Articles by Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch
We found 20 results.
On the Precipice: The Collective Asteroid of Human History
Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch,
23 Sep 2019
17 Sep 2019 – From Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro to the CEOs of all those fossil-fuel companies, we’re still left with the pyromaniacs largely in charge. If they have their way, they will undoubtedly take their pleasures and profits and not give a damn about turning much of this world into an oven for the Greta Thunbergs of the future. Think of this as a planet on the precipice. If Pyromaniacs, Inc., succeeds, if the arsonists are truly able to persevere, there will have been no crime like this in history, none at all.
→ read full articleThe Art of the Trumpaclysm: How the U.S. Invaded, Occupied, and Remade Itself
Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch,
6 Mar 2017
We’re now living in Donald Trump’s America (which I certainly didn’t either predict or imagine in March 2015); we’re living, that is, in an ever more chaotic and aberrant land run (to the extent it’s run at all) by billionaires and retired generals, and overseen by a distinctly aberrant president at war with aberrant parts of the national security state.
→ read full articleWashington’s Military Addiction – And the Ruins Still to Come
Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch,
16 May 2016
But don’t bother to blame the politicians and national security nabobs in Washington for this [their solution — more of the same –militarism]. They’re addicts. They can’t help themselves. What they need is rehab. Instead, they continue to run our world. Be suitably scared for the ruins still to come.
→ read full articleThe Fog of Intelligence: Or How to Be Eternally “Caught Off Guard” in the Greater Middle East
Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch,
19 Oct 2015
1,500. That figure stunned me. I found it in the 12th paragraph of a front-page New York Times story about “senior commanders” at U.S. Central Command playing fast and loose with intelligence reports to give their air war against ISIS an unjustified sheen of success: “CENTCOM’s mammoth intelligence operation, with some 1,500 civilian, military, and contract analysts, is housed at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.
→ read full articleWho Counts? Body Counts, Drones, and “Collateral Damage” (aka “Bug Splat”)
Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch,
4 May 2015
In the twenty-first-century world of drone warfare, one question with two aspects reigns supreme: Who counts? In Washington, the answers are the same: We don’t count and they don’t count.
→ read full articleHow America Made ISIS – Their Videos and Ours, Their “Caliphate” and Ours
Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch,
8 Sep 2014
Looking back, it’s hard not to think of it as a kind of American jihadism and an attempt to establish what might have been an American caliphate in the region. In the process, the U.S. effectively dismantled and destroyed state power in the countries in which it intervened [Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya], while ensuring the destabilization of neighboring countries and finally the region itself.
→ read full articleAmerican Jihad 2014: The New Fundamentalists
Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch,
6 Jan 2014
Imagine what we call “national security” as, at heart, a proselytizing warrior religion. It has its holy orders. It has its sacred texts (classified). It has its dogma and its warrior priests. It has its sanctified promised land, known as “the homeland.” It has its seminaries, which we call think tanks. It is a monotheistic faith in that it broaches no alternatives to itself. It is Manichaean in its view of the world. As with so many religions, its god is an eye in the sky, an all-seeing Being who knows your secrets.
→ read full articleWhy Washington Can’t Stop: The Coming Era of Tiny Wars and Micro-Conflicts
Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch,
28 Oct 2013
Despite this stunning global power equation, for more than a decade we have been given a lesson in what a military, no matter how overwhelming, can and (mostly) can’t do in the twenty-first century, in what a military, no matter how staggeringly advanced, does and (mostly) does not translate into on the current version of planet Earth.
→ read full articleBragging Rights: Eight Exceptional(ly Dumb) American Achievements of the Twenty-First Century
Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch,
30 Sep 2013
It’s indisputable that the bragging rights to American exceptionalism are Washington’s. For those who need proof, what follows are just eight ways (among so many more) that you can proudly make the case for our exceptional status, should you happen to stumble across, say, President Putin, still blathering on about how unexceptional we are.
→ read full articleI Only Regret That I Have But One Life to Give for My Country: Yours
Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch,
12 Aug 2013
The Crime of the Century – Hey, let’s talk spying! In Surveillance America, this land of spookery we all now inhabit, what else is there to talk about? In a sense, Manning and Snowden could be said to have “defected” — from the U.S. secret government to us. However informally or individually, they could nonetheless be imagined as the people’s spies.
→ read full articleTerracide and the Terrarists – Destroying the Planet for Record Profits
Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch,
27 May 2013
We have a word for the conscious slaughter of a racial or ethnic group: genocide. And one for the destruction of the environment: ecocide. But we don’t have a word for the conscious act of destroying the planet we live on. A possibility might be “terracide” from the Latin word for earth. The truth is, whatever we call them, it’s time to talk bluntly about the terrarists of our world. It has the right ring, given its similarity to the commonplace danger word of our era: terrorist.
→ read full articleThe Enemy-Industrial Complex
Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch,
15 Apr 2013
How to Turn a World Lacking in Enemies into the Most Threatening Place in the Universe
→ read full articleAmerican Anniversaries from Hell: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You
Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch,
1 Apr 2013
It’s true that, last week, few in Congress cared to discuss, no less memorialize, the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Nonetheless, two anniversaries of American disasters and crimes abroad — the “mission accomplished” debacle of 2003 and the 45th anniversary of the My Lai massacre — were at least noted in passing in our world.
→ read full articleMonopolizing War? What America Knows How to Do Best
Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch,
17 Sep 2012
Washington may be mobilized for permanent war. Special operations forces may be operating in up to 120 countries. Drone bases may be proliferating across the planet. We may be building up forces in the Persian Gulf and “pivoting” to Asia. Warrior corporations and rent-a-gun mercenary outfits have mobilized on the country’s disparate battlefronts. The American people, however, are demobilized and detached from the wars, interventions, operations, and other military activities done in their name
→ read full articleThe Lessons Washington Can’t Draw From the Failure of the Military Option
Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch,
9 Jul 2012
The Pentagon is, by now, a world unto itself, with a staggering budget at a moment when no other power or combination of powers comes near to challenging this country’s might. Even the once-civilian CIA has undergone a process of para-militarization and now runs its own “covert” drone wars in Pakistan and elsewhere. In a sense, even the military has been “militarized.” In these last years, a secret army of special operations forces, 60,000 or more strong and still expanding, has grown like an incubus inside the regular armed forces.
→ read full articleThe Obama Contradiction: Weakling at Home, Imperial President Abroad
Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch,
30 Apr 2012
He has few constraints (except those he’s internalized). No one can stop him or countermand his orders. He has a bevy of lawyers at his beck and call to explain the “legality” of his actions. And if he cares to, he can send a robot assassin to kill you, whoever you are, no matter where you may be on planet Earth. He sounds like a typical villain from a James Bond novel.
→ read full articleDumb Question of the Twenty-first Century: Is It Legal?
Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch,
6 Jun 2011
Is the Libyan war legal? Was Bin Laden’s killing legal? Is it legal for the president of the United States to target an American citizen for assassination? Were those “enhanced interrogation techniques” legal? These are all questions raised in recent weeks. Each seems to call out for debate, for answers. Or does it? My answer is this: they are irrelevant.
→ read full articleGoodbye to All That: Pox Americana
Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch,
14 Feb 2011
As we’ve watched the dramatic events in the Middle East, you would hardly know that we had a thing to do with them. Oh yes, in the name of its War on Terror, Washington had for years backed most of the thuggish governments now under siege or anxious that they may be next in line to hear from their people.
→ read full articleA World Made by War: How Old Will You Be When the American War State Goes Down?
Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch,
18 Oct 2010
I’ve had two mobilized moments in my life. The first was in the Vietnam War years; the second, the one that leaves me as a nine-year-old, began on the morning of September 11, 2001. I turned on the TV while doing my morning exercises, saw a smoking hole in a World Trade Center tower, and thought that, as in 1945 when a B-25 slammed into the Empire State Building, a terrible accident had happened. Later, after the drums of war had begun to beat, after the first headlines had screamed their World-War-II-style messages (“the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century”), I had another thought. And for a reasonably politically sophisticated guy, my second response was not only as off-base as the first, but also remarkably dumb. I thought that this horrific event taking place in my hometown might open Americans up to the pain of the world. No such luck, of course.
→ read full articleCOULD U.S. AIR STRIKES PUSH PAKISTAN INTO KHMER ROUGE TYPE GENOCIDE?
Pratap Chatterjee and Tom Engelhardt - Tomdispatch.com,
9 Feb 2010
Almost every day, reports come back from the CIA’s “secret” battlefield in the Pakistani tribal borderlands. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles — that is, pilot-less drones — shoot missiles (18 of them in a single attack on a tiny village last week) or drop bombs and then the news comes in: a certain number of al-Qaeda or […]
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