Vocabulary > War

Felix Sockwell

Talking About Fear, Real and Imagined

NYT

31.10.2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/opinion/l31fear.html

Picture > Phan Thi Kim Phuc, center,

with her clothes torn off, flees with other South Vietnamese children

after a misdirected aerial napalm attack on suspected Viet Cong hiding places on June 8, 1972.

A South Vietnamese plane mistakenly dropped its flaming napalm

on South Vietnamese troops and civilians.
 

Kim Phuc became a symbol of the civilian suffering of the Vietnam War.

AP Photo/Nick Ut. Version recadrée.
http://www.nandotimes.com/nt/images/century/photos/century0256.html

1st Cartoon > Garland

The Daily Telegraph        31.5.2006

From L to R: US President George W. Bush, Statue of Liberty,

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Caricature sans article (sur le site du DT).

2nd Cartoon > Dave Brown

The Independent        23.10.2006.

M: US President George W. Bush + Tony Blair's face on the leaf.

1 - South Vietnamese National Police Chief Brig Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan
executes a Viet Cong officer
with a single pistol shot in the head
in Saigon, Vietnam on Feb. 1, 1968.
Carrying a pistol and wearing civilian clothes,
the Vietcong guerrilla was captured near Quang Pagoda,
identified as an officer, and taken to the police chief.

AP Photo / Eddie Adams
http://www.nandotimes.com/nt/images/century/photos/century0258.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1309850,00.html
http://suntimes.com/output/obituaries/cst-nws-xadams20.html

Cartoon

Dave Brown

The Independent

1.6.2006

2 - US President George W. Bush

Topic: Haditha massacre

Related
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2006-05-27-iraqallegations_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-05-29-haditha_x.htm
http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9803/16/my.lai/
http://www.cnn.com/US/9803/06/my.lai.ceremony/

Peter Brookes

The Times

August 9, 2005

L to R: Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, John Prescott, Jack Straw, ?.

Related
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/politicsobituaries/story/0,,1544701,00.html

Vic Harville

Stephens Media Group

Little Rock, Arkansas

Cagle

20 July 2006
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/harville.asp
 

war
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/opinion/keller-falling-in-and-out-of-war.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/opinion/the-forgotten-wages-of-war.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/world/middleeast/end-for-us-begins-period-of-uncertainty-for-iraqis.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/opinion/26herbert.html
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/world/worldspecial/index.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1103566,00.html

ground war

at war
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/opinion/22tue1.html

The 10 best British artworks about war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/oct/31/ten-best-british-artworks-war

Daily Telegraph > Britain at War > News and memories of Britain at war
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/britainatwar/

spoil of war
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/world/africa/somalia-faces-alarming-rise-in-rapes-of-women-and-girls.html

tug-of-war
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/weekinreview/04landler.html

fog of war
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/world/asia/pakistan-and-united-states-bitter-allies-in-fog-of-war.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/aug/23/libya-waiting-fog-war-clear

wartime
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/books/17garner.html

during wartime        2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/
robert-fiskrsquos-world-a-fair-point-everyone-is-equal-in-their-suffering-during-wartime-1609206.html

warrior
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/08/first-world-war-franz-ferdinand-sarajevo

war hero
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/us/vernon-mcgarity-medal-of-honor-winner-dies-at-91.html

conflict
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/09/first-world-war-battle-of-arras

defuse

catastrophe
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/08/first-world-war-mobilisation

clash of civilizations

military build-up

war poetry        2008
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/poetry/article5090356.ece

militancy

Islamic militant groups

North Atlantic Treaty Organization        NATO / Nato

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in 1949
as the military instrument of the common stand
by the United States and Western Europe against Soviet expansionism.
But the cold war ended with the collapse of the U.S.S.R.,
and NATO has shifted to redefine itself and its mission.
In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, it focused on terrorism,
especially Islamic radicalism and its militant offshoots.
Several NATO allies, while not playing a decisive military role,
have been engaged with the United States in the war in Afghanistan since 2001.

Updated: June 10, 2011
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/north_atlantic_treaty_organization/index.html

http://www.nato.int/

http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/index.htm

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/north_atlantic_treaty_organization/index.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/opinion/nato-after-libya.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/world/africa/scores-of-unintended-casualties-in-nato-war-in-libya.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/world/asia/pakistan-says-nato-helicopters-kill-dozens-of-soldiers.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/20/nato-libya-war-26000-missions
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/27/us-libya-idUSTRE7270JP20110427
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/26/us-afghanistan-insurgent-idUSTRE73P1EE20110426

peace

peace process
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/world/asia/Burhanuddin-Rabbani-afghan-peace-council-leader-assassinated.html

peace deal
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/02/world/asia/us-scales-back-plans-for-afghan-peace.html

dove
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1557526,00.html

Gerald Scarfe

The Sunday Times

13 December 2009

Tony Blair, former UK Prime Minister.

Iraq war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/iraq

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/world/middleeast/end-for-us-begins-period-of-uncertainty-for-iraqis.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/world/01military.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/world/01obama-text.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/opinion/01wed1.html
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/08/31/world/middleeast/iraq-drawdown.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/washington/28troops.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/politics/27obama-text.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE51P0AY20090227
http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2009-02-26-marine_N.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/27/obama-iraq-war-end-august-2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/dec/18/uk-troop-withdrawal-iraq-brown
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/dec/17/iraq-agreement-brown-maliki
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/a-moment-for-truth-as-britain-exits-iraq-1202312.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/
without-fanfare-or-much-thanks-britain-departs-from-iraq-1202313.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/
patrick-cockburn-our-troops-had-few-friends-in-basra-1202314.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/
matthew-norman/matthew-norman-nobody-threw-shoes-at-brown-ndash-but-his-guilt-is-still-undeniable-1202268.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/0,2759,423009,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/opinion/23trans.html

Cartoons > Cagle > Leaving Iraq        2010
http://www.cagle.com/news/IraqExit10/main.asp

President Obama’s Address on Iraq        31 August 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/world/01military.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/world/01obama-text.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Scenes from Iraq        December 30, 2011
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/12/scenes_from_iraq_1.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Recent scenes from Iraq        July 19, 2010
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/07/recent_scenes_from_iraq.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Scenes from Iraq        September 3, 2008
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/09/scenes_from_iraq.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Daily Life in Sadr City, Iraq        June 18, 2008
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/middleeast/

Timeline: Iraq 2003-2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jul/30/iraq-timeline-2003-2009

Politics and Iraq
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/iraq

US military presence in Iraq
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2009/feb/27/iraq-us-troops

US casualties in Iraq
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2008-03-13-iraq-casualties_N.htm

Inside the surge: the provinces, Iraq        2009

award-winning Guardian photographer Sean Smith
spent almost two months embedded with US forces in Iraq.
This film shows that despite President Bush's claims
of increased Iraqi cooperation in Anbar,
there is still great fear and hostility against US troops
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/video/2007/sep/10/iraq.sean.smith

'shock and awe'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2009/feb/27/iraq-us-troops

Reuters > Special report > Iraq war
http://www.reuters.com/news/globalcoverage/iraq

Iraq war > five years in Iraq > Cagle cartoons        2008
http://www.cagle.com/news/Iraq5Years/main.asp

Iraq war > five years on        2008
http://iraq.reuters.com/
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN1929611920080319
http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=78455&newsChannel=topNews
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120592985052048279.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120593326652748375.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120588186774146747.html
http://blogs.wsj.com/iraq/
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-03-19-war-protests_N.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/03/18/world/middleeast/20080319_IRAQWAR_TIMELINE.html#tab1
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/weekinreview/16jburns.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/opinion/l18iraq.html

Iraq war > David Kelly
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/kelly/0,,1002607,00.html

Iraq war > The Hutton Report
http://www.guardian.co.uk/hutton/0,,1021216,00.html

Saddam Hussein is executed        Saturday 30 December 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/dec/30/iraq.topstories3?DCMP=EMC-thewrap08

beheading of Nick Berg        2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/may/12/iraq.alqaida?DCMP=EMC-thewrap08

Saddam Hussein is captured        Sunday 14 December 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/dec/14/iraq.iraq1?DCMP=EMC-thewrap08

New York Times > Select Editorials on Iraq
http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/opinion/series/editorials_on_iraq/index.html

cartoons > Cagle > Libya war        2011
http://www.cagle.com/news/LibyaObama/main.asp

cartoons > Cagle > Bombing Libya        2011
http://www.cagle.com/news/LibyaBombing/main.asp

Afghanistan / Afghan war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/afghanistan
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/afghanistan/index.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/opinion/is-this-the-afghan-wars-last-chapter.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/21/uk-special-envoy-afghanistan-quits
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/21/royal-marine-300th-british-death-afghanistan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2010/jun/21/military-afghanistan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/21/bloodiest-year-british-troops-afghanistan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/21/sangin-afghanistan-dead-british-soldiers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/sep/17/afghanistan-casualties-dead-wounded-british-data
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/21/british-forces-need-support-afghanistan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/21/afghanistan-300th-british-solider-dies
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2010/jan/19/afghanistan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/21/afghan-refugees-who-responsible-deaths
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/11/afghanistan_november_2009.html
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/09/afghanistan_september_2009.html
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/07/in_afghanistan_part_one.html
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/07/in_afghanistan_part_two.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jun/24/british-soldiers-taliban-afghanistan
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2009/06/11/CSIS_AfPakWar_Status2009.pdf
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/0,,548335,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/opinion/23trans.html

War in Afghanistan > WikiLeaks > The Afghan War Diary        Sunday, July 26 5pm EST

WikiLeaks today released
over 75,000 secret US military reports covering the war in Afghanistan.

The Afghan War Diary
an extraordinary secret compendium of over 91,000 reports
covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010.
The reports describe the majority of lethal military actions
involving the United States military.
They include the number of persons internally stated
to be killed, wounded, or detained during each action,
together with the precise geographical location of each event,
and the military units involved and major weapon systems used.

The Afghan War Diary is the most significant archive
about the reality of war to have ever been released during the course of a war.
The deaths of tens of thousands is normally only a statistic
but the archive reveals the locations and the key events behind each most of these deaths.
We hope its release will lead to a comprehensive understanding of the war in Afghanistan
and provide the raw ingredients necessary to change its course.

Most entries have been written by soldiers and intelligence officers
listening to reports radioed in from front line deployments.
However the reports also contain related information from
Marines intelligence, US Embassies,
and reports about corruption and development activity across Afghanistan.

http://wardiary.wikileaks.org/
http://wikileaks.org/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10757263
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/the-war-logs
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/war-logs.html

Afghanistan war > Cartoons > Cagle > On to Afghanistan        2010
http://www.cagle.com/news/Afghanistan2010/main.asp

Obama's Address on the New Strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Interactive video and transcript
of President Obama’s speechat the United States Military Academy       December 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/12/02/world/middleeast/20091202-obama-policy.html#

The Taliban, a Sunni Islamist group
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/t/taliban/index.html

Six months in Afghanistan
Photojournalist John D McHugh reports for the Guardian        2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/sixmonthsinafghanistan

Timeline > Afghanistan: 2001-2008 - A chronology
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/08/afghanistantimeline.afghanistan

Afghanistan > America's forgotten war

Photojournalist John D McHugh on the US's other war        2007-2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2008/apr/22/fightingseason
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/30/sixmonthsinafghanistan.afghanistan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2008/apr/28/afghanistan.photography?picture=333745896
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/28/afghanistan.sixmonthsinafghanistan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/28/afghanistan.sixmonthsinafghanistan1

U.S. troops in Afghanistan > Subduing the Korengal Valley        2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/magazine/24afghanistan-t.html

U.S. troops in Afghanistan > the U.S. 10th Mountain Division

http://www.guardian.co.uk/flash/0,,1986485,00.html

British troops in Afghanistan

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2211294,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2294063,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/flash/0,,1698844,00.html

Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/dec/03/question-time-afghanistan-wootton-basset
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/nov/20/wootton-bassett-100th-repatriation-soldiers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jul/10/soldiers-deaths-afghanistan-wootton

US Medevac helicopter

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/sep/08/sixmonthsinafghanistan.afghanistan

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2008/sep/04/sixmonthsinafghanistan.afghanistan

New York Times > Select Editorials on Afghanistan

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/series/select-editorials-on-afghanistan/index.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture >  Afghanistan: January 2013        January 23, 2013

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2013/01/afghanistan_january_2013.html
 

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, May 2012        May 4, 2012

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2012/05/afghanistan_may_2012.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, March 2012        April 13, 2012

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2012/04/afghanistan_march_2012.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, November 2011        December 9, 2011

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/12/afghanistan_november_2011.html
 

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, September 2011

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/09/afghanistan_september_2011.html
 

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, August 2011

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/08/afghanistan_august_2011.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, May 2011

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/06/afghanistan_may_2011.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, April 2011

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/05/afghanistan_april_2011.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, January 2011

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/02/afghanistan_january_2011.html 

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, December, 2010

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/12/afghanistan_december_2010.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, November, 2010

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/12/afghanistan_november_2010.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, October, 2010

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/11/afghanistan_october_2010.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, September, 2010

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/09/afghanistan_september_2010.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, August, 2010

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/09/afghanistan_august_2010.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, June, 2010

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/afghanistan_june_2010.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, May, 2010

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/afghanistan_may_2010.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, February, 2010

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/02/afghanistan_february_2010.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, January, 2010

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/01/afghanistan_january_2010.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, October, 2009

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/10/afghanistan_october_2009.html

Wikileaks > The War Logs        October 2010

An archive of classified military documents

offers views of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

The Iraq Documents

The archive is the second cache
obtained by the independent organization WikiLeaks
and made available to several news organizations.
The Iraq documents shed new light
on such fraught subjects as civilian deaths,
detainee abuse and the involvement of Iran.

http://warlogs.owni.fr/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/28/iraq-war-logs-abbas-alawi

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/oct/26/wikileaks-fox-iraq-war-logs

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/opinion/l26iraq.html

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/10/24/us/politics/politics-us-wikileaks-iraq.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/24/steel-curtain-air-strikes-husaybah
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/24/iraq-war-logs-hanaan-hamood-matrood
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/24/iraq-war-logs-iraq

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/oct/23/wikileaks-iraq-data-journalism
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/23/iraq-zarqawi-alqaida-british-blunder
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/23/iraq-war-logs-october-17-2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/oct/23/wikileaks-iraq-data-journalism
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2010/oct/23/iraq-war-logs-pictures

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/war-logs.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/world/middleeast/23intro.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/world/middleeast/23casualties.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/world/middleeast/23detainees.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/world/middleeast/23iran.html
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/iraq-war-logs.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/world/middleeast/23response.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/world/middleeast/23box.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/world/middleeast/23hikers.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/iraq-war-logs
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/iraq-war-logs-introduction
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/iraq-war-logs-wikileaks-washington
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2010/oct/22/iraq-war-logs

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/afghanistan-war-logs-military-leaks

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/23/iraq-war-logs-wikileaks
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/iraq-detainee-abuse-torture-saddam
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2010/oct/23/iraq-war-logs-torture-frago242
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/iraq-war-logs-apache-insurgents-surrender

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/23/united-nations-call-obama-investigation-abuses-iraq
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2010/aug/13/iraq-war-logs

photojournalism > war

War photographer > Afghanistan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2010/oct/27/afghanistan-us-chris-hondros-photographer

War photographer > Iraq > The Diary of a Shooter > The Documentary Photography of Zoriah
http://www.diariesofashooter.com/stories.html
http://zoriah.com/archivemainpage.html

War photographer > Iraq > Stefan Zaklin
http://homepage.mac.com/szaklin/Menu2.html

War photographer > Peter Turnley > The Unseen Gulf War        1990-1991
http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0212/pt_intro.html
http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0212/pt01.html

anti-war war photographer > Philip Jones Griffiths        1936-2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/mar/24/photography.usa

Vietnam war

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/v/vietnam_war/index.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1726840,00.html

warfare
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/opinion/sunday/keller-smart-drones.html

hybrid warfare
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/americas/23military.html

urban warfare
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/09/international/middleeast/09scene.html

urban guerilla warfare

germ warfare

sectarian warfare

tribal warfare

wartime
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/us/14topus.html

warlord
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/07/armorgroup-warlords-taliban-us
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/08/reservoir-dogs-afghanistan-security-firms
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/world/asia/06warlords.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/world/asia/23taliban.html

warmaker
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1551801,00.html

war crime
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/nov/09/british-military-iraq-war-crimes
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1876151,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2365393,00.html

war criminal

war zone

buffer zone

war-torn country
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/27/10-myths-about-afghanistan

in war-torn south Sudan

on (a) war footing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,1300,550526,00.html

cold war
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/coldwar/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/us/gen-donn-a-starry-cold-war-strategist-dies-at-86.html
http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Guardian/0,4029,1108424,00.html

war grave
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,,1888850,00.html

war chest
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2006353,00.html

WW1 > War poetry > Wilfred Owen    1893-1918
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/holiday_type/history_and_travel/article5108619.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/09/wilfred-owen-dulce-decorum
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1945883,00.html

WW1 > War poetry > Ivor Gurney    1890-1937
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/09/ivor-gurney-on-somme

WW1 > War poetry > John McCrae        1872-1918
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/09/john-mccrae-flanders-fields

WW1 > Wartime Artist > Len Smith
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2008/oct/07/firstworldwar?picture=338366191

wage war on...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/opinion/l22libya.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/us/politics/29cyber.html

all-out war
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,251-2279462,00.html

urban guerrilla war

Gulf war illnesses
http://www.guardian.co.uk/military/story/0,11816,1238167,00.html

trade war

holy war
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/world/middleeast/15mideast.html

civil war / full-blown civil war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/nov/14/monarchy-television
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1989397,00.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-08-03-pentagon-congress_x.htm

U.S. civil war        (1861-1865)
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/10/29/opinion/20101029-civil-war.html

on the verge of civil war

on the brink of war

war game
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/world/middleeast/
united-states-war-game-sees-dire-results-of-an-israeli-attack-on-iran.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/world/middleeast/22iran.html

war-game

go to war

go it alone

war planner

victory
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2006-11-19-kissinger-britain_x.htm

conflict

violence

upsurge of violence

skyrocketing violence
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2006-10-21-iraq_x.htm

strategy
http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2007-12-18-iraqstrategy_N.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-12-23-gates-bush_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-10-20-bush-iraq_x.htm

war planning strategy
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/americas/23military.html

tactics
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-10-21-bush-iraq_x.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1769836,00.html

front
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/09/western-front-battles-timeline
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,1951325,00.html

frontline

horror
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/opinion/horror-in-kandahar.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/military/story/0,,2028735,00.html

wreak / provoke havoc
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1246976,00.html

take hostages

human shield

militia
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2006-10-20-shia-militias_x.htm

disband

state of emergency

descend into mob rule

strife

strife-torn countries

Private Eye        c. 2004

added c. 2004
http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/
russia/chechnya/children/2.html

The Guardian        p. 1

18 October 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1329814,00.html

Philip Guston

Bombardment        1937-8

Private collection
http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/?lid=1020

world war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,12269,1465040,00.html

third world war
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/newt_gingrich/2006/07/the_third_world_war_has_begun.html

WW1 / WW2

World War II        1939-1945
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/arts/design/national-world-war-ii-museum-in-new-orleans-expands.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/0,,1085469,00.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/
http://www.archives.gov/research/ww2/

VE Day / Victory in Europe Day        8 May 1945
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/wwtwo/veday_germany_01.shtml
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWveday.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/veday/0,15989,1473337,00.html

Squadron Leader Eric Foster        1903-2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1771946,00.html

nazi

genocide

gas chamber

be gassed

scream

crematorium

WW2 > D-Day / June 6 1944
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1226533,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/0,14058,1085469,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/archive/0,14058,1085470,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1226579,00.html
http://www.iwm.org.uk/dday/
http://search.eb.com/normandy/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/dday/
http://www.ddaymuseum.org/
http://www.ddaymuseum.co.uk/
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0206/feature1/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1227981,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1223690,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1218915,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1218910,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gall/0,8542,1229026,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/dday/0,14564,1216111,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/flash/0,5860,1183628,00.html

WW2 > D-Day / June 6 1944 > the Guardian > Special report > D-Day
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/dday/0,,1216111,00.html

Colossus Mk 2

Lorenz code

Navajo code talker
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1367771,00.html

indecipherable

Imperial War Museum, London

http://www.iwm.org.uk/

http://london.iwm.org.uk/

http://www.iwmcollections.org.uk/

U.S. President George W. Bush in Baghdad

Thanksgiving - 2003 - AP

Steve Bell

The Guardian

4.11.2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoons/archive/stevebell/0,7371,337764,00.html

President George W. Bush

Steve Bell

The Guardian

3.9.2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoons/stevebell/0,7371,1034687,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1034488,00.html

U.S. President George W. Bush

Falling In and Out of War

March 18, 2012
The New York Times
By BILL KELLER

WHEN you’ve been wrong about something as important as war, as I have, you owe yourself some hard thinking about how to avoid repeating the mistake. And if that’s true for a mere kibitzing columnist, it’s immeasurably more true for those in a position to actually start a war.

So here we are, finally, messily winding down the long war in Afghanistan and simultaneously being goaded toward new military ventures against the regimes in Syria and Iran. Being in the question-asking business, I’ve been pondering this: What are the right questions the president should ask — and we as his employers should ask — when deciding whether going to war is (a) justified and (b) worth it? Here are five, plus two caveats, and some thoughts about how all this applies to the wars before us.

1. HOW IS THIS OUR FIGHT?

It ought to be the first question we ask. Sometimes the answer is obvious. There is a broad agreement that it was in America’s vital national interest in 2001 to go after the homicidal zealots behind the 9/11 attacks on America, and the Afghan regime that hosted them. Whatever you think of how the war was waged or how long it should continue, the going-in was, as the cops say, a righteous shoot.

Often the American stake is not so clear-cut. We may feel an obligation to defend an ally. (Some allies more than others.) We have been known to fight for our economic interests. We intervene in the name of American values, an elastic rubric that can mean anything from halting a genocide to, in George W. Bush’s expansive doctrine, promoting freedom.

Senator John McCain, demanding American air strikes to help rebels topple the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, adopts the Bush “freedom agenda” rationale: by halting suffering and helping overthrow tyranny, we earn some leverage with the victors, improving the odds that Syria will become less hostile to our interests. For a variety of robust dissents, look no further than the conservative Web site National Review Online. There you find the neocon view that intervention is not about fomenting a Syrian democracy; it is about striking at an Islamist, anti-American cabal centered on Iran. You also find the libertarian view that our national interest is best served by staying out of a situation we can only make worse.

Nobody said these would be easy questions.

2. AT WHAT COST?

Judged solely by Question No. 1, there is little difference between Libya, where we helped an inchoate mix of rebels overthrow a brutally oppressive regime, and Syria, where we have so far chosen not to help an inchoate mix of rebels overthrow an even more brutally oppressive regime. The critical difference: Syria is much harder. Libya had weak air defenses deployed along the coastline, easily accessible to Western bombers. Syria’s defenses are more lethal, more plentiful and spread across inland population centers. “We’d have to carpet-bomb a path in and out, or risk American pilots being shot down by the regime and used as human shields,” said John Nagl, a retired Army counterinsurgency expert who teaches at the U.S. Naval Academy. “We’d be killing a lot more people.”

Cost-benefit analysis may seem a cold-blooded discipline — you can’t put a price on freedom, blah blah blah — but it is inseparable from the question of our national interests. After more than 10 years of war that have bled our treasury of at least $3 trillion, killed or disabled many thousands of our troops, and created the kind of multiple-rotation stress that invites atrocities and desecrations, every incremental commitment has to be weighed against the cost to our economic security and our readiness to face the next real threat.

Karl Eikenberry, who served in Afghanistan both as a military commander and as ambassador, put it this way: “If we do not in the future better align ends, ways and means, historians may find that in the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the United States was compelled to contract its global posture similar to the British when they announced their ‘East of Suez’ policy in the late 1960s.”

3. OR WHAT?

Policy makers should — and President Obama mostly has — put a premium on appraising alternatives to war. Most notably, the president has held off an Israeli air assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities by mobilizing tough sanctions on Iran’s oil and banking industries, and by all but declaring that if Iran gets too close to making nuclear weapons the U.S. will send in the bombs. The sanctions show some signs of working.

The ultimate “or what” question about Iran is, if sanctions and threats fail, could we live with a nuclear Iran? Could we trust that like every other nuclear state Iran would be deterred from using its weapons by the certain knowledge that a counterstrike would turn Persia into a wasteland? It’s worth serious discussion, but while the idea of containment by deterrence is gaining ground in pundit-land, President Obama can’t touch it; to do so would undermine the whole effort to halt Iran’s program and, not incidentally, would be hazardous to his reelection.

4. AND WHO ELSE?

In these optional wars, it is useful to have company — to enhance our moral authority, to amplify the intelligence, to share the cost, to spread the risk — and to second-guess us. In Libya, we had 17 other nations enforcing a blockade and no-fly zone, Arabs and Turks among them. “Leading from behind” may have been a mockable phrase, but it was a serviceable strategy.

In Syria, no one is volunteering to join us yet.

5. THEN WHAT?

This is the question Robert Gates made a mantra at the Defense Department: What happens next? How does this play out? What are the second-order and third-order effects?

One unintended (but foreseeable) consequence of invading Iraq was that it distracted our attention and energy from the far more important undertaking in Afghanistan. Now one possible consequence of rushing too fast for the exits in Afghanistan — tempting as that may be given the breakdown of Afghan-American trust — is the increased likelihood that a collapsing Afghanistan would spill into a wobbly Pakistan. In Pakistan there are both numerous nuclear weapons and an abundance of rogue fanatics who would not hesitate to use them.

Syria, says Nagl, is another good place to think hard about collateral chaos: “The hard part is not toppling Assad, it’s what comes afterwards. Everybody raise your hands if you’re up for another occupation of an Islamic country.”

My first caveat is public opinion, which no democracy can ignore. Fighting wars is not something you do by poll. Public opinion can be wrong. It lagged behind F.D.R. before World War II; it was riding along enthusiastically with President Bush when he invaded Iraq. But public opinion puts a thumb on the scale. The U.S. used force to stop a genocide in Bosnia, but did not in Rwanda or Darfur — one critical difference being that Americans (and American TV screens) were paying attention to the European slaughter, but not to the African atrocities.

My second caveat is that asking the right questions only works if you are prepared to hear answers you might not like. Sometimes our leaders start with the answers and work backward, fixing the facts to the policy, as the head of Britain’s MI6 said of the Potemkin intelligence used to sell the invasion of Iraq. To pick just one example from the no-fact zone of Republican primary season, Rick Santorum, the most hawkish of the Republican candidates on Iran, keeps suggesting that Iran’s nuclear program is not under international inspection. It’s possible that Iran has hidden away some facility we don’t know about, but everything we know about — that is, everything we would bomb if we decided to attack — is monitored by international inspectors.

If Iraq taught us nothing else, it should have taught us this: Before you deploy the troops, deploy the fact-checkers.

    Falling In and Out of War, NYT, 18.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/opinion/keller-falling-in-and-out-of-war.html

The Forgotten Wages of War

January 3, 2012
The New York Times
By JOHN TIRMAN

Cambridge, Mass.

THE end of the Iraq war occasioned few reflections on the scale of destruction we have wrought there. As is our habit, the discussion focused on the costs to America in blood and treasure, the false premises of the war and the continuing challenges of instability in the region. What happened to Iraqis was largely ignored. And in Libya, the recent investigation of civilian casualties during NATO’s bombing campaign was the first such accounting of what many believed was a largely victimless war.

We rarely question that wars cause extensive damage, but our view of America’s wars has been blind to one specific aspect of destruction: the human toll of those who live in war zones.

We tune out the voices of the victims and belittle their complaints about the midnight raids, the house-to-house searches, the checkpoints, the drone attacks, the bombs that fall on weddings instead of Al Qaeda.

Gen. Tommy R. Franks famously said during the early days of the war in Afghanistan, “We don’t do body counts.” But someone should. What we learn from body counts tells us much about war and those who wage it.

More than 10 years after the war in Afghanistan began, we have only the sketchiest notion of how many people have died as a consequence of the conflict. The United Nations office in Kabul assembles some figures from morgues and other sources, but they are incomplete. The same has been true for Iraq, although a number of independent efforts have been made there to account for the dead.

But such numbers, which run into the hundreds of thousands, gain scant attention. American political and military leaders, like the public, show little interest in non-American casualties.

Denial, after all, is politically convenient. Failing to consider the mortality figures, the refugees, the impoverished, the demolished hospitals and clean water systems and schools is to deny, in effect, that the war ever happened.

The American military cannot afford to be so cavalier about the dynamics of war. The consequences of how we fight wars reveals a great deal about how and why others fight us.

In Iraq, for example, the causes of the Sunni resistance were often attributed to lost social status; the role of American violence against civilians early in the conflict was rarely discussed. Yet many of the captured Iraqis said they were defending their communities by resisting the occupying forces. Roughing up, detaining or killing suspected enemy fighters — as the coalition forces did in countless operations — prompted some Iraqis to take up the gun, the I.E.D. and the suicide bomb. The more violence from the occupiers, the more ferocious their reaction.

Gen. David H. Petraeus recognized this and sought to reform Army practice. In a field manual he co-authored in 2006, he explained that when “forces fail to provide security or threaten the security of civilians, the population is likely to seek security guarantees from insurgents, militias or other armed groups. This situation can feed support for an insurgency.”

In several opinion polls, Iraqis identified American forces as the primary cause of the violence besetting their country. And although the violence of war and occupation was a proximate cause of the Iraqi resistance, we have few metrics to understand its scope. WikiLeaks released military documents in October 2010 that included accounts of Iraqi fatalities, but such reports are incomplete and sometimes biased, and they reflect only what the troops actually witnessed. News media reports are similarly limited. And our political and military leaders barely consider these numbers anyway.

They dwell instead in a make-believe world of vastly less mayhem, oblivious to what actually besets the civilian population. In 2006, two separate household surveys, by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and by researchers from Johns Hopkins University, found between 400,000 and 650,000 “excess deaths” in Iraq as a result of the war. At the time, however, the commanding general in Iraq put the number at 50,000 and President Bush had claimed in late 2005 that it was just 30,000.

If our leaders are unwilling to grasp the scale of death and social disruption, and the meaning of this chaos for the local population, then American war efforts are likely to end badly and relationships with allies will become strained, as has happened with President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan.

Mr. Karzai’s repeated complaints about NATO actions that cause civilian casualties are often dismissed in the West as political posturing, but his persistence on this issue indicates how deeply it resonates with Afghans. While we dismiss it, Muslims around the world take note.

Ignoring the extent of civilian casualties and the damage they cause is a moral failing as well as a strategic blunder. We need to adopt reliable ways to measure the destruction our wars cause — an “epistemology of war,” as another general, William Tecumseh Sherman, called it — to break through the collective amnesia that has gripped us.

If we do not demand a full accounting of the wages of war, future failures are all the more likely — and warranted.

John Tirman, the executive director

of the Center for International Studies at M.I.T.,

is the author of “The Deaths of Others:

The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars.”

    The Forgotten Wages of War, NYT, 3.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/opinion/the-forgotten-wages-of-war.html

Doctrine of Silence

November 28, 2011
The New York Times
By ROGER COHEN

LONDON — The Obama administration has a doctrine. It’s called the doctrine of silence. A radical shift from President Bush’s war on terror, it has never been set out to the American people. There has seldom been so big a change in approach to U.S. strategic policy with so little explanation.

I approve of the shift even as it makes me uneasy. One day, I suspect, there may be payback for this policy and this silence. President Obama has gone undercover.

You have to figure that one day somebody sitting in Tehran or Islamabad or Sana is going to wake up and say: “Hey, this guy Obama, he went to war in our country but just forgot to mention the fact. Should we perhaps go to war in his?”

In Iran, a big explosion at a military base near Tehran recently killed Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, a central figure in the country’s long-range missile program. Nuclear scientists have perished in the streets of Tehran. The Stuxnet computer worm has wreaked havoc with the Iranian nuclear facilities.

It would take tremendous naïveté to believe these events are not the result of a covert American-Israeli drive to sabotage Iran’s efforts to develop a military nuclear capacity. An intense, well-funded cyberwar against Tehran is ongoing.

Simmering Pakistani anger over a wave of drone attacks authorized by Obama has erupted into outright rage with the death of at least 25 Pakistani soldiers in a NATO attack on two military outposts near the Afghan border.

The Pakistani government has ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to end drone operations it runs from a base in western Pakistan within 15 days. Drone attacks have become the coin of Obama’s realm. They have killed twice as many suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda members as were ever imprisoned in Guantánamo.

One such drone attack, of course, killed an American citizen, the Al Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen a few weeks ago.

The U.S. government says precious little about these new ways of fighting enemies. But the strategic volte-face is clear: America has decided that conventional wars of uncertain outcome in Iraq and Afghanistan that may, according to a Brown University study, end up costing at least $3.7 trillion are a bad way to fight terrorists and that far cheaper, more precise tools for eliminating enemies are preferable — even if the legality of those killings is debatable.

The American case for legality rests on the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force act, which allows the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against persons, organization or nations linked to the 9/11 attack, and on various interpretations of the right to self-defense under international law.

But killing an American citizen raises particular constitutional concerns; just how legal the drone attacks are remains a vexed question. And Iran had no part in 9/11.

In general, it’s hard to resist the impression of a tilt toward the extrajudicial in U.S. foreign policy — a kind of “Likudization” of the approach to dealing with enemies. Israel has never hesitated to kill foes with blood on their hands wherever they are.

This is a development about which no American can feel entirely comfortable.

So why do I approve of all this? Because the alternative — the immense cost in blood and treasure and reputation of the Bush administration’s war on terror — was so appalling. In just the same way, the results of a conventional bombing war against Iran would be appalling, whether undertaken by Israel, the United States or a combination of the two.

Political choices often have to be made between two unappealing options. Obama has done just that. He has gone covert — and made the right call.

So why am I uneasy? Because these legally borderline, undercover options — cyberwar, drone killings, executions and strange explosions at military bases — invite repayment in kind, undermine the American commitment to the rule of law, and make allies uneasy.

Obama could have done more in the realm of explanation. Of course he does not want to say much about secret operations. Still, as the U.S. military prepares to depart from Iraq (leaving a handful of embassy guards), and the war in Afghanistan enters its last act, he owes the American people, U.S. allies and the world a speech that sets out why America will not again embark on this kind of inconclusive war and has instead adopted a new doctrine that has replaced fighting terror with killing terrorists. (He might also explain why Guantánamo is still open.)

Just because it’s impossible to talk about some operations undertaken within this doctrine does not mean the entire doctrine can remain cloaked in silence.

Foreign policy has been Obama’s strongest suit. He deserves great credit for killing Osama bin Laden, acting for the liberation of Libya, getting behind the Arab quest for freedom, winding down the war in Iraq, dealing repeated blows to Al Qaeda and restoring America’s battered image.

But the doctrine of silence is a failing with links to his overarching failure on the economy: it betrays a presidential reticence, coolness and aloofness that leave Americans uncomfortable.
 

    Doctrine of Silence, NYT, 28.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/opinion/cohen-doctrine-of-silence.html

Losing Our Way

March 25, 2011
The New York Times
By BOB HERBERT

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.

Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

Nearly 14 million Americans are jobless and the outlook for many of them is grim. Since there is just one job available for every five individuals looking for work, four of the five are out of luck. Instead of a land of opportunity, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a place of limited expectations. A college professor in Washington told me this week that graduates from his program were finding jobs, but they were not making very much money, certainly not enough to think about raising a family.

There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.

Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable. It shouldn’t be, and didn’t used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era, income distribution was far more equitable, with the top 10 percent of families accounting for just a third of average income growth, and the bottom 90 percent receiving two-thirds. That seems like ancient history now.

The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.

This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.

A stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: “G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” Despite profits of $14.2 billion — $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States — General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.

As The Times’s David Kocieniewski reported, “Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore.”

G.E. is the nation’s largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not fully committed to the best interests of working people.

Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power. So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well. The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home.

New ideas and new leadership have seldom been more urgently needed.



•



This is my last column for The New York Times after an exhilarating,

nearly 18-year run. I’m off to write a book

and expand my efforts on behalf of working people,

the poor and others who are struggling in our society.

My thanks to all the readers who have been so kind to me over the years.

I can be reached going forward at bobherbert88@gmail.com .

    Losing Our Way, NYT, 25.3.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/opinion/26herbert.html

The Big (Military) Taboo

December 25, 2010
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

We face wrenching budget cutting in the years ahead, but there’s one huge area of government spending that Democrats and Republicans alike have so far treated as sacrosanct.

It’s the military/security world, and it’s time to bust that taboo. A few facts:

• The United States spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It says that we spend more than six times as much as the country with the next highest budget, China.

• The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago. Do we fear that if we pull our bases from Germany, Russia might invade?

• The intelligence community is so vast that more people have “top secret” clearance than live in Washington, D.C.

• The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.

This is the one area where elections scarcely matter. President Obama, a Democrat who symbolized new directions, requested about 6 percent more for the military this year than at the peak of the Bush administration.

“Republicans think banging the war drums wins them votes, and Democrats think if they don’t chime in, they’ll lose votes,” said Andrew Bacevich, an ex-military officer who now is a historian at Boston University. He is author of a thoughtful recent book, “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.”

The costs of excessive reliance on military force are not just financial, of course, as Professor Bacevich knows well. His son, Andrew Jr., an Army first lieutenant, was killed in Iraq in 2007.

Let me be clear: I’m a believer in a robust military, which is essential for backing up diplomacy. But the implication is that we need a balanced tool chest of diplomatic and military tools alike. Instead, we have a billionaire military and a pauper diplomacy. The U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service — and that’s preposterous.

What’s more, if you’re carrying an armload of hammers, every problem looks like a nail. The truth is that military power often isn’t very effective at solving modern problems, like a nuclear North Korea or an Iran that is on the nuclear path. Indeed, in an age of nationalism, our military force is often counterproductive.

After the first gulf war, the United States retained bases in Saudi Arabia on the assumption that they would enhance American security. Instead, they appear to have provoked fundamentalists like Osama bin Laden into attacking the U.S. In other words, hugely expensive bases undermined American security (and we later closed them anyway). Wouldn’t our money have been better spent helping American kids get a college education?

Paradoxically, it’s often people with experience in the military who lead the way in warning against overinvestment in arms. It was President Dwight Eisenhower who gave the strongest warning: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” And in the Obama administration, it is Defense Secretary Robert Gates who has argued that military spending on things large and small can and should expect closer, harsher scrutiny; it is Secretary Gates who has argued most eloquently for more investment in diplomacy and development aid.

American troops in Afghanistan are among the strongest advocates of investing more in schools there because they see firsthand that education fights extremism far more effectively than bombs. And here’s the trade-off: For the cost of one American soldier in Afghanistan for one year, you could build about 20 schools.

There are a few signs of hope in the air. The Simpson-Bowles deficit commission proposes cutting money for armaments, along with other spending. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unveiled a signature project, the quadrennial diplomacy and development review, which calls for more emphasis on aid and diplomacy in foreign policy.

“Leading through civilian power saves lives and money,” Mrs. Clinton noted, and she’s exactly right. The review is a great document, but we’ll see if it can be implemented — especially because House Republicans are proposing cuts in the State Department budget.

They should remind themselves that in the 21st century, our government can protect its citizens in many ways: financing research against disease, providing early childhood programs that reduce crime later, boosting support for community colleges, investing in diplomacy that prevents costly wars.

As we cut budgets, let’s remember that these steps would, on balance, do far more for the security of Americans than a military base in Germany.

    The Big (Military) Taboo, 25.12.2010,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/opinion/26kristof.html

The Wars That America Forgot About

October 17, 2010
The New York Times
By TOM BROKAW

McLeod, Mont.

IN what promises to be the most contentious midterm election since 1994, there is no shortage of passion about big issues facing the country: the place and nature of the federal government in America’s future; public debt; jobs; health care; the influence of special interests; and the role of populist movements like the Tea Party.

In nearly every Congressional and Senate race, these are the issues that explode into attack ads, score points in debates and light up cable talk shows. In poll after poll, these are the issues that voters say are most important to them this year.

Notice anything missing on the campaign landscape?

How about war? The United States is now in its ninth year of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the longest wars in American history. Almost 5,000 men and women have been killed. More than 30,000 have been wounded, some so gravely they’re returning home to become, effectively, wards of their families and communities.

In those nine years, the United States has spent more than $1 trillion on combat operations and other parts of the war effort, including foreign aid, reconstruction projects, embassy costs and veterans’ health care. And the end is not in sight.

So why aren’t the wars and their human and economic consequences front and center in this campaign, right up there with jobs and taxes?

The answer is very likely that the vast majority of Americans wake up every day worrying, with good reason, about their economic security, but they can opt out of the call to arms. Unless they are enlisted in the armed services — or have a family member who has stepped forward — nothing much is asked of them in the war effort.

The all-volunteer uniformed services now represent less than 1 percent of the American population, but they’re carrying 100 percent of the battle. It’s not unusual to meet an Army infantryman or Marine who has served multiple tours in Iraq and/or Afghanistan.

Moreover, the majority of those in uniform come from working-class or middle-class backgrounds. The National Guard units and reserve forces that have been called up, some for more than one tour, draw heavily on first responders, as well as farm, factory and service workers.

Their families live in their own war zone. At a recent Minnesota event for military families, I heard Annette Kuyper, the mother of a National Guardsman who had an extended deployment in Iraq, describe how she and other Guard mothers changed their lives while their children were in harm’s way. “We close the blinds on the windows overlooking the driveway,” she said, “so we don’t see the Army vehicle arriving with a chaplain bearing the unbearable news.”

This woman’s son returned safely, but too many do not. As the campaign season careens to an end, military funerals will be held in country burial grounds, big city graveyards and at Arlington National Cemetery. Military families will keep the blinds closed on the windows facing the driveway.

While campaigns trade shouts of witchcraft, socialism, greed, radicalism (on both sides), warriors and their families have a right to ask, “What about us?” If this is an election about a new direction for the country, why doesn’t some candidate speak up for equal sacrifice on the home front as well as the front lines?

This is not just about military families, as important as they are. We all would benefit from a campaign that engaged the vexing question of what happens next in the long and so far unresolved effort to deal with Islamic rage.

No decision is more important than committing a nation to war. It is, as politicians like to say, about our blood and treasure. Surely blood and treasure are worthy of more attention than they’ve been getting in this campaign.

Tom Brokaw, a special correspondent for NBC News,

is the author, most recently, of “Boom! Talking About the ’60s.”

    The Wars That America Forgot About, NYT, 17.10.2010,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/opinion/18brokaw.html

Pentagon to Outline Shift in War Planning Strategy

June 23, 2009
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon will adopt a new strategy that for the first time orders the military to anticipate that future conflicts will include a complex mix of conventional, set-piece battles and campaigns against shadowy insurgents and terrorists, according to senior officials.

The shift is intended to assure that the military is prepared to deal with a spectrum of possible threats, including computer network attacks, attempts to blind satellite positioning systems, strikes by precision missiles and roadside bombs, and propaganda campaigns waged on television and the Internet. The new strategy has broad implications for training, troop deployment, weapons procurement and other aspects of military planning.

In officially embracing hybrid warfare, the Pentagon would be replacing a second pillar of long-term planning. Senior officials disclosed in March that the review was likely to reject a historic premise of American strategy — that the nation need only to prepare to fight two major wars at a time.

Driving both sets of developments are lessons learned from the past six years, when the United States has been fighting two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet is stretched to be ready for potentially significant operations elsewhere, Pentagon officials say, such as against Iran, North Korea or even China and Russia. Conflicts with any of those countries would also be expected to present a hybrid range of challenges.

But powerful constituencies in the military and in Congress continue to argue that the next war will not look like Iraq or Afghanistan, and they say the military is focusing too much on counter-insurgency and losing its ability to defeat a traditional nation-state.

Even so, senior officials say hybrid warfare will be adopted as a central premise of military planning in the top-to-bottom review required every four years by Congress. When completed later this year, the assessment, officially called the Quadrennial Defense Review, will determine how billions of dollars are spent on weapons and influence how the military reshapes its training.

During a Pentagon news conference last week, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said of the new strategy, “It derives from my view that the old way of looking at irregular warfare as being one kind of conflict and conventional warfare as a discreet kind of warfare is an outdated concept. Conflict in the future will slide up and down a scale, both in scope or scale and in lethality.”

Even before the review is complete, the new thinking has claimed high-dollar victims.

Mr. Gates proposed ending production of the Air Force’s top-of-the-line F-22 fighter jets, arguing that money should be spent on warplanes that carry out a broader array of missions, from countering enemy air forces to evading surface-to-air missiles to bombing insurgent militias in hiding.

But supporters of the F-22 in Congress are pushing for financing to keep the production line open, potentially setting up a veto battle.

The defense secretary also put on hold a multibillion-dollar program for the Army’s next-generation armored vehicle, saying its proposed flat-bottom design ignored lessons that angular troop transports are safer from roadside bombs, which have been the biggest killer of troops in Iraq.

In preparing to adopt concepts of hybrid warfare, the Defense Department has closely studied Israel’s last war in Lebanon in 2006, when a terrorist group, Hezbollah, fielded high-tech weapons equal to any nation’s, including long-range missiles. Likewise, when a traditional military power like Russia went to war with the former Soviet republic of Georgia last August, its tanks, paratroopers and warships were preceded by crippling computer network attacks.

The previous Pentagon strategy review focused on a four-square chart that described security challenges to the nation as perceived then. It included traditional, conventional conflicts; irregular warfare, such as terrorism and insurgencies; catastrophic challenges from unconventional weapons used by terrorists or rogue states; and disruptive threats, in which new technologies could counter American advantages.

“The ‘quad chart’ was useful in its time,” said Michele A. Flournoy, the under secretary of defense for policy, who is leading the strategy review for Mr. Gates.

“But we aren’t using it as a point of reference or departure,” she said in an interview. “I think hybrid will be the defining character. The traditional, neat categories — those are types that really don’t match reality any more.”

The nation’s top military officers are reviewing their procurement programs and personnel policies to adapt to the new environment, focusing in particular on weapons systems that can perform multiple missions.

“When I send a carrier strike group forward, or when I send an amphibious ready group forward with a Marine Expeditionary Unit on board, I don’t know what they are going to end up doing,” said Adm. Gary Roughead, the chief of naval operations. “Therefore, the way that we view our training, the way that we view our capabilities, has to be packaged for this range of actions.”

He cited the experience of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, which was steaming toward Iraq to carry out combat missions when it was diverted to become the American headquarters for tsunami relief in Indonesia. Both Admiral Roughead and Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff, said in interviews that they had adopted goals of making certain each weapon system could “stretch” across a spectrum of operations, proving value in traditional and irregular warfare.

General Schwartz cited Air Force decisions to place surveillance systems on its long-range bombers and tactical warplanes to make each a provider of valuable battlefield intelligence, as well as maintaining strike capabilities.

“This is the kind of thing we are talking about, where we avoid point-mission platforms and look for versatility,” General Schwartz said. “Multipurpose platforms are inherently more affordable.”

For the ground forces, the goal is an ability to sustain 10 combat brigades abroad at all times, with 10 more in reserve and nearly ready to go as they complete training. This eventually would allow active duty troops to spend three years at home for every year deployed.

 

Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff,

when asked to define the Army’s goals in the review, said:

“The most significant thing I’d like to get

is an acceptance of that rotational model.”

    Pentagon to Outline Shift in War Planning Strategy, NYT, 23.6.2009,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/americas/23military.html

Images, the Law and War

May 17, 2009
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — It was a hypothetical question in a Supreme Court argument, and it was posed almost 40 years ago. But it managed to anticipate and in some ways to answer President Obama’s argument for withholding photographs showing the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What if, Justice Potter Stewart asked a lawyer for The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971, a disclosure of sensitive information in wartime “would result in the sentencing to death of 100 young men whose only offense had been that they were 19 years old and had low draft numbers?” The Times’s lawyer, Alexander M. Bickel, tried to duck the question, but the justice pressed him:

“You would say that the Constitution requires that it be published and that these men die?”

Mr. Bickel yielded, to the consternation of allies in the case. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that my inclinations of humanity overcome the somewhat more abstract devotion to the First Amendment.”

And there it was: an issue as old as democracy in wartime, and as fresh as the latest dispute over pictures showing abuse of prisoners in the 21st century. How much potential harm justifies suppressing facts, whether from My Lai or Iraq, that might help the public judge the way a war is waged in its name?

The exchange also contained more than a hint of the court’s eventual calculus: The asserted harm can’t be vague or speculative; it must be immediate and concrete. It must be the sort of cost that gives a First Amendment lawyer pause.

As it happened, Mr. Bickel’s response outraged the American Civil Liberties Union and other allies of the newspaper in the Pentagon Papers case, which concerned the Nixon administration’s attempt to prevent publication of a secret history of the Vietnam War. They disavowed Mr. Bickel’s answer and said the correct response was, “painfully but simply,” that free people are entitled to evaluate evidence concerning the government’s conduct for themselves.

Which is a good summary of the interest on the other side: Scrutiny of abuses by the government enhances democracy because it promotes accountability and prompts reform.

Justice William O. Douglas, in a 1972 dissent in a case about Congressional immunity, described his view of the basic dynamic. “As has been revealed by such exposés as the Pentagon Papers, the My Lai massacres, the Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident,’ and the Bay of Pigs invasion,” he wrote, “the government usually suppresses damaging news but highlights favorable news.”

Indeed, the Nixon administration successfully opposed the use of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the release of documents and photographs concerning the killings of hundreds of South Vietnamese civilians in 1968 at My Lai. (The decision led Congress to broaden that law.)

Disclosure of abuses can also provoke a backlash. The indelible images that emerged from the Vietnam War helped turn the nation against the war, and may have steeled America’s enemies. And earlier photographs of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were used for propaganda and recruitment by insurgents there.

How, then, to apply the lessons of history and law to the possible disclosure of additional images of prisoner mistreatment by Americans in the current wars?

On Wednesday, when Mr. Obama announced that the government was withdrawing from an agreement to comply with court orders requiring release of the images, he said there was little to learn from them and much to fear. But he offered speculation on both sides of the balance.

“The publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals,” he said. “In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.”

The first assertion, which the Bush administration also made, is not universally accepted. In a 2005 decision ordering the release of the images, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Federal District Court in Manhattan said they may provide insights into whether the abuses shown were indeed isolated and unauthorized.

And the claim that harm would follow disclosure — that terrorists, for example, would exact revenge — is hard to measure or prove. “The terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan do not need pretexts for their barbarism,” Judge Hellerstein wrote. In the Pentagon Papers case, too, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of publication, saying, in essence, that speculation about potential harm was not sufficient.

There are, of course, profound differences between the two cases. One concerned the constitutionality of a prior restraint against publishing information already in the hands of the press; the other is about whether civil rights groups are entitled to obtain materials under the Freedom of Information Act. But both involve contentions that serious harm would follow from publication.

Justice Stewart’s answer, in his concurrence in the 6-to-3 decision, was that assertions are not enough. “I cannot say,” he wrote, that disclosure “will surely result in direct, immediate and irreparable damage to our nation or its people.” In other contexts, too, the Supreme Court has endorsed limits on speech only when it would cause immediate and almost certain harm to identifiable people. More general and diffuse consequences have not done the trick.

In 1949, for instance, the court overturned the disorderly conduct conviction of a Chicago priest whose anti-Semitic speech at a rally had provoked a hostile crowd to riot. Free speech, Justice Douglas wrote, “may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are or even stirs people to anger.”

Fear of violence, however, was enough to persuade many people that publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad should be discouraged or forbidden.

Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who has handled terrorism cases, said the only prudent course in the current case is to withhold the images. “If you’re in a war that’s been authorized by Congress, it should be an imperative to win the war,” he said. “If you have photos that could harm the war effort, you should delay release of the photos.”

But Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer with the civil liberties union, said history favored disclosure, citing the 2004 photographs from Abu Ghraib and the 1991 video of police beating Rodney King in Los Angeles.

But the touchstone remains the Pentagon papers case. It not only framed the issues, but also created a real-world experiment in consequences.

The government had argued, in general terms, that publication of the papers would cost American soldiers their lives. The papers were published. What happened?

David Rudenstine, the dean of the Cardozo Law School and author of “The Day the Presses Stopped,” a history of the case, said he investigated the aftermath with an open mind.

“I couldn’t find any evidence whatsoever from any responsible government official,” he said, “that there was any harm.”

    Images, the Law and War, NYT, 17.5.2009,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/weekinreview/17liptak.html

Op-Ed Columnist

Wars, Endless Wars

March 3, 2009
The New York Times
By BOB HERBERT

The singer Edwin Starr, who died in 2003, had a big hit in 1970 called “War” in which he asked again and again: “War, what is it good for?”

The U.S. economy is in free fall, the banking system is in a state of complete collapse and Americans all across the country are downsizing their standards of living. The nation as we’ve known it is fading before our very eyes, but we’re still pouring billions of dollars into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with missions we are still unable to define.

Even as the U.S. begins plans to reduce troop commitments in Iraq, it is sending thousands of additional troops into Afghanistan. The strategic purpose of this escalation, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged, is not at all clear.

In response to a question on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Mr. Gates said:

“We’re talking to the Europeans, to our allies; we’re bringing in an awful lot of people to get different points of view as we go through this review of what our strategy ought to be. And I often get asked, ‘Well, how long will those 17,000 [additional troops] be there? Will more go in?’ All that depends on the outcome of this strategy review that I hope will be done in a few weeks.”

We invaded Afghanistan more than seven years ago. We have not broken the back of Al Qaeda or the Taliban. We have not captured or killed Osama bin Laden. We don’t even have an escalation strategy, much less an exit strategy. An honest assessment of the situation, taking into account the woefully corrupt and ineffective Afghan government led by the hapless Hamid Karzai, would lead inexorably to such terms as fiasco and quagmire.

Instead of cutting our losses, we appear to be doubling down.

As for Iraq, President Obama announced last week that substantial troop withdrawals will take place over the next year and a half and that U.S. combat operations would cease by the end of August 2010. But, he said, a large contingent of American troops, perhaps as many as 50,000, would still remain in Iraq for a “period of transition.”

That’s a large number of troops, and the cost of keeping them there will be huge. Moreover, I was struck by the following comment from the president: “There will surely be difficult periods and tactical adjustments, but our enemies should be left with no doubt. This plan gives our military the forces and flexibility they need to support our Iraqi partners and to succeed.”

In short, we’re committed to these two conflicts for a good while yet, and there is nothing like an etched-in-stone plan for concluding them. I can easily imagine a scenario in which Afghanistan and Iraq both heat up and the U.S., caught in an extended economic disaster at home, undermines its fragile recovery efforts in the same way that societies have undermined themselves since the dawn of time — with endless warfare.

We’ve already paid a fearful price for these wars. In addition to the many thousands of service members who have been killed or suffered obvious disabling injuries, a study by the RAND Corporation found that some 300,000 are currently suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or depression, and that 320,000 have most likely experienced a traumatic brain injury.

Time magazine has reported that “for the first time in history, a sizable and growing number of U.S. combat troops are taking daily doses of antidepressants to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Suicides among soldiers rose in 2008 for the fourth consecutive year, largely because of the stress of combat deployments. It’s believed that 128 soldiers took their own lives last year.

Much of the country can work itself up to a high pitch of outrage because a banker or an automobile executive flies on a private jet. But we’ll send young men and women by the thousands off to repeated excursions through the hell of combat — three tours, four tours or more — without raising so much as a peep of protest.

Lyndon Johnson, despite a booming economy, lost his Great Society to the Vietnam War. He knew what he was risking. He would later tell Doris Kearns Goodwin, “If I left the woman I really loved — the Great Society — in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs... All my dreams...”

The United States is on its knees economically. As President Obama fights for his myriad domestic programs and his dream of an economic recovery, he might benefit from a look over his shoulder at the link between Vietnam and the still-smoldering ruins of Johnson’s presidency.

    Wars, Endless Wars, NYT, 3.3.2009,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/opinion/03herbert.html

Letters

    Talking About Fear, Real and Imagined, NYT, 31.10.2007,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/opinion/l31fear.html

Making a killing:

how private armies

became a $120bn global industry

    Making a killing: how private armies became a $120bn global industry, I, 21.9.2007,
    http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2984818.ece

Robert Fisk on Shakespeare and war

    Manhattan’s Littlest Soldiers, NYT, 11.3.2007,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/nyregion/11grays.html

Human rights concerns

fail to staunch flow of UK arms

China tops list with £70m of exports in one year
as military sales soar to blacklisted regimes

Sunday October 15, 2006
The Observer
Antony Barnett

The British government is exporting record levels of military equipment to 19 of the 20 states its own ministers and officials have just identified as 'major countries of concern' for human rights abuses.

The 20 countries were listed in the Foreign Office's annual Human Rights Report, which was launched by the Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, last week. They include China, Burma, North Korea, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe.

But the government's arms export records reveal that concerns over human rights appear not to have prevented ministers from approving tens of millions of pounds of military sales to those same regimes.

For instance, on China the report stated: 'The Chinese authorities continue to violate a range of basic human rights. The use of the death penalty remains extensive and non-transparent; torture is widespread.' Yet, despite the existence of a European Union arms embargo, ministers approved strategic export licences - which are needed to sell military items abroad - for China worth almost £70m between July 2005 and June 2006.

According to the UK government's own record of export licences, between January and March this year ministers approved the sale to China of military aero-engines, military communciations equipment and 'technology to build combat aircraft'. It also sold Beijing gun mountings and components for military vehicles, and 'components for nuclear reactors'.

The EU embargo prohibits countries from selling 'whole' weapons such as missile and aircraft, although it does allow the sale of parts.

Other countries whose human rights records concern the Foreign Office, but which still receive arms exports from the UK, include Colombia, Saudi Arabia and Russia, where more than £40m of military equipment was exported last year. On Russia, the Foreign Office report stated: 'Human rights defenders continue to be gravely concerned by actions taken by authorities... The North Caucasus... remains one of Europe's most serious human rights issues.' Yet last year ministers authorised export licences to Russia worth £10m. These included military cargo and utility vehicles, sniper rifles, gun silencers, shotguns, and components for military aircraft navigation equipment.

The analysis of military exports was carried out by Saferworld, the human rights campaign group. Claire Hickson, Saferworld's head of communications, said: 'This once again highlights the incoherence of UK policy which could result in British military equipment being used to commit human rights abuses abroad.'

At the launch of the Human Rights Report, Beckett said: 'This report would set down what we were doing to promote human rights and fundamental freedoms around the world. And it would be something by which the public, the NGO community and the media could hold us as a government to account.'

But Saferworld responded: 'The UK government does little to check what happens to arms exports once they leave the country. There is little way of knowing whether the arms find their way to other users, such as criminal gangs, pariah states, terrorists, paramilitaries or warlords or other rebel forces. A number of these states have reputations as conduits of arms to other irresponsible parties.'

A spokesman for the Foreign Office said that all military exports were rigorously scrutinised on a 'case by case basis' and the British government needs to be reassured that such sales would not be used for internal repression or external aggression.

The Human Rights Report was first published in 1998 by former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who wanted to promote human rights overseas in line with the new Labour government's 'ethical foreign policy'.

    Human rights concerns fail to staunch flow of UK arms, O, 15.10.2006,
    http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1922775,00.html

Cold War relics found under Brooklyn Bridge

    White House Letter; A Proclamation of Victory That No Author Will Claim, NYT, 3.11.2003,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/03/us/white-house-letter-a-proclamation-of-victory-that-no-author-will-claim.html

On This Day - August 24, 1990

From The Times Archive

Westerners held after the invasion of Kuwait

July 3 1982

The traumas left by a small war

From The Guardian archive

    From The Guardian archive > July 3 1982 > The traumas left by a small war, G,
    republished 3.7.2007, p. 32, http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2007/07/03/pages/ber32.shtml

Police repel anti-war mob at US embassy

From the Times Archive

The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill,

June 1, 1940

The miracle of rescue from Dunkirk

From the Guardian archive

Saturday June 1, 1940
Guardian
EA Montague


In the grey chill of dawn today in a south-eastern port, war correspondents watched with incredulous joy the happening of a miracle.

By every canon of military science the BEF has been doomed for the last four or five days. Completely out-numbered, out-gunned, out-planed, all but surrounded, it had seemed certain to be cut off from its last channel of escape. Yet for several hours this morning we saw ship after ship come into harbour and discharge thousands of British soldiers safe and sound on British soil. As the sun was turning the grey clouds to burnished copper, the first destroyer of the day slid swiftly into the harbour, its silhouette bristling with the heads of the men packed shoulder to shoulder on its decks.

One watched them with a pride that became almost pain. They had passed through nights and days of hunger, weariness and fear, but nearly every man still had his rifle and a clip of ammunition: nearly all had brought their full kit with them - and what an agony its weight must have been. They were still soldiers and still in good heart. They were of all units and ranks. Some were in the position of the gunners whose battery had been shelled out of existence near Oudenarde, because our overworked fighter planes had had no time to deal with the German reconnaissance planes.

Their battery commander had told them to do the best they could for themselves, and they had walked 30 miles to Dunkirk. It is a stretch of level sand backed by dunes. The sea in front of it is shallow for some way out, so that ships cannot come close in. Many of the men have spent up to four days on this beach, hiding in hollows scratched in the sand, from the German planes which have scourged them with bomb and machine-gun.

Every now and then, among the men who climb the gangplank into England, one sees stretcher-bearers carrying a still form, its face bloodless and remote. Yet [others] survive in their thousands and are able to joke and sing.

In no time the ship is ready to return to Dunkirk. But before it is ready, another has drawn up alongside. British ships and French and Dutch, warships, drifters, trawlers, yachts, barges, they bring their loads across the hostile Channel and then go back undaunted into the inferno.

All the selfless courage of two nations is being thrown into the resistance at Dunkirk, and it looks as if it will not be spent in vain.

· Evelyn Montague,

eldest son of the Guardian leader writer CE Montague,

died in 1948 of tuberculosis contracted

during his years as war correspondent

    From the Guardian archive > June 1, 1940 > The miracle of rescue from Dunkirk, G,
    Republished 1.6.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1787239,00.html

May 29, 1940

Our army in France has been cut off

From the Guardian archive

Wednesday May 29, 1940
Guardian
EA Montague


The latest news of the BEF [British Expeditionary Force] in France is grave.

It had always been obvious, even before the defection of the Belgian king, that the British force was running risks of encirclement in its heroic efforts to keep the Somme-Arras gap as narrow as possible.

It now seems likely that we shall pay heavily in British lives for King Leopold's action. We have to face the fact that the possibility of withdrawing the BEF from its present position is small. It is now virtually surrounded, and the abandonment by the Belgians of their position on its eastern flank has left Dunkirk, its port of evacuation, in grave danger of falling to the Germans.

The situation is now so clear that nothing that we say today can be of the slightest value to the enemy. One is free to tell in outline the story of 18 heroic days.

Some of us have been nauseated by rumours in England that our soldiers had in some way failed. They did not fail in any way. No troops in the world ever fought better. Fierce fighting took place, and little ground was lost. But German pressure on the French forces farther to the south increased, and so did that fatal gap which had now been created between the French armies on our right and their main body. In consequence we had to carry out another withdrawal.

In the meantime, German armoured and motorised divisions had streamed through the gap and were already threatening Arras. In an endeavour to close it a British force moved down to the Arras area and counter-attacked successfully. The Germans were so vastly more numerous, however, that our success was only a local one.

The BEF was now faced with the problem of manning a extending front in order to protect its lifeline to the sea. The fact that it quickly formed the necessary defensive line is yet another proof of the heroic efficiency which both commander and troops have shown throughout this epic fortnight.

Small British motorised and light armoured detachments kept pace with the encirclement and resisted every attempt at penetration of our lines.

Up to this morning the BEF was facing the enemy on the French frontier from near Ypres to the River Scarpe. Thence it supported the part of two French armies roughly as far as Douai, and from there a thin but resolute line continued the ellipse into which the British force had been driven to west of Dunkirk.

The early collapse of the Belgian advanced positions enabled the Germans to push on fast and to attack the lines held by the British.

    From the Guardian archive > May 29, 1940 > Our army in France has been cut off, G,
    Republished 29.5.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1785166,00.html

May 14 1940

Blood, tears, and doing without a maid

From The Guardian archive

May 14 1940
The Guardian

[The Manchester Guardian which reported Churchill's "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat" speech carried an article which dealt with another pressing matter.]

People of modest means can effect a substantial economy during the war by doing without a maid. Her services will then be available for more essential work, and the employer can be sure of saving anything from one to two pounds a week.

Apart from food and wages the cost of many household items can be lessened. The careful and intelligent housewife will be able to halve her bills for soaps, powders, and cleaning materials. Light and fuel bills will be less and there will be fewer leakages. Careful planning will, however, be necessary if the housewife does not wish to be too tired and harassed to keep up outside interests.

In most houses the two most constant tasks are preparation of meals and keeping down the dust. The best way to keep the house spick and span is never to let dust accumulate anywhere, and for this a thorough turn-out of every room and passage is necessary once a week and a quick daily dusting. Employ a daily woman to come in, say, on two mornings a week for the turning-out. Then an hour a day should be enough to keep any small house immaculate.

Meals are a more difficult problem. Food must be provided, or health suffers. Soup, for instance, can be taken off the menu during the summer. Make plenty of use of all casserole dishes. If glass ovenware is used it should be soaked for an hour in very hot soda-water.

Potatoes should be baked or boiled in their skins. Eaten with salt and margarine or dripping they are not only more nutritious but more appetising, besides saving much time. Avoid puddings which necessitate the making of breadcrumbs, chopping ingredients, creaming, beating, and tying up of basins. Reduce the number of cooked meals as far as possible. One hot meal a day is ample for anybody except in very cold weather. This saves time in preparation, washing up and fuel, and is healthier as it enables more fresh food in the form of salads to be taken.

Grown-up members of the family should make their own beds, keep their rooms tidy, and clean their own shoes. Older children can also help in these tasks, but, apart from putting away their toys and being reasonably tidy, children should not be expected to spend much time on housework. Their free play-time is psychologically important, especially in these days, and should not be unduly curtailed.

    From The Guardian archive > May 14 1940 > Blood, tears, and doing without a maid, G,
    republished 14.5.2007, p. 30, http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2007/05/14/pages/ber30.shtml

May 8 1940

Lessons of Norway

From The Guardian archive

May 8 1940
The Guardian

[In popular histories of the war, this debate was dominated by one phrase, "in the name of God go", which destroyed Neville Chamberlain. That was not how the Manchester Guardian or the Times reported the occasion.]

As far as the debate has gone it has changed nothing in the Parliamentary situation. That is, superficially.

And yet there was a difference. Today's Prime Minister was not the Chamberlain of a few weeks ago whom one heard telling the Tory Central Council that Hitler had missed the bus. But one can still hear those cheers from the embattled "Yes Men" .

Mr Chamberlain's apologia for the Norwegian failure can be studied elsewhere. Here one turns to his "general observations" which shed a good deal of light on himself and his Government. The lessons are those which the Opposition parties have been trying to teach him for months, so the Labour and Liberal benches rocked with cheers at his discoveries.

One lesson was that we had not realised the imminence of the threat. There the Opposition cheered for a full minute. The Leader of the Opposition [Mr Attlee] saw Norway as only one more failure in the uninterrupted story of Ministerial failures. Yet he was full of confidence about our winning the war, though he said bluntly it would only be done by putting different men at the helm.

Drama touched the debate once, when Admiral Sir Roger Keyes alleged in effect that Trondheim had been lost through faint hearts in Whitehall. He rose in his uniform of an admiral of the fleet, as he explained, because he had come to Westminster to speak for men in the fighting Navy who were very unhappy.

Sir Roger admonished [Mr Churchill] to steel himself for vigorous action, because he possesses the confidence of the War Cabinet, the country and the Navy. He ended by reminding Mr Churchill of Nelson's saying that bold est measures are always the safest. So far this had been quite the most disturbing speech in the debate.

Sir Roger's speech will probably tell for more against the Government than Mr Amery's, which followed, but Mr Amery's speech was a sustained and harsh denunciation of the Government for its timidity and ineffectiveness, full of power, and concluding with the savage application to the Government of Cromwell's words to the Long Parliament: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say. Let us have done with you. In the name of God, go."

Mr Amery's philippic was delivered as usual to half-empty benches on his own side, but there was a goodly muster of the Opposition to hear him.

    From The Guardian archive > May 8 1940 > Lessons of Norway, G,
    republished 8.5.2007, p. 28, http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2007/05/08/pages/ber28.shtml

March 15 1938

Britain replies to the Austrian anschluss

From the Guardian archive

While Herr Hitler was making a conqueror's progress through the streets of the Austrian capital yesterday afternoon, Mr. Chamberlain in the House of Commons was announcing that Germany's actions would force Britain to take still further defence measures.

The Premier's words were: "I am confident that we shall be supported in asking that no one, whatever his preconceived notions may be, shall regard himself as being excluded from any extension of the national effort which may be called for.

"In regard to our defence programmes, we have always made it clear that they were flexible and they would have to be reviewed from time to time in the light of any new development in the international situation. It would be idle to pretend that the recent events do not constitute a change of the kind we had in mind."

Mr. Chamberlain brushed aside the official German pretences that "forcible pressure" was not exerted by the Reich. Mr. Chamberlain declared that the methods adopted by Germany throughout these events "call for the severest condemnation," and must prejudice the Government's hope of promoting international co-operation.

The Premier's reference to the "national effort" was not a hint of the possibility of military or industrial conscription. Mr. R. A. Butler, in making this clear in his speech closing the debate, also indicated that it was in the Air Force programme that expansion or acceleration may be contemplated.

The Premier, it was further explained, was referring to "certain inconveniences and perhaps sacrifices," which employers and work people would no doubt be asked to accept in the national interest if the Government decided upon these measures.

The Prime Minister's announcement about defence follows only a week after he had informed the country that the figure of £1,500,000,000 contemplated for the defence estimates would have to be substantially increased.

Mr. Chamberlain recounted in his speech the German assurances to Czecho-Slovakia, but said nothing of the British position.

Yesterday, France gave Czecho-Slovakia a solemn pledge that she is determined to honour her agreement in the event of attack. The pledge was given by M Blum, the Premier, and M Paul-Boncour, the Foreign Minister, to the Czecho-Slovak Minister in Paris, and the French Ambassador in London was instructed to inform the British Government of this determination.

    From the Guardian archive > March 15 1938 > Britain replies to the Austrian anschluss, G,
    Republished 15.3.2007, p. 40, http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2007/03/15/pages/ber40.shtml

June 12, 1917

Shaw objects to hard labour for pacifists

From The Guardian archive

Tuesday June 12, 1917
Guardian

Sir, - The announcement that a sentence of two years' hard labour has been passed upon Mr. Clifford Al1en raises the question whether the press and public, in accepting the news without protest or comment, are acting advisedly. Imprisonment with hard labour is the most severe form of incarceration practised in England. A sentence of two years is regarded as reaching the limit of endurance. When terms of imprisonment exceeding two years are called for the prisoner is sent to penal servitude. The difference is that a prisoner at the end of two years' hard labour is in a state of exhaustion which could not be prolonged without endangering his life, whereas penal servitude has to be so ordered that men can endure ten or even twenty years of it without physical collapse. It must therefore be clearly understood that a prisoner can be killed by sentencing him to hard labour for a continuing offence.Thus Mr. Clifford Allen, having already served a severe term of hard labour, is virtually under sentence of death. Is It the intention of the Government? If so, there is nothing more to be said. It may be so, for it is a matter of daily experience that many people think that such a death is too good for a conscientious objector, and do not hesitate to say as much. But are these vicarious zealots in the majority? Why are the scruples and personal rights of the objectors treated with pedantic respect when they operate to the dis­advantage of the objector, and overridden by force when they have the contrary effect? Mr. Stephen Hobhouse refuses to submit to medical examination. Why was he not examined by force? Objectors refusing to put on uniform have been forcibly clad. Women refusing their dinners have been forcibly fed. Your columns have just reported the case of an invalid recruit who was stripped naked and prevented from sitting near the fire. He is now dead. Yet when Mr. Hobhouse objects, his wishes and his person are regarded as sacred, and the authorities, deploring his obstinacy, consign him to hard labour for life. Anyhow, here are two gentlemen in a fair way to be killed because the public has no knowledge and the authorities no sense. If we wish to kill them, cannot we shoot them out of hand and have done with it, Dublin fashion? Yours, &c., G. BERNARD SHAW

[Allen, later the pacifist socialist peer Lord Allen of Hurtwood,

developed spinal tuberculosisis and was released after 16 months.

Hobhouse, nephew of the Guardian leader writer LT Hobhouse,

was chairman of the Quaker committee for helping enemy aliens.

He too was freed early because of ill health .]

    From The Guardian archive > June 12, 1917 > Shaw objects to hard labour for pacifists, G,
    Republished 12.6.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1795748,00.html

On This Day - July 15, 1916

From the Times Archive

The Battle of the Somme has become synonymous with

the horrors of trench warfare.

In the midst of suffering, however, there were humorous interludes.

A SECOND lieutenant in a Yorkshire battalion tells a story of a German dug-out and its occupants. The dug-out was in the first line of trenches taken by the officer’s platoon. The men then went forward to the next trench, and the officer, being hit, had to stay behind. The rest of the story may be told in his own words: - “After a bit I wriggled back to that Boche front line into a shallow sap. I was resting there when I saw a Boche officer come climbing out of that big dug-out we’d put the six bombs in. He was peering first one way and then the other, like a burglar. “Oh, you beauty!” I thought. A second later he was dead. I charged my breech again, and no sooner done than my next target pops up – a lieutenant. I aimed for his shoulder blades, but the old gun kicked a bit, and I got him through the head.

Then a private came up, with never a weapon of any sort in his hands, and the fear of God in his face. ‘You’re a Boche,’ I thought; ‘and you ought to be shot: but you’ve got nothing in your hands.’ “Here!” I shouted at him.

We went along a passage, turned to the left into a regular boudoir. Dug-out! Why there was Turkey carpet on the floor, and beautiful tapestry curtains to the bunks. There were three cases of beer. There were about a hundred eggs; two cut hams; boxes of cigars; one case of champagne; cakes; and chocolates. I got the batman to help me back to daylight. There wasn’t a living soul in the trench, so I got the batman to take me pick-a-back while I stuck to my rifle.”

    From the Times Archives > On This Day - July 15, 1916, The Times, 15.7.2005,
    http://www.newsint-archive.co.uk/pages/main.asp

April 27, 1903

From the Guardian archive

Monday April 27, 1903
Guardian

Like so many other official documents on South African affairs, Lord Milner's new despatches are belated admissions of unpleasant truths that independent observers have long insisted on in the face of official indifference.

The public were sceptical as to the extent of the devastation of the conquered countries. It was thought that some six hundred farms had been burnt and then the mischief had stopped. Great was the outcry when the Boer Generals in appealing for funds declared that the whole land was laid waste.

But now what is Lord Milner's account? "We began working," he writes, "with the country absolutely denuded of everything."

Lord Milner has a turn for rhetoric and he states the case a little more strongly than a sober and literal-minded Boer would do. A Boer would have mentioned prosaically that there were only a few thousand cattle left, or that many towns were wholly and many partially destroyed.

However, Lord Milner is merely admitting at length what the Boer leaders contended eight months ago. The country when the war ceased was laid waste from end to end. He passes on at once to a further admission. One of the complaints from the Boer side about the administration of relief turned on the condition of the animals supplied to them instead of a money grant out of the three millions.

It was said that the animals taken over from the military were in a miserable plight, and that many died before work could be got out of them. That was thought by many to be a slander, but what, again, does Lord Milner say? "The large number of animals which we took over from the military were for the most part in wretched condition.

"Hundreds of them died before they had done any work at all; many thousands were useless for several months, and were only gradually resuscitated by the greatest care and at considerable expense."

A further complaint came from those who had surrendered during the war under promise of British protection and who nevertheless had their property destroyed later on - sometimes by the British themselves.

We note such admissions in no spirit of controversy, but because we in England have frequently had the argument from common sense checked by the argument from authority. When common sense and knowledge of affairs seemed to show that events were turning out one way, we were told that they were turning in precisely the opposite way. Milner was British high commissioner in South Africa before the Boer war

    From the Guardian archive > Lord Milner: the Boers got their facts right - April 27, 1903, G,
    Republished 27.4.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1762319,00.html

September 26, 1901

The war diary of a Boer family

From the Guardian archive

Thursday September 26, 1901
Guardian

The following extracts from a diary, of the authenticity of which we have obtained sufficient assurance, illustrate one aspect of the process of "clearing" tracts of the country occupied by the enemy.

Amsterdam, New Scotland, February 14 1901. This morning, about eight o'clock, the cavalry of the enemy entered the town, the infantry following.

Every garden and tree was stripped of everything. All the livestock was taken. General Campbell arrived; he was very abrupt. He said they, the English, had come to give us food and protection.

Mother replied that we were quite satisfied with the food and protection our own people afforded us. Then he said we were to be ready to leave the following day at 10 a.m.

Feb. 15. Worse than ever. The Provost Marshal, Capt. Daniels entered the house and began searching. They took what they wanted - soap, candles, mealies & c. even to white sewing cotton. When mother came in, Capt. Daniels turned to her and said, 'Those devils of Boers have been sniping at us again, and your two sons among them, I suppose. If I catch them, they will hang.'

Feb. 17. At dawn Capt. Ballantyne said we would be allowed a quarter of an hour to load, and only to take the most necessary things. Beds, clothing, mattresses, chairs, chests & c., odds and ends of all kinds were burnt. Foodstuffs were also taken. At 9 p.m. we out-spanned in a hard rain. It was pitiful to hear the children crying all night in the wet waggons for water and food.

March 5. Annie very sick. Must be the food, as we have only meat, and mealies when we can pick them.

March 6. Annie very ill all day. A driving misty rain. Oxen with lung sickness are made to pull until they fall down in the yoke to die.

April 19 [in captivity at Volksrust]. Message that Major Watt, Assistant District Commissioner, wanted to see [Mother] at once. Mother, Annie and Polly Coltzer went with the policeman. Major Watt was in a dreadful rage.

'You are Mrs. Cameron?' 'Yes.' 'You are a most dangerous woman, you have been speaking against the British Government. You are an English woman.' 'All my sympathies are with the Boers.' 'Make a note of that. All the concessions we intended making you will be withdrawn. You will not be allowed to receive any parcels.'

April 25. We received the following: 'I beg to inform you that you are to proceed to Maritzburg tomorrow by the 11p.m. train. A waggon shall convey your luggage to the station.'

B. R. Cameron,Prisoner of War, May 31 1901. Green Point, Pietermaritzburg, Natal.

    From the Guardian archive > September 26, 1901 > The war diary of a Boer family, G,
    Republished 26.9.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1881168,00.html

November 17, 1899

Boers wreck a train. Churchill is missing

From the Guardian archive

Friday November 17, 1899
Guardian

On Wednesday an armoured train was derailed near Chieveley and attacked. The escort was composed of half a company of Dublin Fusiliers, and another half company of Durban Light Infantry, 120 of whom are missing. Mr. Winston Churchill is among the missing. The armoured train consisted of, in the front, a flat truck with a seven-pounder gun, manned by a petty officer and five bluejackets from Her Majesty's ship Tartar. It contained 100 men in all. The train was despatched for the purpose of reconnoitring the Boer positions near Colenso and to ascertain the truth of reports that railway track had been destroyed.

The troops were entrained and left Estcourt at six o'clock in the morning. The train ran forward to Chieveley, where a body of the enemy was seen. The enemy opened a cannonade at a range of about 2,000 yards. The Boers also had tilted a rail.

Instantly two of the trucks were overturned and the third was derailed. Many of our men were injured. Mr. Winston Churchill bravely summoned the train hands and volunteers, detached the locomotive, ran back to the front trucks, and then, pushing and pulling, drove through the wreckage.

The infantry opened a rifle fire on the Boers, who were advancing on the west side of the line, and held them in check. [Mr. Churchill] set to work heroically with the engine hands and cleared the debris, and put many of our wounded men upon the locomotive and tender, which, though shelled, got back at ten in the morning. Mr. Churchill remained at Frere to assist the other soldiers.

Meanwhile our bluejackets fired their seven-pounder, the petty officer bravely laying and serving the weapon against the cannonade. He sent three shells bursting among the enemy, who numbered some 500.

The Boers poured shot and shellfire into the crippled train... A shell struck and hurled [the seven-pounder] away, overturning the truck. The only newspaper correspondent present was Mr. Winston Churchill, who distinguished himself by his courageous conduct, as did also Wagner, the driver, and Stuart, the stoker of the engine.

The troops, who had maintained a hopeless fight with great courage, were overpowered. A few managed to escape, but the majority were either killed or wounded or taken prisoners. Mr. Churchill was last seen advancing with a rifle among the Dublin Fusiliers. He is believed to have surrendered himself to cover the retreat.

· Within a year of his highly publicised capture and escape,

Churchill became a Conservative MP at the age of 26

    From the Guardian archive > November 17, 1899 > Boers wreck a train.
    Churchill is missing, G, Republished 17.11.2006,
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1950384,00.html

 

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