson finally cut the Gordian knot of British politics. With the massive victory in Thursday’s election Johnson ensured his Withdrawal Treaty will make it through the House of Commons and deliver some version of Brexit in the future. The win was so big it was an embarrassment to those who obstructed Brexit for the…
