TomDispatch.com

In 1998, neo-conservative theorist Robert Kagan enunciated what would become a foundational belief of Bush Administration policy.

The Chevron ad began: "It took us 125 years to use the first trillion barrels of oil. We'll use the next trillion in 30. Energy will be one of the defining issues of this century. One thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over..."

The world is full of tales in which morals are hard to extract from facts.

How many Iraqis have died in our war in their country? Is there a better symbol of how the war for Iraq has already been lost than our ignorance about the cost of the war to Iraqis?

Does the Road to the Future End at Dubai? by Mike Davis

Another successful landmark has been reached in our occupation of Iraq: The World Monuments Fund has just placed the country on its list of the Earth's 100 most endangered sites.

It's been a tough year for the U.S. military. But you wouldn't know it from the Internet, now increasingly packed with slick, non-military looking websites of every sort that are lying in wait for curious teens (or their exasperated parents) who might be surfing by. By Nick Turse

Making the World Unsafe for Democracy. By Tom Engelhardt

Republican Congressman Walter B.

John Walcott is proud of his bureau's reporting, and he should be. As my colleague Michael Massing has written in the pages of the New York Review of Books, during the lead-up to the Iraq war Knight Ridder reporters had an enviable and unexampled record of independence and success. By Mark Danner

Imagine that the Pentagon Papers or the Watergate scandal had broken out all over the press -- no, not in the New York Times or the Washington Post, but in newspapers in Australia or Canada.

Bases, Bases Everywhere

Call it Star Wars, parts VII-XXII; but last week, just as Revenge of the Sith was opening galaxy-wide -- multiplexes on Tatooine alone were expected to pull in billions -- reporter Tim Weiner revealed on the front page of the New York Times that a new presidential directive will soon essentially gre

Such an attitude has never been particularly popular in this country. It became downright suspect after September 11, 2001 -- and you of course are the Class of September 11, having arrived here only days before those attacks and the changed world they ushered in. By Mark Danner

Or the Metrics of Losing

With the Iranians threatening to resume some nuclear activities in the near future, their European Union (EU) interlocutors are threatening to break off their six-month long negotiations to resolve the nuclear issue diplomatically.

Politics in an Age of Fiction. By Tom Engelhardt

Vigilantes have always been to the American West what the Ku Klux Klan was to the South: vicious and cowardly bigotry organized into a self-righteous mob.

Millions of cars traverse Baghdad's roads every day, and just a handful of them are carrying suicide bombers. For the Iraqi government and US forces, it's a needle-in-the-haystack problem with few practical solutions.

The 12-man crew out of any World War II movie, including a Jewish technician from Baltimore, a Brooklyn-born staff-sergeant wearing a Dodgers cap, and a tree surgeon from Michigan (Little Boy reminded him of a tree trunk), was officially photographed before the Enola Gay took off on its history-bust

Last February the sirens howled in Hollywood as the LAPD rushed reinforcements to the 5600 block of La Mirada Avenue. While a police captain barked orders through a bullhorn, an angry crowd of 3000 people shouted back expletives.

My Senior Intelligence Source does not believe that Paul Wolfowitz, well known as an amateur artist, actually drew the illustrations (which he hasn't seen).

"The essence of any insurgency, and its most decisive battle space, is the psychological. [It's] armed theater: you have protagonists on the stage but they're sending messages to wider audiences.

For the last few years we have been ruled by lexicographers. Never has an administration spent so much time creating, defining, or redefining terms, perhaps because no one (since George Orwell) has grasped the power and possibility that lay hidden in plain sight in the naming and renaming of words.

"A commission due to report to President Bush this month will describe American intelligence on Iran as inadequate to allow firm judgments about Iran's weapons programs, according to people who have been briefed on the panel's work."

If you happened to be a vice president with the kind of power no vice president has ever had, you might give a passing thought or two to securing some of that oil -- if you were still worried a year-plus later about where it was going to come from.

At the very least, there can be little question that the Iraq invasion and occupation has destabilized the region (as the neocons, who had long assumed that chaos would be their ally, hoped it would).

As everyone knows, the second commandment in the King James edition of the Bible states quite clearly: "Th ou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth below, or that is in the water under the earth."

One of the most difficult things to judge in the world today is the extent of American power.

How about a nuclear-free Middle East? Could the US make that happen? We could if we had moral clarity -- the underpinning necessary to bring it about.