“Maybe I had a brain tumor.” That was NBC News anchorman Brian Williams in 2015 desperately fishing for an explanation when his ever-evolving fantasy claims on national television about his combat experience in the Iraq War were finally exposed. But it wasn’t a brain tumor. In my new book THE EMPIRE OF LIES: Fragments from the Memory Hole I identify Williams as just one more example of a strange malady I call “combat envy.” It doesn’t appear in any standard psychiatric diagnostic manual, but it should. It is a more common and dangerous syndrome than you might suspect. War hero posturing has...

Benjamin Franklin said it best: "There never was a good war, or a bad peace." Now that war is again underway—the third attack on Iran in two years—people of healthy human consciousness must pray that the destruction and carnage is limited. Yet the trajectory appears to be grim. Wars often progress in unexpected ways. The Persian Gulf region is a tangled spaghetti plate of interests including economic, religious, cultural, and geopolitical. None of our politicians have proved capable of comprehending those interests and foreseeing the consequences of their elective wars. President George W....

In the endless parade of Fox News neocons, Ari Fleisher, the press secretary who helped George W. Bush gaslight the American people into the Iraq War, explained recently that while Donald Trump appears to have desisted from fresh attacks on Iran, he’s merely buying time, “waiting to get the correct military options in place.” Stating the obvious was only a prelude to war fomenting. Fomenting is always next. Fleischer offers up the latest regime-change rationale, today’s equivalent of the old Iraqi WMD lies: “Iran is responsible for killing more Americans than any other nation that is in...

Once again, the U.S. global military empire is the father of the fear that it propagates. And this time it’s right here in our own backyard. Just as freezing Russia’s dollar assets has encouraged foreign central banks’ gold accumulation and driven global de-dollarization, leading to President Donald Trump’s veiled threats against those that turn their back on the weaponized dollar, sanctions on Venezuela’s oil production and markets made certain the growing presence of Iran, Russia, and China in our hemisphere. By restricting Venezuela’s access to U.S. capital markets and halting oil imports...