How to Hide an Empire

Though the Chemical Warfare Service ran tests on animals—goats were a favorite—it insisted that all gases and equipment be ultimately tested on humans. Those humans were soldiers, recruited with modest inducements such as extra leave time or appeals to patriotism. They participated in three types of tests. In the drop test, liquid was applied to th

Territory still matters today. Colonialism hovers in the background of politics at the highest level. McCain, Palin, Obama, and Trump have all been touched by it. That may seem like an odd and surprising fact. But we should get over our…

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Despite its origin among Clinton-supporting Democrats, the birther conspiracy theory hopped party lines in the general election. The Fox News host Sean Hannity picked up the issue, as did the CNN host Lou Dobbs. Seventeen Republicans in Congress either suggested that Obama wasn’t born in the United States or voiced a strategic uncertainty.

Like Puerto Rico, the Northern Marianas were subject to some U.S. laws but not others. The federal minimum wage and much of immigration law were waived. The nearest Occupational Safety and Health Administration office was thousands of miles away. At the same time, for the purposes of trade, the Northern Marianas counted as part of the country. The

Bin Laden’s list of grievances against the United States was long, ranging from its support of Israel to Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. (“Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history?” he asked.) But his chief objection, voiced consistently throughout his career, was the stationing of troops in Saudi Arabi

Bin Laden wasn’t the only one thinking along such lines. In 1990 Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, invaded Kuwait. It was a bold and sudden attack. Within four hours of crossing the border, the Iraqi army had reached Kuwait’s capital, attacked the emir’s palace, and set it aflame. Days later, Hussein annexed Kuwait. This gave him control of two

There are about four million people living in the territories today, in Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Marianas. They’re subject to the whims of Congress and the president, but they can’t vote for either. More than fifty years after the Voting Rights Act, they remain disenfranchised. As Guamanians and P

Al-Qaeda’s planes operation seems to have been guided by a larger strategy: provoke the United States, draw it into a war in the Middle East, force infidel governments there into crisis (they would have to either accommodate the unpopular occupiers or fight them), and then defeat the United States on the ground, just as the mujahidin had defeated t

The Bin Ladens built the bases. A Bin Laden would seek to destroy them. Osama bin Laden issued his “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” in 1996, after the Dhahran bombing. On the face of it, this seemed an absurdly imbalanced war: an exile living in a cave complex in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, taking on