In the film The Wizard of Oz, the title character puts on quite a spectacle to provide a little "shock and awe" to Dorothy and her cohort while they're in the Emerald City. It turns out that it's all just a show, as the little man commands the four to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," after Dorothy's dog Toto reveals the charade by pulling aside the drape. This story bears a strange resemblance to the wars in the Middle East today, where leaders attempt to distract their public from domestic strife at home by pointing at imaginary threats from abroad. What is happening? It's ... Read More
How Moammar Gadhafi Lashes Out At Western Governments to Distract Libyans At Home
March 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Violence and Aggression Linked to Mating in Men’s Minds
March 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Guys: What do you feel when you look at a photo of an attractive woman? Excited? Intrigued? How about warlike? Such a response may seem strange or even offensive. But newly published psychology study suggests it is far from uncommon — and it may help explain the deep psychological roots of warfare. With yet another war in full swing, we once again face the fundamental question of why groups of humans settle their differences through organized violence. A wide range of motivations have been offered over the years: In a 2002 book, Chris Hedges compellingly argued that war is both an ... Read More
Deploying to a Different Kind of Theater
February 11, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Derek Blumke stumbled upon an odd souvenir in an Afghan bazaar when he was serving in the country with the Air Force during the first years of the U.S. war there. “It’s a British 1842 bayonet, and I’m buying it from a local in Afghanistan,” he recalled. “Why wouldn’t you buy that?” On novelty alone, the find was priceless. Blumke had no sense at the time, though, of its context — what the thing was even doing there. He went into Afghanistan, like most soldiers in America’s nine-year conflict, with little sense of the local culture and language, let alone its ... Read More
How Military Campaigns Get Their Names
December 7, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Military campaigns have traditionally been named after geographical locations: The Battle of Gettysburg, the Siege of Troy. But that was the pre-Mad Men era, before national leaders realized the value of branding extends to armed incursions. In recent years, we’ve had Operation Iraqi Freedom (which ascribed an idealistic motivation to our actions) and Operation Desert Storm (which suggested our force was ferocious). Such names are clearly chosen to influence public opinion back home; they pre-emptively frame how the campaign will be perceived by the public. How do military marketing ... Read More
Plucking Learning From the WikiDeluge
October 21, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The Pentagon has been bracing all week for the next big release of WikiLeaks secrets, a haul expected to contain as many as 400,000 classified documents from the Iraq conflict that would dwarf this summer's Afghan "war logs." The Pentagon has a 120-person damage-control team at the ready, and it has already begun begging news outlets not to publish the material. (WikiLeaks, which runs better interference than the Pentagon itself, maintains on its Wikileaks Twitter feed that it has no idea why everyone thinks these files are about Iraq.) Whenever they are released — and whatever is ... Read More
‘Cyberwarfare’ Will Blur the Edges of War
October 20, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The question first came up when Estonian government servers went down in 2007, under a "denial-of-service" attack that seemed — but was never proven — to come officially from Russia. Estonia was a new member of NATO and felt bullied by its former Soviet big brother. But the question was awkward, and it came up again when Georgian servers went down just before Russian tanks invaded a Georgian province in 2008. (Georgia also wants NATO membership as a shield against Russia.) Were cyber-attacks warfare, and should they trigger Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which provides for ... Read More
Make Health Care, Not Birth Control, the Priority
August 12, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Imagine that you are a young Chinese woman of, say, 21, who accidentally becomes pregnant by her fiancé. When the local birth control official discovers your condition a few months later, she declares your pregnancy to be "illegal" and orders you to report for an abortion. In desperation, you point out that the father is your fiancé, and that you plan to marry as soon as you reach the minimum marriage age of 23. You argue that you are currently childless, and that you should be allowed, even under the one-child policy, to bear your first and only child. None of this matters, the official ... Read More
Too Much Testosterone?
July 7, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
I have issues with the research essay, "Make Birth Control, Not War," (May-June 2010) written by Thomas Hayden and Malcolm Potts in which they claim that it is our genetic evolutionary heritage and especially the generous amount of testosterone in young males that are the causes of war. Young males (and now some females) may be the human carriers of weapons and slaughter, but as far as I know, wars have been and still are engendered and manipulated by older men of wealth, status and power. What is wrong (and could be corrected with education and training) is that our "value" system is ... Read More
Prisoners of the States
July 1, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
In March 2004, the Abu Ghraib scandal seared unsightly images of prisoner abuse into the consciousness of a new generation of Americans. The allegations blindsided citizens who — galvanized by the specter of a nuclear Saddam — had been mostly supportive of the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. Not since the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam 42 years earlier had so many questioned whether the nation held higher moral ground than its enemies. Despite the courts-martial of the guards involved, the ensuing media frenzy only muddled the policy debate regarding the status of "unlawful combatants." The ... Read More
Sebastian Junger Brings AfPak to Big Screen
June 24, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Journalist Sebastian Junger says he's "not going to spend another year with a unit at a remote outpost getting shot at," and after seeing Restrepo, which opens June 25 in New York and Los Angeles, you can understand why. The film, which Junger co-directed with Tim Hetherington, won the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival and is a companion piece to War, Junger's best-selling book about being embedded for more than a year with the soldiers of Second Platoon, Battle Company in Afghanistan's distant and incredibly dangerous Korengal Valley. Shot on ... Read More
