Afghanistan

It was less than three ago that Prime Minister David Cameron announced ‘mission accomplished’ in Afghanistan, yet up to 100 more British soldiers are likely to be sent back to protect Kabul from a resurgent Taliban. Defense sources said the US had called on its allies to contribute more troops and that the UK was in discussions with NATO to settle on numbers, according to a report in the Telegraph RT reports: The news follows a flying visit to Kabul by UK Defence Secretary Michael Fallon on Thursday.

We have just celebrated Memorial Day. Yet even though the United States has continuously been in combat for almost 15 years now—including but hardly limited to two major wars—the original idea of the holiday is steadily being lost. It’s less and less a time to remember and honor the fallen, and more often that day when we celebrate the coming of the warm season and all that entails—vacations, backyard barbecues, and permission to wear white until Labor Day.

Earlier today, a veteran White House correspondent laid out his version of how Obama "gets away with it" in a news cycle when everyone's attention should be glued to the economic failures of the lame duck president. One thing he forgot to mention, however, was the use of such conventional "rally around the flag" tactics as taking out a key symbolic nemesis of the US to drum up patriotic fervor.

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Authored by Noam Chomsky, originally posted at TomDispatch.com,

[This piece, the first of two parts, is excerpted from Noam Chomsky’s new book, Who Rules the World? (Metropolitan Books).]

When we ask “Who rules the world?” we commonly adopt the standard convention that the actors in world affairs are states, primarily the great powers, and we consider their decisions and the relations among them. That is not wrong. But we would do well to keep in mind that this level of abstraction can also be highly misleading.