Author: Tom Engelhardt

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Retired U.S. Army Major Danny Sjursen offers a year-ending look at what “forever war” really means in the American experience. To do so, he turns not to the wars in which he personally took part in Afghanistan and Iraq, but to one that took place almost a century before his birth (and, in a fashion, is still ongoing). It was a war in the southern Philippines that most Americans read more

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The other day, after a three-year legal struggle, the Washington Post broke a story about a secret Afghan War project of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Its focus was hundreds of interviews read more

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I was wondering recently: If I’m not watching it anymore, how about you? When, out of curiosity, I went looking in the modern fashion, via Google, I found that there had indeed been increasing numbers of people like me back in 2016 read more

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In case you hadn’t noticed, the climate change news is anything but good. There was that dismal recent United Nations Emissions Gap Report on how far so many countries are from meeting their Paris climate accord commitments on staunching greenhouse gas emissions. Then there was the read more

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In Australia, about as far from Alaska as you can get, rainforests considered too wet to burn have recently been in flames. And that’s no longer an atypical story on this globe of ours. No wonder U.N. Secretary-General António read more

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It was at his “homecoming” rally — he was giving up his old stomping grounds in New York City, including Fifth Avenue, that famed street where he could shoot someone and still “wouldn’t lose voters,” for his Mar-a-Lago resort in the swing state that means so read more

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Many men do monstrous things. And some men are very nearly monsters, capable of killing without compunction or remorse. In the everyday civilian world, we generally seek to lock them up. In war, they have a chance to fully flower. And if they serve in militaries that fight serial conflicts where the laws of war are considered mere suggestions, they can be all that they can read more

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Sometime in September 2007, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore wrote me at TomDispatch to complain about America’s disastrous and already seemingly never-ending war in Iraq. The invasion of that country had taken place more than four years earlier and things had long gone from bad to worse.  That very year, the administration of President read more

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Après Moi, le Déluge…
The Age of Trump, the End of What?
By Tom Engelhardt

French king Louis XV reputedly said, “Après moi, le déluge.” (“After me, the flood.”) Whether that line was really his or not remains unclear, but not long after his death did come the French Revolution. read more

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Think of it as a small miracle of sorts.

This country has now been at war continuously for 18 years, ever since President George W. Bush and his top officials announced a “Global War on Terror” within days of the 9/11 attacks and, not long afterward, launched the invasion of Afghanistan. Iraq, of course, followed. And Somalia. And Yemen. And Libya. And Syria. And drone read more