Tom Engelhardt

An editor in publishing for the last 25 years, Tom Engelhardt is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War era, now out in a revised edition with a new preface and afterword, and Mission Unaccomplished, TomDispatch Interviews With American Iconoclasts and Dissenters. He is at present consulting editor for Metropolitan Books, a fellow of the Nation Institute, and a teaching fellow at the journalism school of the University of California, Berkeley. Visit his Web site. This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Déjà Vu in Gaza

On the one hand, there’s the madness of devolving Iraq, where dead bodies and sectarian bloodletting are now the daily norm; on the other hand, there’s the eternal madness of the never less than devolving Israeli/Palestinian situation. There, last week, the Israeli government functionally declared Ariel Sharon’s unilateral policy of a no-negotiations withdrawal from Gaza … Continue reading

Karl Rove’s Scheherazade Strategy

Here’s how a Washington Post piece soon after the Supreme Court’s smack-down of the Bush administration’s Guantanamo policies began: “Republicans yesterday looked to wrest a political victory from a legal defeat in the Supreme Court, serving notice to Democrats that they must back President Bush on how to try suspects at Guantanamo Bay or risk … Continue reading

Pentagon Fireworks

One of the least noticed success stories of George Bush’s years in power has been his administration’s ability to focus the world’s attention so singularly first on Saddam Hussein ‘s “nuclear program” – remember that yellowcake brick road? – which had absolutely no basis in reality; then on a meager (though frightening) North Korean nuclear … Continue reading

The Misuse of American History

I recently wrote about Karl Rove’s gamble that Americans would prefer a Green-Zone version of our world to grim political reality and that, in the process of telling “Green-Zone stories” to the public, it was useful if you could also “Green Zone” history – enclosing small parts of the past (like the president’s version of … Continue reading

Running With the Barbarians

As every political junkie in the country now knows, just before finding himself not indicted by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Karl Rove went to a fundraiser in New Hampshire and launched the Republican campaign for the 2006 midterm elections. Its simple goal was to keep a Democratic majority (and so the power to investigate) out … Continue reading

The Imperial Press and Me

[The person who runs TomDispatch is not usually the focus of this space, but I decided to make an exception and run this Nick Turse interview with me. It’s my way of announcing some TomDispatch news: All the interviews I’ve done so far for the site are to be collected into a paperback that Nation … Continue reading

The Iraqi Insurgency and Us

Remember Saddam’s “killing fields”? By now, the Bush administration has turned whole swathes of Iraq into a charnel house. Last week Hala Jaber, a fine British reporter, returned to Baghdad and visited one of today’s killing fields – that city’s morgue into which, from what she calls “the nightly slaughter,” approximately 6,000 corpses have been … Continue reading

The Tripolar Chessboard

Since the British imperial moment of the late 19th century, the image of much of the world – especially Central Asia and the Middle East – as but a set of pawns in a “Great Game” on a geopolitical “chessboard” where the great powers of whatever era are at play has been a commonplace. Many … Continue reading

War Crimes as Porn

The history of war-atrocity snapshots did not start with the Abu Ghraib screensavers from hell. After all, photography itself came into being as the industrializing West was imposing its rule on much of the planet. That imposition meant wars of conquest; and such colonial wars, in turn, meant slaughter. From the moment the wooden sailing … Continue reading

Turning Points and
Ebbing Tides

The press tells us that our “thrilled” president was “conservative” or “carefully guarded,” or expressed “cautious optimism” in responding to the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the smalltime thug, beheader, fomenter of Sunni/Shia civil war, and all-around violent extremist who became an American poster boy for terrorism in Iraq. Who had even heard of him … Continue reading