Author: Tom Engelhardt

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

Don’t you wonder sometimes why officials in Washington have never paid the slightest attention to that famous old Vietnam-era song lyric, “War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!”? After all, two decades of read more

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

I have to admit that, in 2018, when I first read in the Guardian that, later in this century, the deadliest place for climate-change-induced heat waves read more

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

Back in 2007, in his first piece for TomDispatch, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore focused on the proliferation of self-congratulatory ribbons and medals on the chests of America’s generals. read more

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

What a burst of attention, analysis, and read more

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

It remains the most famous line of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” — and yes, of course, you know what it is:

“Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.”

In a sense, that sums up America’s water problems described so vividly, if painfully, by read more

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

Today, TomDispatch regulars and Pentagon experts William Hartung and Mandy Smithberger consider the way the funding of the U.S. military and the industrial complex that goes with it has headed for what used to be called “the wild blue yonder.” After all, it’s just about the only thing a Congress that can’t otherwise seem to reach an accord agrees about.

In a strange read more

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

Consider it strange indeed that Congress won’t even blink when asked to fund the military — anything military whatsoever. In fact, when the Biden administration suggested a Pentagon budget of a staggering $715 billion for fiscal year 2022, both parties in the House of Representatives responded by insisting on read more

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

In 2006, Newsweek dubbed him “a rising star” and one of the “Jedi knights who are fighting in what [Vice President] Cheney calls ‘the shadows.’” The particular Jedi knight being touted to the skies was Army General Stanley McChrystal, then running the Pentagon’s super-secret Joint Special Operations Command. And such language only multiplied, when, read more

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

Ann Jones began her remarkable book Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan this way: “I went to Afghanistan after the bombing stopped. Somehow, I felt obliged to help pick up the pieces. I read more

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

The request arrived by email, but read as if it were from another age. Would I be open, an executive assistant asked, to having tea with the president of an Ivy League university? A longtime éminence grise, the president, still new to the job, was interested in discussing with a select group of young scholars how to guide this renowned educational institution into read more