Author: Tom Engelhardt

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

Perhaps the strangest thing about America’s “forever wars” is how little obvious impact they’ve had here. A country — an imperial power, in fact, that liked to think of itself as the planet’s last or “lone” superpower — goes to war for so long (and with so little evident read more

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More than 19 years ago, the U.S. launched the air war that would become the ground invasion and “liberation” of Afghanistan. More than 17 years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared “major combat” over in that read more

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In 1998, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright first referred to the U.S. as “the indispensable nation.” That, of course, was seven years after the Soviet Union had read more

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Only one thing truly hurt him at a gut level, and it wasn’t the endangerment of his vice president in a Capitol attacked by a rabid mob sporting the read more

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For just a moment, let me try to look on the bright side of the storming of the Capitol last week by a mob incited and dispatched by President Trump. When George W. Bush, the president who launched the Global War on Terror and then invaded Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, read more

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America has essentially been at war, nonstop, since the weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Those “forever wars,” as they’re now commonly called, have been both truly distant from and eerily close to us, far away and yet a deeply embedded part of American life. And here, to my mind, is the read more

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The casualty figures sound like they’re from some particularly brutal war, possibly the American Civil War, or as some doctors read more

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As his time in office ends in a mob invasion of the Capitol and an read more

Saying Goodbye to the Con-Man-in-Chief

Demining America After The Donald

By Tom Engelhardt

2021 has indeed begun and god knows what it has in store for us.  But unless, somehow, we’re surprised beyond imagining, The Donald is indeed going to leave the White House soon and, much as I hate to admit it, in some strange fashion we’re going to miss him.  Of course, it will be beyond a great relief to see his… well, let’s just say him in the rearview mirror.  While occupying the White House, he was, read more

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

The American invasion of Iraq began almost 18 years ago in mid-March 2003. By early April, that country’s capital, Baghdad, had fallen and before the month ended the war was considered over and won. On May 1st, President George W. Bush, in the co-pilot’s seat of a Navy fighter jet, landed read more