Articles by Tom Engelhardt – TomDispatch

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Mapping a World from Hell: 76 Countries Are Now Involved in Washington’s War on Terror
Tom Engelhardt – TomDispatch, 8 Jan 2018

4 Jan 2018 – A glance at the map tells you that the war on terror, an increasingly complex set of intertwined conflicts, is now a remarkably global phenomenon.

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The Fourth Branch – The Rise to Power of the National Security State: Who Rules Washington?
Tom Engelhardt – TomDispatch, 15 Sep 2014

As every schoolchild knows, there are three check-and-balance branches of the U.S. government: the executive, Congress, and the judiciary. That’s bedrock Americanism and the most basic high school civics material. Only one problem: it’s just not so.

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Filling the Empty Battlefield – Jeremy Scahill, Blowback Reporter
Tom Engelhardt – TomDispatch, 29 Apr 2013

There was a secret history of twenty-first-century American war crying out to be written. Now, we have it in the form of Scahill’s latest book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. Scahill has tracked, in particular, the rise of JSOC – Joint Special Operations Command. In Iraq, it grew into a kind of Murder Inc., “an executive assassination wing,” as Seymour Hersh once put it, operating out of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. It next turned its hunter/killer methods on Afghanistan and then on the planet, as the special operations forces themselves grew into an expansive secret military cocooned inside the U.S. military.

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Overwrought Empire: The Discrediting of U.S. Military Power
Tom Engelhardt – TomDispatch, 15 Oct 2012

The more dominant the U.S. military becomes in its ability to destroy and the more its forces are spread across the globe, the more the defeats and semi-defeats pile up, the more the missteps and mistakes grow, the more the strains show, the more the suicides rise, the more the nation’s treasure disappears down a black hole — and in response to all of this, the more moves the Pentagon makes.

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Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark
Tom Engelhardt – TomDispatch, 25 Apr 2011

But then, how often do empires end well, really? They 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. Sooner or later, they find themselves, as in our case, economically stressed and militarily extended in wars they can’t afford to win or lose.

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