Tom Engelhardt

Whistling Past the Graveyard of Empires

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

It’s the saddest reading around: the little announcements that dribble out of the Pentagon every day or two -- those terse, relatively uninformative death notices: rank; name; age; small town, suburb, or second-level city of...

On Staring Death in the Face and Not Noticing

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com.

Here’s the essence of it: you can trust America’s crème de la crème, the most elevated, responsible people, no matter what weapons, what powers, you put in their hands.  No need to...

Weakling at Home, Imperial President Abroad

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

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...

Vietnam Has Left Town, Say Hello to the New Syndrome on the Block

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Take off your hat. Taps is playing. Almost four decades late, the Vietnam War and its post-war spawn, the Vietnam Syndrome, are finally heading for their American grave.  It...

How the Intelligence Community Is Creating a New American World

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com.

I was out of the country only nine days, hardly a blink in time, but time enough, as it happened, for another small, airless room to be added to the...

Obama Breaks New Ground When It Comes to War With Iran

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

When I was young, the Philadelphia Bulletin ran cartoon ads that usually featured a man in trouble -- dangling by his fingers, say, from an outdoor clock.  There would...

How the U.S. Fanned the Flames in Afghanistan

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Is it all over but the (anti-American) shouting -- and the killing?  Are the exits finally coming into view?

Sometimes, in a moment, the fog lifts, the clouds shift, and you can finally see...

How Drone War Became The American Way of Life

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

In the American mind, if Apple made weapons, they would undoubtedly be drones, those remotely piloted planes getting such great press here.  They have generally been greeted as if they were...

How Drones, Special Operations Forces, and the U.S. Navy Plan to End National Sovereignty As We Know It

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Make no mistake: we’re entering a new world of military planning.  Admittedly, the latest proposed Pentagon budget manages to preserve just about...

It Can’t Happen Here

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Exclusive: New Iranian Commando Team Operating Near U.S.

(Tehran, FNA) The Fars News Agency has confirmed with the Republican Guard’s North American Operations Command that a new elite Iranian commando team is operating in...

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta called it “utterly deplorable.”  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed “total dismay.”  General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was “deeply disturbed” that the actions in question would “erode the reputation of our joint force.”  Marine Corps Commandant General...

These days, with a crisis atmosphere growing in the Persian Gulf, a little history lesson about the U.S. and Iran might be just what the doctor ordered.  Here, then, are a few high- (or low-) lights from their relationship over the last half-century-plus:

Summer 1953: The CIA and British intelligence...

And a Military-First Policy on a Destabilizing Planet

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Here’s the ad for this moment in Washington (as I imagine it): Militarized superpower adrift and anxious in alien world.  Needs advice.  Will pay.  Pls respond qkly.  PO Box 1776-2012, Washington, DC.

Here’s the...

How Two Wars in the Greater Middle East Revealed the Weakness of the Global Superpower

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

It was to be the war that would establish empire as an American fact.  It would result in a thousand-year Pax Americana.  It was to be...

How the Occupied Became the Occupiers

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

On the streets of Moscow in the tens of thousands, the protesters chanted: “We exist!”  Taking into account the comments of statesmen, scientists, politicians, military officials, bankers, artists, all the important and attended to figures...

Their Bread, Our Circus

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Sometimes words outlive their usefulness.  Sometimes the gap between changing reality and the names we’ve given it grows so wide that they empty of all meaning or retain older meanings that only confuse us.  “Election,” “presidential election campaign,”...

Lessons From the Dead in a No-Learning-Curve World

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

He was 22, a corporal in the Marines from Preston, Iowa, a “city” incorporated in 1890 with a present population of 949.  He died in a hospital in Germany...

Seeing the World in Black and White (With Subtitles)

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Every childhood has its own geography and every child is an explorer, as daring as any Peary or Amundsen or Scott. I was the mildest of children, such...

This Is What Defeat Looks Like

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

How about a moment of silence for the passing of the American Dream?  M.R.I.C.  (May it rest in carnage.)

No, I’m not talking about the old dream of opportunity that...

A (Self-)Graduation Speech for the Occupiers of Zuccotti Park

Cross-posted from TomDispatch.com

Once the Arab Spring broke loose, people began asking me why this country was still so quiet.  I would always point out that no one ever expects or...