Author: Tom Engelhardt

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

The War in Questions
Making Sense of the Age of Carnage
By Tom Engelhardt

My first question is simple enough: After 18-plus years of our forever wars, where are all the questions?

Almost two decades of failing American wars across a startlingly large part of the planet and I’d like to know, for instance, who’s been fired for them? Who’s been impeached? Who’s even read more

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When it came to war, this year’s State of the Union Address, given by a president who had, at least in part, been voted into office for criticizing America’s “endless read more

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When I first met Michael Klare in the late Neolithic age (it was actually the early 1970s), he was already researching the U.S. military in a way no one else was doing. His first book on the subject, War Without End: American Planning for the Next Vietnams, had just been published. The title remains eerily apt, given Washington’s twenty-first-century “forever wars.” read more

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I suppose this should shock no one, but as the stresses of climate change grow, they only heighten other stresses already built into this world of ours; new realities, that is, have a tendency to create more extreme versions of some very old ones as well. A new two-year study of the phenomenon by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, for instance, focuses read more

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Here was the headline that recently caught my eye: “Former Top U.S. General Dunford Joining Unicef.”

Okay, you knew it was a joke immediately, right? There’s really only one conceivable headline of that sort when you’re talking about a figure like four-star general Joseph Dunford, read more

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Formerly a pitchman for Pizza Hut and McDonald’s, he became president while eating KFC chicken and later served read more

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Let me say a few words about Greta Thunberg. She’s now 17 and remarkably unfazed by big bullies of all kinds, including President Donald Trump. She entered our world all read more

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What’s the value of an American life in the age of Donald Trump? If you were judging by the death of Nawres Hamid, an Iraqi-American contractor killed in late December after an American base in Iraq was mortared by a Shiite militia believed to have ties to Iran, the answer would be obvious: enough to risk read more

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In late December 2018, when James “Mad Dog” Mattis resigned as secretary of defense after President Trump announced that he was going to pull U.S. troops out of Syria, it was a hell of a story. read more

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In these years, Washington has, in a sense, tortured history.

Early in this century, the Guantánamo Bay detention facility would become the crown jewel of a mini-gulag of torture and mistreatment that the CIA and the U.S. military — remember those infamous photos from Abu Ghraib prison in read more