LOLA board member and retired USAF lieutenant colonel Karen Kwiatkowski reviews Why Peace, a compedium of the best anti-intervention writing edited by libertarian activist, Marc Guttman.  

Washington’s foreign policy elite loves to mock the overuse of the cliché “graveyard of empires,” but it seems as though the last decade of our increasingly failed bid in Afghanistan is littered with lackluster epitaphs for American generals, envoys and diplomats.

When Washington needed women to carry out its two-front war of choice, they were there, lending more than 255,000 female volunteers to the mission. Today, women make up approximately 15 percent of the active duty force and 20 percent of the reserve components.

Last month in this space we discussed the role of top foreign policy/national security think tanks as standard-bearers for the military establishment and political status quo in Washington.

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning — the man accused of blowing a whistle so loud it’s still reverberating through the world two years after the fact — will return before a judge for his court-martial proceedings this month.

“Dismounted complex blast injuries” caused by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Afghanistan are felling our soldiers and Marines so frequently today that men are routinely banking their sperm as another item on the checklist before they deploy for the war.

It’s got to be hard for most Americans looking at the fleeting images of angry Afghans today shouting “death to America” and not think, “What the hell are we still doing there?”

The year began with a story about a 24-year-old ex-soldier who shot and killed a female park ranger at Mt. Rainier National Park in Washington before dying of apparent hypothermia, his body face down in the snow.