This post was originally published at TomDispatch.com.

By Peter Van Buren

We had a debate club back in high school. Two teams would meet in the auditorium, and Mr. Garrity would tell us the topic, something 1970s-ish like “Resolved: Women Should Get Equal Pay for Equal Work” or “World Communism Will Be Defeated in Vietnam.” Each side would then try, through persuasion and the marshalling of facts, to clinch the argument. There’d be judges and a winner.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.

By Tom Engelhardt

Americans lived in a “victory culture” for much of the twentieth century.  You could say that we experienced an almost 75-year stretch of triumphalism -- think of it as the real “American Century” -- from World War I to the end of the Cold War, with time off for a destructive stalemate in Korea and a defeat in Vietnam too shocking to absorb or shake off.

Sunday, October 7, marks the 11^th anniversary of the Afghanistan war, now the longest war in U.S. history. This date provides an opportunity to take stock of what a tragic calamity this war is over a decade after its start, and to examine, once again, why military solutions are not effective in solving deep, systemic complexities of a country like Afghanistan.

As the New York Times reported earlier this week, leading members of the U.S. Senate are scrambling to devise a plan that averts automatic sequestration budget cuts scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 2, 2013. What remains to be seen is how any kind of deal will address a massive, wasteful $700 billion-a-year Pentagon budget and not place the bulk of deficit-reduction solutions on slashing vital programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Living Under Drones, a new report by human rights law experts at Stanford and New York University, counters the common rhetoric that the use of drone stikes is a precise and effective tool for making the U.S. a safer place. The report, along with a video produced by Brave New Foundation, aims to open up public discussion on the incendiary U.S. drone policy in Pakistan incorporating the devastating, virtually hidden side effects. Above, John Amick discussed with RT America the importance of Living Under Drones in a media climate more or less dry of any critical reporting on the issue.

This post was originally published at TomDispatch.com.

By Andrew Bacevich

First came the hullaballoo over the “Mosque at Ground Zero.”  Then there was Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida, grabbing headlines as he promoted “International Burn-a-Koran Day.”  Most recently, we have an American posting a slanderous anti-Muslim video on the Internet with all the ensuing turmoil.