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BOOK & the ARTS NOW THAT WE KNOW HOW THE UNITED States' generation-long misadventure in depressing cer's Afghanistan in Craig experience The Whitlock's ended, Afghanistan in 2005, one excellent Army Papers: recounted and offiA Secret History of the War, takes on an elevated salience. From a counterterrorism perspective, the United States is now dependent on the Taliban to live up to their claim that they will not let Afghanistan be used again as a base for global terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda or some successor group. The United States would never have invaded Afghanistan simply to keep the Taliban at bay, but now it had to stay and fight them because it was already there. A decade and a half of grinding counterinsurgency warfare and expensive nation-building efforts later, President Donald Trump made a deal with the Taliban under which the United States would withdraw its forces in 2021. [Extracted from the article]

In 1943, with the war against Japan intensifying in the Pacific, Dr. L.F. Fisser of the National Defense Research Committee designed a tiny incendiary bomb for the use of the U.S. Army Air Force. The two-ounce bomb was to be dropped on Japan affixed to free-tailed bats, of which there happened to be an ample supply in Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico. The bat bombs were to be chilled to hibernating temperature in ice-cube trays, packed 180 to a box and sprung free at a thousand feet above the ground, where they would thaw and, in great hunger, swoop down on the wood and paper homes of Tokyo. Something may be insane, but it is only crackpot when it doesn't work. Another plan to bring the total warfare concept to the Japanese capital was conceived by General Curtis LeMay.

The article criticizes Francis Fukuyama's paper "The End of History?" The paper has not even a word on the economy of war for one thing, or on the national security state. It may be true that millions of people across the globe now yearn for the standard of living enjoyed by the American middle class, but the very existence of this standard, which is flaunted with the same lack of consideration as Fukuyama brings to the study of history, is creating a historic crisis of expectations. Making much of a "victory" in the cold war, which is to say that any fool can declare an end to a conflict the scope of which he vastly exaggerated in the first place, Fukuyama addresses a feverish ode to the joys of the free market.

The author claims that the administration of President George W. Bush sanctioned the use of torture in interrogating Iraqi detainees. So there were WMDs in Iraq after all. They're called digital cameras. Partly because of them, the United States faces one of the most humiliating defeats in imperial history. But there's also a clear paper trail. Not just the long and copiously documented record of US torture, with many of its refinements acquired by the CIA from the Nazis after World War II, but the more recent lineage of encouragement. Within a few days of the Trade Towers going down in September 2001, a vacationing FBI agent told an acquaintance of mine in Puerto Vallarta that detainees in the United States were being tortured. By October of 2001, public opinion here was being softened up for the use of torture. It was not far into the Afghan war that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld made plain his views on prisoners, after horrifying accounts began to surface of the treatment of Taliban POWs. He first said the United States was "not inclined to negotiate surrenders." From spring 2003, the Red Cross was complaining to US Army commanders in Iraq, and later to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in Washington, about frightful treatment of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

Spurred on by post--September 11, 2001 fears, more than a dozen states, from Colorado to Delaware, have passed or are considering restrictions on issuing driver's licenses to noncitizens. Some, like Georgia, Minnesota and New York, may tie license expiration dates to the expiration of immigration papers, as Florida, New Jersey and Kentucky do now. Florida's Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles now sends records of all its transactions to the Federal Bureau of Investigation every night. A Michigan bill would authorize DMV staff to contact federal authorities if there is "reasonable cause" to believe an applicant is an illegal alien.