Articles by: Danny Sjursen

The Future of War, American-Style

The Future of War, American-Style

A Bidenesque Tour of America’s Regional and Global Military Adventures Hard as it is to believe in this time of record pandemic deaths, insurrection, and an unprecedented encore impeachment, Joe Biden is now officially at the helm of the U.S. war machine.  He is, in other words, the fourth president to oversee America’s unending and unsuccessful post-9/11 military campaigns.  In terms of active U.S.[Read More…]

by 22/01/2021 Comments are Disabled Imperialism
      Baz Ratner/Reuters US troops in Afghanistan, June 2011

What If They Called an Election and Nothing Changed in the War State?

In this mystifying moment, the post-electoral sentiments of most Americans can be summed up either as “Ding dong! The witch is dead!” or “We got robbed!” Both are problematic, not because the two candidates were intellectually indistinguishable or ethically equivalent, but because each jingle is laden with a dubious assumption: that President Donald Trump’s demise would provide either decisive deliverance[Read More…]

by 23/11/2020 1 comment Imperialism
Trump, Tulsa, and the Rise of Military Dissent

Trump, Tulsa, and the Rise of Military Dissent

It was June 20th and we antiwar vets had traveled all the way to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the midst of a pandemic to protest President Trump’s latest folly, an election 2020 rally where he was to parade his goods and pretend all was well with this country. We never planned to go inside the cavernous arena where that rally was[Read More…]

by 10/07/2020 Comments are Disabled World
 The Future of Forever War, American-Style

 The Future of Forever War, American-Style

  Covid-19, an ongoing global human tragedy, may have at least one silver lining. It has led millions of people to question America’s most malignant policies at home and abroad. Regarding Washington’s war policies abroad, there’s been speculation that the coronavirus might, in the end, put a dent in such conflicts, if not prove an unintended peacemaker — and with good reason,[Read More…]

by 26/05/2020 Comments are Disabled Imperialism
Romance Is the New Realism: Eugene Debs and the Age of Corona

Romance Is the New Realism: Eugene Debs and the Age of Corona

In this pandemic-era, it has become increasingly clear that we are only as healthy as the least insured—hence the poorest—in our society. Eugene Debs delivering a speech in Chicago in 1912. “I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity,” the famous socialist leader once said. “The people are awakening. In due time they will and must come[Read More…]

by 03/05/2020 Comments are Disabled World
 Trump’s Own Military Mafia

 Trump’s Own Military Mafia

Every West Point class votes on an official motto. Most are then inscribed on their class rings. Hence, the pejorative West Point label “ring knocker.” (As legend has it, at military meetings a West Pointer “need only knock his large ring on the table and all Pointers present are obliged to rally to his point of view.”) Last August, the class of 2023 announced theirs: “Freedom Is[Read More…]

by 09/04/2020 1 comment World
Why No Retired Generals Oppose America’s Forever Wars

Why No Retired Generals Oppose America’s Forever Wars

There once lived an odd little man — five feet nine inches tall and barely 140 pounds sopping wet — who rocked the lecture circuit and the nation itself. For all but a few activist insiders and scholars, U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler is now lost to history. Yet more than a century ago, this strange contradiction of a[Read More…]

by 21/02/2020 1 comment Imperialism
The American Chaos Machine: U.S. Foreign Policy Goes Off the Rails

The American Chaos Machine: U.S. Foreign Policy Goes Off the Rails

In March 1906, on the heels of the U.S. Army’s massacre of some 1,000 men, women, and children in the crater of a volcano in the American-occupied Philippines, humorist Mark Twain took his criticism public. A long-time anti-imperialist, he flippantly suggested that Old Glory should be redesigned “with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.” I got[Read More…]

by 24/01/2020 1 comment Imperialism
Landscape

 Remembering America’s First (and Longest) Forgotten War on Tribal Islamists

For a decade and a half, the U.S. Army waged war on fierce tribal Muslims in a remote land. Sound familiar? As it happens, that war unfolded half a world away from the Greater Middle East and more than a century ago in the southernmost islands of the Philippines. Back then, American soldiers fought not the Taliban, but the Moros,[Read More…]

by 18/12/2019 Comments are Disabled Imperialism
Watching My Students Turn Into Soldiers of Empire

Watching My Students Turn Into Soldiers of Empire

Patches, pins, medals, and badges are the visible signs of an exclusive military culture, a silent language by which soldiers and officers judge each other’s experiences, accomplishments, and general worth. In July 2001, when I first walked through the gate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point at the ripe young age of 17, the “combat patch” on one’s[Read More…]

by 08/11/2019 Comments are Disabled Imperialism
A Veteran in a World of Never-Ending Wars and Improvised Explosive Devices

A Veteran in a World of Never-Ending Wars and Improvised Explosive Devices

  Recently, on a beautiful Kansas Saturday, I fell asleep early, exhausted by the excitement and ultimate disappointment of the Army football team’s double overtime loss to highly favored Michigan. Having turned against America’s forever wars and the U.S. military as an institution while I was still in it, West Point football, I’m almost ashamed to admit, is my last[Read More…]

by 23/09/2019 Comments are Disabled Imperialism
A new study from Brown University's Costs of War Project found that the U.S. "War on Terror" has killed half a million people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. (Photo: Spc. Phillip McTaggart/Flickr/cc)

Could Donald Trump End the Afghan War?

Could Donald Trump end the Afghan war someday? I don’t know if such a possibility has been on your mind, but it’s certainly been on the mind of this retired U.S. Army major who fought in that land so long ago. And here’s the context in which I’ve been thinking about that very possibility. Back in the previous century, it[Read More…]

by 29/07/2019 1 comment Imperialism
President Donald Trump meets with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval Office of the White House, Tuesday, March 20, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

 Key American Allies in the Middle East Are the Real Tyrants

American foreign policy can be so retro, not to mention absurd. Despite being bogged down in more military interventions than it can reasonably handle, the Trump team recently picked a new fight — in Latin America. That’s right! Uncle Sam kicked off a sequel to the Cold War with some of our southern neighbors, while resuscitating the boogeyman of socialism.[Read More…]

by 31/05/2019 Comments are Disabled World
Danny Sjursen, On Leaving the U.S. Army

Danny Sjursen, On Leaving the U.S. Army

 “Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners.” — Robert Graves, Goodbye To All That(1929). I’m one of the lucky ones. Leaving the madness of Army life with a modest pension and all of my limbs intact feels like a genuine escape. Both the Army and I knew it was[Read More…]

by 31/03/2019 2 comments World