The aerial bombing of cities is an optional element of strategic bombing, which became widespread in warfare during World War I. The bombing of cities grew to a vast scale in World War II and is still practiced today. The development of aerial bombardment marked an increased capacity of armed forces to deliver ordnance from the air against combatants, military bases, and factories, with a greatly reduced risk to its ground forces. The killing of civilians and non-combatants in bombed cities has variously been a deliberate goal of strategic bombing, or unavoidable collateral damage resulting from intent and technology. A number of multilateral efforts have been made to restrict the use of aerial bombardment so as to protect non-combatants and other civilians.
The history of the United States from 1991 to 2008 began after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The dissolution signaled the end of the Cold War and left the U.S. unchallenged as the world's sole superpower. The U.S. took a leading role in military involvement in the Middle East. The U.S. expelled an Iraqi invasion force from Kuwait, a Middle Eastern ally of the U.S., in the Persian Gulf War. On the domestic front, the Democrats won a return to the White House with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. In the 1994 midterm election, the Republicans won control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Strife between Clinton and the Republicans in Congress initially resulted in a federal government shutdown following a budget crisis, but later they worked together to pass welfare reform, the Children's Health Insurance Program, and a balanced budget. Charges from the Lewinsky scandal led to the 1998 impeachment of Clinton by the House of Representatives but he was later acquitted by the Senate. The U.S. economy boomed in the enthusiasm for high-technology industries in the 1990s until the NASDAQ crashed as the dot-com bubble burst and the early 2000s recession marked the end of the sustained economic growth.
The Saddam–al-Qaeda conspiracy theory was based on false claims made by the United States government, alleging that a highly secretive relationship existed between Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and the Sunni pan-Islamist militant organization al-Qaeda between 1992 and 2003. The George W. Bush administration promoted it as a main rationale for invading Iraq in 2003.
The Iraqi civil war was a civil war fought mainly between the Iraqi government along with American-led coalition forces and various sectarian armed groups, mainly Islamic State of Iraq and the Mahdi Army, from 2006 to 2008. In February 2006, the anti-American insurgency escalated into a sectarian civil war after the bombing of Al-Askari shrine, considered as a holy site in Twelver Shi'ism. US President George W. Bush and Iraqi officials accused Al-Qaeda in Iraq of orchestrating the bombing, although AQI publicly rejected any links to the attacks. The incident set off a wave of reprisals by Shia militants on Sunni civilians, followed by Sunni counterattacks on Shia civilians.
The proposed invasion of Afghanistan prompted protests with mass demonstrations in the days leading up to the official launch of the war on October 7, 2001. The continuation of the war in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021 lead to further protest and opposition to hostilities.
"Little Eichmanns" is a term used to describe people whose actions, while on an individual scale may seem relatively harmless even to themselves, taken collectively create destructive and immoral systems in which they are actually complicit. The name comes from Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi bureaucrat who helped to orchestrate the Holocaust, but claimed that he did so without feeling anything about his actions, merely following the orders given to him.
Ward LeRoy Churchill is an American author and political activist. He was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder from 1990 until 2007. The primary focus of his work is on the historical treatment of political dissenters and Native Americans by the United States government. His work features controversial views, written in a direct, often confrontational style. While Churchill has claimed Native American ancestry, genealogical research has failed to unearth such ancestry and he is not a member of a tribe.
From a Native Son: Selected Essays on Indigenism, 1985–1995 is a 1996 book by Ward Churchill. It is a collection of 23 previously published essays on various topics relevant to the indigenous peoples of the Americas in relation to their experience of being colonized. It is introduced by Howard Zinn.
The Iraq War was a protracted armed conflict in Iraq from 2003 to 2011. It began with the invasion of Iraq by the United States-led coalition that overthrew the Ba'athist government of Saddam Hussein. The conflict continued for much of the next decade as an insurgency emerged to oppose the coalition forces and the post-invasion Iraqi government. US troops were officially withdrawn in 2011. The United States became re-involved in 2014 at the head of a new coalition, and the insurgency and many dimensions of the armed conflict are ongoing. The invasion occurred as part of the George W. Bush administration's war on terror following the September 11 attacks.
The concept of inversion in postcolonial theory and subaltern studies refers to a discursive strategy which opposes or resists a dominant discourse by turning around its categories and re-enacting an asymmetrical relation with the terms the other way around. The term can be used with positive, negative or neutral value-connotations.
The war on terror, officially the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), is a global counterterrorism military campaign initiated by the United States following the September 11 attacks and is also the most recent global conflict spanning multiple wars. The main targets of the campaign were militant Islamist and Salafi jihadist armed organisations such as al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and their international affiliates, which were waging military insurgencies to overthrow governments of various Muslim-majority countries. Other major targets included the Ba'athist regime in Iraq, which was deposed in an invasion in 2003, and various militant factions that fought during the ensuing insurgency.
Gustavus Myers (1872–1942) was an American journalist and historian who published a series of highly critical and influential studies on the social costs of wealth accumulation. His name has been associated with the muckraking era of US literature, somewhat erroneously, since his work was not journalistic, did not aim at popular magazine publication, and took a scholarly, investigative and documentary approach to its subjects.
The siege of Sadr City was a blockade of the Shi'a district of northeastern Baghdad carried out by US and Iraqi government forces in an attempt to destroy the main power base of the insurgent Mahdi Army in Baghdad. The siege began on 4 April 2004 – later dubbed "Black Sunday" – with an uprising against the Coalition Provisional Authority following the government banning of a newspaper published by Muqtada Al-Sadr's Sadrist Movement. The most intense periods of fighting in Sadr City occurred during the first uprising in April 2004, the second in August the same year, during the sectarian conflict that gripped Baghdad in late 2006, during the Iraq War troop surge of 2007, and during the spring fighting of 2008.
The 25 October 2009 Baghdad bombings were attacks in Baghdad, Iraq which killed 155 people and injured at least 721 people.
The September 11 attacks were carried out by 19 hijackers of the militant Islamist terrorist organization al-Qaeda. In the 1990s, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden declared a holy war against the United States, and issued two fatāwā in 1996 and 1998. In the 1996 fatwā, he quoted the Sword Verse. In both of these fatāwā, bin Laden sharply criticized the financial contributions of the American government to the Saudi royal family as well as American military intervention in the Arab world.
The Iraqi insurgency was an insurgency that began in late 2011 after the end of the Iraq War and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, resulting in violent conflict with the central government, as well as low-level sectarian violence among Iraq's religious groups.
The Islamic State of Iraq, previously referred to as al-Qaeda in Iraq, is a militant Salafist jihadist group that aimed to establish an Islamic state in Sunni, Arab-majority areas of Iraq during the Iraq War and later in Syria during the Syrian Civil War.
The Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights, earlier known as the Gustavus Myers Center for Human Rights or The Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America or several other such variations, was an American nonprofit organization that existed from 1984 to 2009. It took its name from American journalist and historian Gustavus Myers and, in particular, from his 1943 work History of Bigotry in the United States. The center was most known for the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, given out each year to ten books. The award, in the words of the center, "commends works published in a given year which extend our understanding of the root causes of bigotry and the range of options we as humans have in constructing alternative ways to share power."
The Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards were literary awards given out each year between 1985 and 2008 by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. Each year ten works were so noted for their treatment of the subjects of bigotry, intolerance, and inequitable power arrangements in society.
