Author: Tom Engelhardt

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Who even remembers when President Bush — no, not George W. but his father! — exclaimed, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome!” That was in the wake of Operation Desert Storm (aka the First Gulf War of 1991) and it was indeed true that the U.S. military had kicked Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s troops out of Kuwait with remarkable ease. And yes, visually, read more

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Yes, many of its prisoners, swept up in the early days of the war on terror, had committed no hostile acts against this country or its allies (55% of them, according to one study). And yes, they read more

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We — all of us on this planet — now live in one world and only one. Somehow, this remains hard for so many of us to grasp. Yet it’s been true since at least August 6, 1945, when a single atomic bomb obliterated the city of Hiroshima and, lest there were any doubts, three days read more

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Honestly, I wonder why (other than Covid-19) Americans aren’t out in the streets protesting. Oh wait, given that we’ve just “celebrated” the anniversary of January 6th and our world is alive with talk of read more

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For a moment, imagine an upside-down military world. Instead of U.S. guided-missile destroyers and other ships regularly carrying out “freedom of navigation operations” near Chinese-claimed islands in the read more

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In case you haven’t noticed — and I know you have — this country, as I wrote recently, is being (un)built before our very eyes. As a start, an read more

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Yes, it’s true. After 20 years of war — actually, more like 30 years if you count American involvement in the Russian version of that conflict in the 1980s — the U.S. has finally waved goodbye to Afghanistan (at least for now). Its last act in Kabul was the read more

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What Will We Remember of 2022? Nation (Un)Building and Planet (Un)Building, American-Style By Tom Engelhardt

Let me start 2022 by heading back — way, way back — for a moment.

It’s easy to forget just how long this world has been a dangerous place for human beings. I thought about this recently when I stumbled upon a little memoir my Aunt Hilda scrawled, decades ago, in a small notebook. In it, she commented in passing: “I was graduated during that horrible flu epidemic of 1919 read more

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Here’s the question that comes to my mind as 2022 begins: If soon after the global war on terror began — with no special sources of inside information, nothing — I could see perfectly well that it was going to be a disaster, why couldn’t the people who mattered? It’s not like it was magic or something. It was obvious as hell.

And yet the crew running our government read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

My Year and Welcome to ItWhat a Boost(er) It Was for Me! By Tom Engelhardt  

Whether the pandemic that’s swept the world started from a bat or not, as 2021 ends, I think it’s safe to say that we’re all far battier than we were when it began.

In my neighborhood at least, as this year draws to a close, that old Lone Ranger line, “Who was that masked man?,” again applies to just about anyone. In fact, as Delta cases read more