PRESS ROOM

The US military is being hit with a rising tide of suicides, especially among young veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. One veteran of both, analyst Matthew Hoh of the Center for International Policy, says official statistics show -- the risk of suicide rises with exposure to combat, and even more for those who have killed. What this points to, Hoh says, is suicide from what he calls “moral injury,” the sense that your wartime experience led you to betray your personal standards of morality or conduct.

Amb. Robert E. Hunter had a compelling piece on the Lobelog site recently in which he warned that the House Democratic leaders’ choice of the Ukraine issue on which to hang their impeachment hearings for Pres. Trump means that the discussion of both Ukraine and Russia in the U.S. political system has now become seriously polarized.

In 2001 and 2002, Congress passed authorizations for war. While not declarations of war, these mandates, each titled as an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) provided the legal framework for attacks against al-Qaida in 2001 and in 2002 for the Iraq War. Both AUMFs are still in effect. As Congress considers its annual authorization to fund the Pentagon, Sen. Jim Inhofe, as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is in a position of responsibility and ability to repeal these AUMFs.

On 18 November, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States no longer judges the settlements Israel has established in the occupied West Bank to be illegal. Under international law, that announcement - like the Trump administration's earlier determinations that Golan is part of Israel and that Jerusalem is Israel's capital - has no weight.

Somebody ought to put a bullet in her skull. Back in the day, our forefathers would have put a bullet in her [expletive].” These words, uttered by some lost soul — no, wait, I mean a proud American — were directed at U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar earlier this year. He had called her office and talked to a staffer, calling the congresswoman a terrorist and spewing out his death threat on behalf of the fantasy Founding Fathers. He was later arrested.

Wednesday's Democratic presidential debate must go beyond the intensive focus on impeachment that has seized our public debate in recent weeks to address other urgent issues facing the country. There is much to talk about -- health care, the climate crisis, creating well-paying jobs, and more. But one issue that has received short shrift is the need to reduce and refocus the Pentagon's massive budget. With a more realistic strategy and more disciplined spending practices, the country could be made considerably safer while spending less on the Department of Defense. The time is ripe for addressing the issue of overspending at the Pentagon, and the presidential candidates are the right people to do it.

In 2001 and in 2002 Congress passed authorizations for war. While not declarations of war, these mandates, each titled as an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), provided the legal framework for attacks against al-Qaeda and then for the Iraq War.

It may not surprise you to learn that the views of the American public on foreign policy differ substantially from those of the Washington national security establishment. But as a new survey from the Eurasia Group Foundation has shown, the gulf between elite and popular views presents a unique opportunity to rethink American grand strategy, particularly with respect to how to manage the U.S. rivalry with Russia and China.

Key members of the Washington security establishment are clearly unhappy with Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to eliminate the Pentagon’s Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account, which was released as part of her campaign’s plan to pay for Medicare-for-All. The OCO account was originally meant to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but has long since been converted into a slush fund to pay for tens of billions of dollars in projects and activities that have nothing to do with the direct costs of current conflicts. The latest analyst to pile on against the idea of eliminating OCO is Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution.

“Such deals with Saudi Arabia and other Mideast states may be hugely popular with the companies that profit from the trade, but the vast majority of Americans oppose runaway arms trading on the sensible grounds that it makes the world less safe. The question now is: Will Congress play a greater role in attempting to block such weapons deals with the Saudis and human-rights abusers or will America’s weapons-sales addiction and its monopoly position in the Middle Eastern arms trade simply continue, setting the stage for future disasters of every sort?”

The Trump administration's pressure on Ukraine is the center of the impeachment inquiry, but foreign influence expert Ben Freeman says the influence also worked in the opposite direction. "I think in 2020 we are going to see a level of foreign influence on the election that's even higher than what we saw in 2016," he says.

It’s no secret that Donald Trump is one of the most aggressive arms salesmen in history. How do we know? Because he tells us so at every conceivable opportunity. It started with his much exaggerated “$110 billion arms deal” with Saudi Arabia, announced on his first foreign trip as president. It continued with his White House photo op with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in which he brandished a map with a state-by-state rundown of American jobs supposedly tied to arms sales to the kingdom. And it’s never ended. In these years in office, in fact, the president has been a staunch advocate for his good friends at Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics -- the main corporate beneficiaries of the U.S.-Saudi arms trade (unlike the thousands of American soldiers the president recently sent into that country’s desert landscapes to defend its oil facilities).