Columnists

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDGE: A Foreign Policy of Delusion

Conn Hallinan
Friday March 03, 2017 - 10:56:00 AM

In trying to unravel the debates over U.S. foreign policy currently being fought out in the editorial pages of the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the magazine Foreign Policy, one might consider starting in late December on a bitter cold ridge in northern Wyoming, where 81 men of the U.S. Army’s 18th Infantry Regiment were pursuing some Indians over a rocky ridge.

The year was 1866 and the U.S. was at war with the local tribes—Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho—in an attempt to open a trail into the Montana gold fields. The fighting was going badly for an army fresh from the battlefields of the Civil War. Oglala Sioux leader Red Cloud and his savvy lieutenant Crazy Horse did not fight like Robert E. Lee, but rather like General Vo Nguyen Giap a hundred years in the future: an ambush by attackers who quickly vanished, isolated posts overrun, supply wagons looted and burned.

The time and place was vastly different, but the men who designed the war against Native Americans would be comfortable with the rationale that currently impel U.S. foreign policy. In their view, the Army was not fighting for gold in 1866, but was embarked on a moral crusade to civilize the savages, to build a shining “city on a hill,” to be that “exceptional” nation that stands above all others. The fact that this holy war would kill hundreds of thousands of the continent’s original owners and sentence the survivors to grinding poverty was irrelevant.

Is that very much different than the way the butcher bills for the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the overthrow of Libya’s government and the Syrian civil war is excused as unfortunate collateral damage in America’s campaign to spread freedom and democracy to the rest of the world? -more-


THE PUBLIC EYE: Indivisible: Social Action Startup

Bob Burnett
Friday March 10, 2017 - 10:43:00 AM

Some of the most exciting days of my life occurred in the late 80's when I was involved in a technology startup, Cisco Systems. 29 years later I'm involved in another exciting startup, Indivisible. There are fascinating similarities between my experience at Cisco and Indivisible. -more-


ON MENTAL ILLNESS: How Delusions Snowball, and How People Follow their Leader

Jack Bragen
Thursday March 09, 2017 - 11:07:00 PM

The human mind, that of the ordinary, non-afflicted person, is good at fooling itself. If this weren't so, things in society would not be as they are. -more-