![]() November 21, 2021[Note for TomDispatch Readers: In case you missed the last TDpost, historian Alfred McCoy's stunning new Dispatch Book, his history of empire and imperial orders from the sixteenth century to late tomorrow night (and beyond, given what he writes about our climate-changing future), has just been published. I urge you to pick up a copy of To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change. Believe me, you won't regret it! Of it, Adam Hochschild says, "In an age where most scholars concentrate on a limited specialty, no one sees a bigger picture more brilliantly than Alfred McCoy. In this powerful, enlightening, and frightening book he gives us a magisterial view of the empires of the past -- and of the force in our future which promises to dwarf them all.” And Jeremy Scahill writes, "McCoy’s latest book To Govern the Globe is a formidable work of scholarship spanning an incredible arc of world history. Yet it is a gripping and fast-paced read that manages to distill the complex history of the rise and fall of world empires into a gripping narrative that is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying." And here's another familiar reminder for those of you who would like to offer some special support (always deeply appreciated) to this site as the year ends. Just visit our donation page and for a minimum of $100 (or, if you live outside the U.S., $150), McCoy will sign and personalize a copy of To Govern the Globe for you and send it your way. Finally, my deepest thanks to all TD readers who have already done either of the above! Tom] Don't you wonder sometimes why officials in Washington have never paid the slightest attention to that famous old Vietnam-era song lyric, "War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!"? After all, two decades of the American "Global War on Terror" (as it was once called) seems, above all, to have acted as a remarkable recruitment poster for terror outfits that, in these years, have spread from Afghanistan across the Greater Middle East and deep into Africa. In some sense, in our time, terror -- ask Afghans now being bombed and murdered by ISIS-K -- isn't so much the cause of war as the price of war. And honestly, I can't help but think that, if he were alive today, Osama bin Laden would be laughing all too hard, since from his point of view no one could have expected a better response to the 9/11 attacks than this country offered when it promptly invaded Afghanistan (with Iraq already in the gunsights of the Bush administration's top officials). Recently, in a striking piece at the American Prospect, Stephanie Savell laid out just how, in these years, Washington's version of militarism has become "the most significant recruiting device for groups that use terror tactics." She focused on Africa where -- no matter what you may have heard -- our forever wars are anything but over. Like today's author, TomDispatch regular Andrea Mazzarino, Savell was a co-founder of Brown University's remarkable Costs of War Project, which has continually produced crucial information on our disastrous wars and their effects that you could find nowhere else, including the stunning costs of, and death toll (especially on civilians) from, those conflicts. Today, in her usual deeply personal and thoughtful way, Mazzarino considers the costs of war for us in this country or, put another way, why it's been so hard for so many in Washington (hi, Republicans! Hi, Joe and Kyrsten!) to imagine spending the sort of money on our needs that they wouldn't think twice about forking over to the military-industrial complex for our wars from hell and the weaponry to pursue them right into a series of horrors, including (as the New York Timesreported recently) the covert killing of women and children in stunning numbers. Tom |