Peace and Security
Washington Goes AWOL
Grave New World
On the web, Or on the phone, One thing's sure: You're not alone. In my own malcontent civic organization, Veterans For Peace, we've always known we were being watched. We are, after all, against war. And we're impolite enough about it to hold up signs. We've been...
Fantasy Budgeting Won’t Make Us Safer
The watchword in Washington has been "cut" for some time. But the House of Representatives headed in the opposite direction when it adopted its version of the National Defense Authorization bill. The bill authorizes $552 billion in military spending next year. That's...
Locking Up Our Future
Finally, there's a sign that our national passion for locking up more and more Americans could be subsiding. Our "correctional population" is gradually shrinking after decades of robust growth. We had 2.9 million people behind bars in 2011, down from 3.2 million in...
The War on Terror Has Not Made Us Safer
Two days after the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001, I was sitting in front of my institute's office around the corner from the White House. We had just been evacuated again. The police patrolling the streets didn't have a clue what was going on. So we sat on...
A Radioactive Waste of Money
Can a single example illustrate why the federal budget is so hard to get under control? A somewhat obscure nuclear processing plant on the Savannah River in South Carolina might do the trick. The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, known by the awkward acronym MOX,...
Egging On North Korea
As our dust-up with North Korea stumbles inexorably onward, the U.S. media is tearing its hair out over how any sovereign nation could possibly act so irrationally. Well, how about looking in the mirror? North Korea's policies and supreme leader may seem kooky, but...
Charting a New Course on Illegal Drugs
As Manuel, a Colombian farmer, showed me his peppercorn crops ravaged by the defoliant sprayed in a futile effort to kill his neighbor's drug crops, he explained why the Drug War could never be won. No matter how much money or chemicals drug warriors threw at...
How to Help Syria Now
The appalling civil war in Syria is well into its third year. With upwards of 70,000 dead, countless numbers maimed and injured, and millions of refugees, there are recurrent calls for the United States to "do something" to end the mayhem. That "something" is usually...
Our Women in Uniform Deserve Better
Americans have honored our soldiers and those killed in U.S. wars in late May for nearly 150 years. Memorial Day, which became an official holiday in 1868, was originally called Decoration Day and got started when civilian women decided to decorate military graves...
