“Musalaheen! Musalaheen!” The child cried twice before turning to run back inside. He peered at me from behind the doorjamb. I stood stunned for a moment, arm extended in front of me. I looked at the glove on my hand, blackened from sewage and dirt, torn apart by razor wire and rocks. I realized, if I were him, I wouldn’t shake my hand either. Musalaheen is the Arabic word for gunslinger. Jason Arment, serving as a Machine Gunner in the United States Marine Corps during Operation Iraqi Freedom, is both gunman and witness in this memoir. Musalaheen is a chronicle of boots on the ground in an occupied land and Arment unflinchingly offers the reader a window into their own complicity in genocidal empire building.

Now included at the end of the book is a link for a web-based program, PDFs and MP3 sound files for each chapter. Over 300 pages ... Developed by I Corps Foreign Language Training Center Fort Lewis, WA For the Special Operations Forces Language Office United States Special Operations Command LANGUAGE TRAINING The ability to speak a foreign language is a core unconventional warfare skill and is being incorporated throughout all phases of the qualification course. The students will receive their language assignment after the selection phase where they will receive a language starter kit that allows them to begin language training while waiting to return to Fort Bragg for Phase II. The 3rd Bn, 1st SWTG (A) is responsible for all language training at the USAJFKSWCS. The Special Operations Language Training (SOLT) is primarily a performance-oriented language course. Students are trained in one of ten core languages with enduring regional application and must show proficiency in speaking, listening and reading. A student receives language training throughout the Pipeline. In Phase IV, students attend an 8 or 14 week language blitz depending upon the language they are slotted in. The general purpose of the course is to provide each student with the ability to communicate in a foreign language. For successful completion of the course, the student must achieve at least a 1/1/1 or higher on the Defense Language Proficiency Test in two of the three graded areas; speaking, listening and reading. Table of Contents Introduction Introduction Lesson 1 People and Geography Lesson 2 Living and Working Lesson 3 Numbers, Dates, and Time Lesson 4 Daily Activities Lesson 5 Meeting the Family Lesson 6 Around Town Lesson 7 Shopping Lesson 8 Eating Out Lesson 9 Customs, and Courtesies in the Home Lesson 10 Around the House Lesson 11 Weather and Climate Lesson 12 Personal Appearance Lesson 13 Transportation Lesson 14 Travel Lesson 15 At School Lesson 16 Recreation and Leisure Lesson 17 Health and the Human Body Lesson 18 Political and International Topics in the News Lesson 19 The Military Lesson 20 Holidays and Traditions

his book, Axis of Resistance: towards an independent Middle East, follows the author’s 2016 book The Dirty War on Syria. It examines the end of the war on Syria and the wider elements of the regional conflict, in particular the prospects for a democratic Palestine, the character of the Resistance and the role of Iran. It draws attention to these broad leitmotifs underpinning each particular history that are key to understanding both the parts and the whole: A single, essentially colonial impetus drives each particular US aggression from Libya to Afghanistan. These hybrid wars utilize propaganda offensives, economic siege warfare, terrorist proxies, direct invasions and military occupations followed by repression via client states. The aim is to keep resistance forces fragmented. Just as each aggression forms part of a broader Washington strategy, similarly the integration of the resistance in particular remains critical to its success. The Resistance has a common character but no idealized personality or ideology. However the common features are a demand for popular self-determination and for accountable social structures that serve broad social interests. "Western policy has been worse than a crime it’s been a blunder.Tim Anderson’s epic study shows what a crime, what a blunder it has been.And how ugly the monster which now stalks the land. My land, your land, the whole of humanity. It is a must read.” GEORGE GALLOWAY, British politician “Axis of Resistance will take its place alongside the few books worth reading on how and by whom the flickering lights of the imperial twilight of ‘the West’ in the Middle East were finally extinguished.” DR. JEREMY SALT, Middle East historian, former professor Melbourne Universit

Quagmire shares a range of voices—men and women, military and civilian—and a range of perspectives from the homeland, the combat zone, and war’s aftermath covering fifteen years of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Is it over? Are we safe yet? What the hell happened? Or, rather, more aptly: What didn't happen? In 2020, we were deceived and misled. Each day offered a new challenge, revealed some new horror, and there was no relief in being told it was simply the nature of the world, the nature of our society. 2020 was the kind of thing that happens to people in textbooks, except it was happening in real time to all of us. We probably need group therapy to make sense of it all, to address our individual and collective wounds. This book is in pursuit of doing just that: Offer some kind of catharsis to the whole ordeal. “2020 is shaping up to be one of the most garbage years in American history. What statement do you want to make about it?” This was the prompt advanced to writers of the essays in this collection, capturing experiences raw and personal, and attempting to make sense of the extraordinary situation we found ourselves in. Very few walked away unscathed. Such a confluence of issues: COVID, Trump, racism, poverty, health under siege, sexism, police brutality, Black Lives Matter, protests, federal troops occupying American cities and beating on citizens, masks and social distancing, businesses shuttered, entire industries closed, schools moved online, major sports halted, and more. As the effects of 2020 continue rippling, the future already begs to know, “What the hell happened that year?” We hope this collection will clarify, or perhaps at least de-fog a bit. Essays as testimony provide an intimate lens, a snapshot in time. And perhaps a way to make sense of some of the chaos, so we can move forward with fresh eyes. Contributors: Rashaun J. Allen, Jason Arment, Rabb Asad, Joe Austin, DeMisty D. Bellinger, John S. Blake, Shannon Brazil, Tracy Burkholder, Suzanne Burns, Brendan Canty, Adrian Ernesto Cepeda, Stacey Y. Clark, Eve Connell, Zaji Cox, Alex Dang, Leah Noble Davidson, Sean Davis, Chris Dupuy, James Jay Edwards, Brian S. Ellis, Jenny Forrester, Kenning JP García, Lauren Gilmore, Dian Greenwood, Joseph Edwin Haeger, Ally Henny, Jackie Shannon Hollis, Gabino Iglesias, Ashley James, Tim Mays, Wryly T. McCutchen, Travis Laurence Naught, Dang Nguyen, Isobel O'Hare, Florencia Orlandoni, Linda Rand, Skyler Reed, Christine Maul Rice, Kate Ristau, Leyna Rynearson, Liz Scott, Kimberly Sheridan, Corie Skolnick, Amoja Sumler, Ben Tanzer, Nancy Townsley, Chris Valle, Ran Walker, Eric Witchey, Ellen Yaffa, Jason Zenobia

At the turn of the century Washington launched a series of invasions and proxy wars against all the independent peoples and states of the region, in the name of creating a ‘New Middle East’. That offensive involved mass propaganda and the use of large proxy-terrorist armies, especially sectarian Islamist groups armed and financed by Washington and its regional allies, especially Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Israel. Resistance to that regional war led to the formation of a loose regional bloc, led by Iran, which is now forming more substantial relations with the wider counter-hegemonic blocs led by China and Russia, in particular the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). West Asia After Washington addresses how, as Washington’s multiple wars for a subjugated ‘New Middle East’ fail, the global order is shifting against the North American giant. China is displacing the USA as the productive and economic center of the world and new global organizations are competing with those created by the Anglo-Americans. It is in this global context we must understand the future of the Arabic and Islamic countries of the Middle East, now often called West Asia in reflection of that new orientation. Among other things, this alliance is making real what North American intelligence has long feared and termed an ‘Iranian land-bridge’, extending to the Mediterranean in the west and as far as China in the east. That ‘land bridge’ between East Asia and Europe centers on Iran, the largest independent state of the region and is, from a Zionist perspective, thought to represent “the most serious long term existential threat to Israel” because it forms a united resistance front in support of the colonized Palestinian people. This book discusses the wars of hegemonic decline, the roots of Western fascism, Zionist cancel culture, the Kurdish card in Syria, the purging of Christians from the ‘New Middle East’, the betrayal of Yemen, and takes us inside Syrian Idlib. Then it looks into the near future, considering Washington’s strategic retreat, the legacy of murdered Iranian Commander Qassem Soleimani, and the possibilities of dismantling Apartheid Israel and the lifting of the siege on Syria and its recovery. The Iranian land bridge to China, Iran’s Resistance Economy, regional integration, and the challenge of multipolarity offer insight into the West Asian region after Washington.

This anthology edited by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Empathy Exams offers “essays that are challenging, passionate, sobering, and clever” (Publishers Weekly). “The essay is political—and politically useful, by which I mean humanizing and provocative—because of its commitment to nuance, its explorations of contingency, its spirit of unrest, its glee at overturned assumptions; because of the double helix of awe and distrust—faith and doubt—that structures its DNA,” writes guest editor Leslie Jamison in her introduction to this volume. The essays she has compiled in The Best American Essays 2017 “thrill toward complexity.” From the Iraqi desert to an East Jerusalem refugee camp, and from the beginnings of the universe to the aftermath of a suicide attempt, these essays bring us, time and again, to the thorny intersection of personal experience and public discourse. The Best American Essays 2017 includes entries by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Lawrence Jackson, Rachel Kushner, Alan Lightman, Bernard Farai Matambo, Wesley Morris, Heather Sellers, Andrea Stuart, and others.

Presents an anthology of the best literary essays published in the past year, selected from American periodicals.

Ensconced in the black hole between childhood and adulthood, a glorious degenerate-grade freedom endures. A rebellion from respectability. An anathema to normalcy. It is the type of defiance that’s hopeful—hurt by the world but looking to reconcile it. Enter Gogo Germaine and her girl gang of delinquents. As manic teens in the ’90s punk scene, they engage in a vivid spectrum of misbehavior—from truancy to tattoos to trespassing. Here, in the underbelly of adolescence, music is God and the rest is a rush of nihilism. Gogo and her friends stumble through sound and fury into questionable firsts at varying degrees of sobriety. Many of us blunder through that black hole. It is a point of universal convergence, manifested by divergent experiences. Gogo’s rebellion may look different from yours, but the soaring highs and visceral lows will be familiar.