Tag: Tom Engelhardt
Tom Engelhardt: Filling the Empty Battlefield
April 2013A new book from Jeremy Scahill, America’s blowback reporter.
Tom Engelhardt: The Enemy-Industrial Complex
April 2013How to turn a world lacking in enemies into the most threatening place in the universe.
Tom Engelhardt: Where Is Everybody?
March 2013Why it’s so tough to get your head around climate change.
Tom Engelhardt: Dumb and Dumber
February 2013A secret CIA drone base, a blowback world, and why Washington has no learning curve.
Tom Engelhardt: The American Lockdown State
February 2013Post-Legal drones, the Bin Laden tax, and other wonders of our American world.
Tom Engelhardt: The Pentagon as a Global NRA
January 2013For Washington, there is no arms control abroad.
Tom Engelhardt: The U.S. Intelligence Community’s New Year’s Wish
January 2013Megatrends, game-changers, black swans, tectonic shifts, and a world not that different from 2012.
Tom Engelhardt: The Barack Obama Story
December 2012An open letter to the community organizer and Constitutional law professor who became a robot President.
Tom Engelhardt: Democratic Mockpocalypse
October 2012This year’s presidential campaign is bigger and louder than anything we’ve ever seen before.
Tom Engelhardt: Obama Against the World
September 2012Forget Mitt Romney, can the president make it to November 7?
Tom Engelhardt: Monopolizing War?
September 2012War has become a sort of American monopoly–but the American people don’t seem to know, or care.
Tom Engelhardt: Mission Failure: Afghanistan
August 2012A message written in blood that no one wants to hear.
Tom Engelhardt: The Military Solution
July 2012A process of militarization is working its way through all facets of American government, and it’s not likely to stop any time soon.
Tom Engelhardt: It Couldn’t Happen Here, It Does Happen There
June 2012The value of American—and Afghan—lives.
Tom Engelhardt: Praying at the Church of St. Drone
June 2012An unprecedented expansion of authority has created a new role for the president: Assassin-in-Chief.
Tom Engelhardt: America as a Shining Drone Upon a Hill
May 2012On staring death in the face and not noticing.
Tom Engelhardt: The Afghan Syndrome
April 2012Vietnam has left town, say “hello” to the new syndrome on the block.
Tom Engelhardt: Drone Warfare and the United States of Fear
April 2012Anis Shivani interviews Tom Engelhardt, creator of TomDispatch, about how today’s political leaders are leading us toward Soviet-era doublethink and decline.
Tom Engelhardt: The 0 Percent Doctrine
March 2012Obama breaks new ground when it comes to war with Iran.
Tom Engelhardt: Kicking Down the World’s War
February 2012 |
How drones, Special Operations Forces, and the U.S. Navy plan to end national sovereignty as we know it. |
Tom Engelhardt: Iran Through the Looking Glass
January 2012 |
Iranian aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Mexico, and why it can’t happen here. |
Tom Engelhardt: Superpower Adrift in an Alien World
January 2012 |
It’s time for us to realize that none of the crucial problems on this planet are amenable to military solutions, not even by a country willing to pour its treasure into previously unheard of national security expenditures. |
Tom Engelhardt: Lessons from Lost Wars in 2012
January 2012 |
Over the last decade, the U.S. has been taught a repetitive lesson when it comes to ground wars on the Eurasian mainland: don’t launch them. |
Tom Engelhardt: The Four Occupations of Planet Earth
December 2011 |
How the Occupied became the Occupiers. |
Tom Engelhardt: The 1% Election: Their Bread, Our Circus
December 2011 |
How to turn election year into election life. |
Tom Engelhardt: Into the Whirlwind
December 2011 |
After almost nine years of war and occupation, what does Washington have to show for itself? |
Tom Engelhardt: How the Movies Saved My Life
November 2011 |
Seeing the world in black and white (with subtitles). |
Tom Engelhardt: Wall Street by the Book
October 2011 |
A (self-)graduation speech for the occupiers of Zuccotti Park. |
Tom Engelhardt: Bailing Out the Complex
October 2011 |
Is the National Security Complex too big to fail? |
Tom Engelhardt: Washington’s Field of Screams
September 2011 |
In the last decade, there has been only one definition that truly matters: the almost instantaneous post-9/11 insistence that we are “at war,” and not even in a specific war or set of wars, but in an all-encompassing one. |
Tom Engelhardt: Scamming Washington: Exclusive Letters from the ScamiLeaks Archives
September 2011 |
Who knew that the highest officials in Washington receive scam “Nigerian” letters as well? |
Tom Engelhardt: Let’s Cancel 9/11: Bury the War State’s Blank Check at Sea
September 2011 |
Our “ceremonies of hubris” have for the last decade provided a blank check to the war state, so isn’t it time to start talking about how to end them? A call to end our 9/11 ceremonies and rip the Band-Aid off the wound. |
Tom Engelhardt: Details of Secret Pact Emerge: Troops Stuck in Afghanistan Until 2024
August 2011 |
If you thought President Obama was ending the war in Afghanistan, think again. Your children will be fighting it in 2024 if the Pentagon has its way. |
Tom Engelhardt: Could the Pentagon Be Responsible for Your Death? The Military’s Marching Orders to the Jihadist World
August 2011 |
A look at a potentially shocking Pentagon program to influence jihadis online that someone in Congress should investigate fast. |
Tom Engelhardt: Lowering America’s War Ceiling? Imperial Psychosis on Display
August 2011 |
A tour de force exploration of the war crisis that lurks behind the debt-ceiling crisis. |
Tom Engelhardt: How Not to Make Friends in the Greater Middle East: Washington’s Singular Accomplishment
July 2011 |
Be proud, America! In the name of security, the U.S. is spreading fear & hate. |
Tom Engelhardt: Obama’s Bush-League World: Is the Obama National Security Team a Pilotless Drone?
July 2011 |
How George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror fantasies and delusions were embedded in our world and have now become the humdrum norm of Obama policy. |
Tom Engelhardt: The Militarized Surrealism of Barack Obama: Signs of the Great American Unraveling
July 2011 |
What President Obama’s words really tell us about the state of the nation. |
Tom Engelhardt: Nine War Words That Define Our World: “Victory” Is the Verbal Equivalent of a Yeti
June 2011 |
Nine common terms associated with our present wars that probably don’t mean what you think they mean. |
Tom Engehardt: 100 Percent Scared
June 2011 |
The rabble over the E. coli outbreak and terrorism teaches us a lot about how America works. |
Tom Engelhardt: Dumb Question of the Twenty-first Century: Is It Legal?: Post-Legal America and the National Security Complex
May 2011 |
When it comes to acts of state today, there is only one law: don’t pull up the curtain. |
Tom Engelhardt: Bored to Death in Afghanistan (and Washington): Mating Déjà Vu with a Mobius Strip in the Graveyard of Empire
May 2011 |
If nobody told you otherwise, you could easily believe that almost every breaking Afghan story in the last four weeks came from some previous year of the war. |
Tom Engelhardt: Osama bin Laden’s American Legacy: It’s Time to Stop Celebrating and Go Back to Kansas
May 2011 |
When the celebrations and partying over his death fade…we’ll once again be left with the tattered American world bin Laden willed us, and it will be easy to see just how paltry a thing this “victory,” his killing, is almost 10 years later. |
Tom Engelhardt: China as Number One?: Don’t Bet Your Bottom Dollar
May 2011 |
Is it really so illogical to imagine China as the next “sole superpower” on planet Earth? |
Tom Engelhardt: Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark: What It Feels Like When a Superpower Runs Off the Tracks
April 2011 |
Empires live vampirically by feeding off others until, sooner or later, they begin to feed on themselves, to suck their own blood, to hollow themselves out. |
Tom Engelhardt: The Worst That Could Happen
March 2011 |
“And so, for decades, that part of my childhood remained the dark but largely forgotten underside of the golden 1950s. I never thought I’d want it back, but with six nuclear plants threatening to melt down in Fukushima, Japan, I find that I do.” |
Tom Engelhardt: (N)ever Again: Old Secretaries of Defense Never Die, They Just Write Bestselling Memoirs
March 2011 |
It’s time, once and for all, to lock the gates. It’s time to use the U.S. military only in the genuine defense of this country. |
Tom Engelhardt: All-American Decline in a New World
February 2011 |
You might think that, as vast swathes of the Greater Middle East are set ablaze, someone in Washington would take a new look at our Af/Pak War and wonder whether it isn’t simply beside the point. No such luck. |
Tom Engelhardt: Waist Deep in the Washington Quagmire
February 2011 |
If the Obama’s budget is passed, its five-year freeze on domestic programs will reduce spending to the lowest level since Eisenhower left office in 1961. |
Tom Engelhardt: Pox Americana: Driving Through the Gates of Hell and Other American Pastimes in the Greater Middle East
February 2011 |
Almost 20 years after the lesser superpower of the Cold War left the world stage, the “victor” is now lurching down the declinist slope, this time as the other defeated power of the Cold War era. |
Tom Engelhardt: In the Crosshairs, Tuscon-Kabul
January 2011 |
Six are dead in Tucson, and the country is outraged. Sixteen are killed in Kabul, and there’s nary a thought for the deceased. Tom Engelhardt discusses how Americans are quick to protect their own, but care little for Afghan innocents. |
Tom Engelhardt: The Urge to Surge: Washington’s 30-Year High
January 2011 |
It’s easy to forget that war is a drug. But eventually, Washington, the Pentagon, and the U.S. military will have to enter rehab. They desperately need a twelve-step program for recovery. Until then, the delusions and the madness that go with surge addiction are not likely to end. |
Tom Engelhardt: One November’s Dead: The American War Dead Disappear into the Darkness
December 2010 |
The true horror of the casualties of war may lie in the fact that Americans aren’t even calling for an explanation. |
Tom Engelhardt: The National Security State Cops a Feel: Taking Off the Gloves (and Then Everything Else)
November 2010 |
As long as Americans don’t grasp the connections between our war state and our “safety,” things will only get worse |
Tom Engelhardt: How to Schedule a War: The Incredible Shrinking Withdrawal Date
November 2010 |
“In my nineteen fifties childhood, there was a cheesy (if thrilling) sci-fi flick, The Incredible Shrinking Man…In recent weeks, without a radioactive cloud in sight, the date for serious drawdowns of American troops in Afghanistan has followed a similar path toward the vanishing point.” |
Tom Engelhardt: The Stimulus Package in Kabul: (I Was Delusional—I Thought One Monster “Embassy” Was the End of It)
November 2010 |
You must have had a moment when you thought to yourself: It really isn’t going to end, is it? For the author of this post, the U.S. military’s $511 million plan for a massive expansion of the U.S. embassy in Kabul inspired one of those moments of hopelessness. |
Tom Engelhardt: Ballot Box Blues: The Most Dispiriting Election of a Lifetime (Mine)
November 2010 |
“Whether the country I once wanted to represent was ever there in the form I imagined is a question I’ll leave to the historians…What remains, angry or depressed, has made for a toxic brew as well as the most dispiriting election of my life.”—Tom Engelhardt’s ballot box blues for November 2010. |
Tom Engelhardt: Handicapping the Global Midterms
October 2010 |
In the midst of American election frenzy, a one-man tip sheet on the “global midterms”—prospective winners, losers, and those “on the cusp.” |
Tom Engelhardt: The War Addicts: 2016 and Then Some
October 2010Our generals are hooked on spending. Don’t expect them to discipline themselves. They won’t.
Tom Engelhardt: One and a Half Cheers for American Decline: The Future’s Not Ours—and That’s Good News
September 2010Our country may be in decline, but the news isn’t all bad. It’s actually going to feel better to be just another nation, one more country, rather than the nation.
Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse: The American Way of War Quiz: This Was the War Month That Was (Believe It or Not)
September 2010The first TomDispatch American Way of War Quiz. Pit your wits against the best the Pentagon has to offer.
Tom Engelhardt: Will Our Generals Ever Shut Up?: The Military’s Media Megaphone and the U.S. Global Military Presence
September 2010Today, you no longer need to be a retired military officer to offer play-by-play commentary on and analysis of our wars. Though nothing in the record indicates that anyone should listen to what these men have to say, the main narrators of those wars turn out to be none other than the generals running, or overseeing, them.
Tom Engelhardt: What If Washington…?: Five Absurd Things That Simply Can’t Happen in Wartime Washington
August 2010As a boy, Engelhardt loved reading what-if history and science fiction books. Here are his own five what-ifs, five possibilities that—given our world—verge on the fictional.
Tom Engelhardt: The Opposites Game: All the Strangeness of Our American World in One Article
July 2010Historically, it has undoubtedly been the nature of imperial powers to consider every strange thing they do more or less the norm. For a waning imperial power, however, such an attitude has its own dangers.
Tom Engelhardt: Why Are We in Afghanistan?: As Petraeus Takes Over, Could Success Be Worse Than Failure?
July 2010Failure breeds critics, you might say, the way dead bodies breed flies. Or put another way, it’s easy enough to criticize a failing American project, but what about a successful one?
Tom Engelhardt: America Detached from War: Bush’s Pilotless Dream, Smoking Drones, and Other Strange Tales from the Crypt
June 2010With the increasing use of the robotic drone—the Lady Gaga of weapons—America may be instigating the next era of lawless and valorless warfare.
Tom Engelhardt: Call the Politburo, We’re in Trouble: Entering the Soviet Era in America
June 2010As the military continues to hemorrhage money and get drunk with power, the U.S. begins more and more to resemble its once mighty rival, the Soviet Union.
Tom Engelhardt: Yes, We Could Get Out!: Why We Won’t Leave Afghanistan or Iraq
April 2010Washington makes it seem so impossible, but we really could withdraw our massive armies from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Tom Engelhardt: Believe It or Not (2010 Imperial Edition)
April 2010U.S. war-fighting numbers to knock your socks off.
Tom Engelhardt: When Was the Last Time You Visited Iraq?: Exporting American Democracy to the World
March 2010Perhaps the U.S. should think twice before shipping its dysfunctional democracy abroad.
Tom Engelhardt: How to Fight a Better War (Next Time)
March 2010Three fixes for the American way of war.
Tom Engelhardt: Explain Something to Me: Fixing What’s Wrong in Washington… in Afghanistan
February 2010Why does a country that is convinced it’s becoming ungovernable think itself so capable of making another country governable?
Tom Engelhardt: Seven Days in January: How the Pentagon Counts Coups in Washington
February 2010American life is being sacrificed to the very infrastructure meant to provide this country’s citizens with “safety.” That’s what seven days in January really means.
Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse: An American World of War: What to Watch for in 2010
January 2010For Americans, 2010 could be the year of the assassin.
Tom Engelhardt: In Nightmares Begin Responsibilities: Why War Will Take No Holiday in 2010
December 2009As for peacemaking or de-escalation next year, fuggedaboutit…2010: pure loss.
‘No Iraqis Left Me on a Roof to Die’
September 2005Two hurricanes, one of them human, had blown through American life; between them, they had linked the previously unconnected.
Entries for a Devil’s Dictionary of the Bush Era
April 2005Never has an administration spent so much time creating, defining, or redefining terms, perhaps because no one (since George Orwell) has grasped the power and possibility that lay hidden in plain sight in the naming and renaming of words.
