Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years, has recently been published.

Blog Entries by Tom Engelhardt

The Afghan Speech Obama Should Give (But Won't)

Posted November 20, 2009 | 10:31 AM (EST)


Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com.

Sure, the quote in the over-title is only my fantasy. No one in Washington -- no less President Obama -- ever said, "This administration ended, rather than extended, two wars," and right now, it looks as if no one in an official capacity is likely...

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Why Military Dreams Fail -- and Why It Doesn't Matter

5 Comments | Posted November 10, 2009 | 05:05 PM (EST)


Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com.

For drone freaks (and these days Washington seems full of them), here's the good news: Drones are hot! Not long ago -- 2006 to be exact -- the Air Force could barely get a few armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the air at once;...

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Too Big to Fail?: Why All the President's Afghan Options Are Bad Ones

7 Comments | Posted November 1, 2009 | 06:26 PM (EST)


In the worst of times, my father always used to say, "A good gambler cuts his losses." It's a formulation imprinted on my brain forever. That no-nonsense piece of advice still seems reasonable to me, but it doesn't apply to American war policy. Our leaders evidently never saw a war...

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Who's Next? Lessons from the Long War and a Blowback World

14 Comments | Posted October 18, 2009 | 06:38 PM (EST)


Is it too early -- or already too late -- to begin drawing lessons from "the Long War"? That phrase, coined in 2002 and, by 2005, being championed by Centcom Commander General John Abizaid, was meant to be a catchier name for George W. Bush's "Global War on...

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War of the Worlds: London, 1898; Kabul, 2009

5 Comments | Posted October 8, 2009 | 12:35 PM (EST)


Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

An unremarkable paragraph in a piece in my hometown paper recently caught my eye. It was headlined "White House Believes Karzai Will Be Re-elected," but in mid-report Helene Cooper and Mark Landler of the New York Times turned to Afghan War commander...

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How to Trap a President in a Losing War: Petraeus, McChrystal, and the Surgettes

39 Comments | Posted September 24, 2009 | 04:51 PM (EST)


Cross-posted with Tomdispatch.com.

Front and center in the debate over the Afghan War these days are General Stanley "Stan" McChrystal, Afghan war commander, whose "classified, pre-decisional" and devastating report -- almost eight years and at least $220 billion later, the war is a complete disaster --...

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Is America Hooked on War?

48 Comments | Posted September 17, 2009 | 03:41 PM (EST)


Cross-posted with tomdispatch.com.

"War is peace" was one of the memorable slogans on the facade of the Ministry of Truth, Minitrue in "Newspeak," the language invented by George Orwell in 1948 for his dystopian novel 1984. Some 60 years later, a quarter-century after Orwell's imagined future bit the...

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Afghanistan by the Numbers

16 Comments | Posted September 8, 2009 | 11:26 AM (EST)


Cross-posted with Tomdispatch.com

Here may be the single strangest fact of our American world: that at least three administrations -- Ronald Reagan's, George W. Bush's, and now Barack Obama's -- drew the U.S. "defense" perimeter at the Hindu Kush; that is, in the rugged, mountainous lands of...

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The Long, Slow Death of American Triumphalism

1 Comments | Posted August 26, 2009 | 03:55 PM (EST)


Crossposted with tomdispatch.com

The Prequel: In my childhood, I played endlessly with toy soldiers -- a crew of cowboys and bluecoats to defeat the Indians and win the West; a bag or two of tiny olive-green plastic Marines to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima. Alternately, I grabbed my...

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Biking Out of Iraq

15 Comments | Posted August 13, 2009 | 01:55 PM (EST)


Cross-posted with tomdispatch.com.

The Bush administration invaded Iraq in March 2003 with a force of approximately 130,000 troops. Top White House and Pentagon officials like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz were convinced that, by August, those troops, welcomed with open arms by the oppressed Iraqis, would be...

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Forgettable Fire: On Not Remembering Hiroshima

17 Comments | Posted August 6, 2009 | 09:44 AM (EST)


Crossposted with TomDispatch.com

As another August 6th has arrived, let me tell you a little story about Hiroshima and me:

As a young man, I was probably not completely atypical in having the Bomb (the 1950s was a great time for capitalizing what was important) on...

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Don't Turn the Page on History: Facing the American World We Created

22 Comments | Posted July 23, 2009 | 03:57 PM (EST)


Crossposted with TomDispatch.com

We've just passed through the CIA assassination flap, already fading from the news after less than two weeks of media attention. Broken in several major newspapers, here's how the story goes: the Agency, evidently under Vice President Dick Cheney's orders, didn't inform Congress that,...

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Borrowed Time: The World at 65

11 Comments | Posted July 20, 2009 | 02:34 PM (EST)


"Being an historian, I am jotting down these notes out of habit; but what I saw and experienced two days ago I am sure no one else as civilized as I am will ever see. I am writing for those who shall come a long time from now."
...

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Will What We Don't Know (or Care to Know) Hurt Us?

9 Comments | Posted July 7, 2009 | 10:32 AM (EST)


Crossposted with TomDispatch.com


Mourning Michael Jackson, Ignoring the Afghan Dead

It was a blast. I'm talking about my daughter's wedding. You don't often see a child of yours quite that happy. I'm no party animal, but I danced my 64-year-old legs off. And I...

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Obama Looses the Manhunters

10 Comments | Posted June 16, 2009 | 11:04 AM (EST)


Crossposted with TomDispatch.com


Charisma and the Imperial Presidency


Let's face it, even Bo is photogenic, charismatic. He's a camera hound. And as for Barack, Michelle, Sasha, and Malia -- keep in mind that we're now in a first name culture -- they all...

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Missing Word, Missing World

3 Comments | Posted June 2, 2009 | 07:01 PM (EST)


Crossposted with TomDispatch.com

Graduating the Rest of Us, '09


Graduates of the Bush years, initiates of the Obama era, if you think of a commencement address as a kind of sermon, then every sermon needs its text. Here's the one I've chosen for today, suitably...

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Going for Broke

5 Comments | Posted May 21, 2009 | 03:00 PM (EST)


Crossposted with TomDispatch.com


Six Ways the Af-Pak War Is Expanding


Yes, Stanley McChrystal is the general from the dark side (and proud of it). So the recent sacking of Afghan commander General David McKiernan after less than a year in the field and McChrystal's appointment...

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Secretary Doomsday and the Empathy Gap

2 Comments | Posted May 7, 2009 | 06:56 PM (EST)


Crossposted with TomDispatch.com


The Everyday Extremism of Washington


A front-page New York Times headline last week put the matter politely indeed: "In Pakistan, U.S. Courts Leader of Opposition." And nobody thought it was strange at all.

In fact, it's the...

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Killing Civilians

Posted April 23, 2009 | 11:48 AM (EST)


Crossposted with TomDispatch.com


How Safe Do You Actually Want to Be?


Almost like clockwork, the reports float up to us from thousands of miles away, as if from another universe. Every couple of days they seem to arrive from Afghan villages that few Americans will...

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Terminator Planet

Posted April 8, 2009 | 12:09 PM (EST)


Crossposted with TomDispatch.com


Launching the Drone Wars


In 1984, Skynet, the supercomputer that rules a future Earth, sent a cyborg assassin, a "terminator," back to our time. His job was to liquidate the woman who would give birth to John Connor, the leader of the...

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