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.

The Scalping Party

It didn’t take long for the war crimes to begin – in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo, in Iraq. By November 2003, Mike Davis was writing about them for TomDispatch. And in introducing his piece, “The Scalping Party,” I suggested that the seeds of our future were well-planted and already beginning to sprout their monstrous crop. I … Continue reading

The Scourge of Militarism: Rome and America

In September 2003, only four months after our president’s “Mission Accomplished” moment on the USS Abraham Lincoln, it was already evident to some of us that neocon dreams of establishing a robust Pax Americana on the planet were likely to be doomed in the sands of Iraq – but that, in the process, the American … Continue reading

Rummy Rules

In my non-Tomdispatch life as a book editor, I used to have a modest dream. Every season, editors like me send the galleys of books they’re publishing off, en masse, to likely blurbees, who will, if all goes well, reach for their thesauruses, gather their adjectives into serried ranks, and say the best things possible … Continue reading

Bases, Bases Everywhere

The last few weeks have been base-heavy ones in the news. The Pentagon’s provisional Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) list, the first in a decade, was published to domestic screams of pain. It represents, according to the Washington Post, “a sweeping plan to close or reduce forces at 62 major bases and nearly 800 minor … Continue reading

Crossing Nuclear Thresholds

Call it Star Wars, parts VII-XXII; but last week, just as Revenge of the Sith was opening galaxy-wide – multiplexes on Tatooine alone were expected to pull in billions – reporter Tim Weiner revealed on the front page of the New York Times that a new presidential directive will soon essentially green-light the future U.S. … Continue reading

The Return of the Body Count

On March 19, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld discussed the “metrics” of measuring success in Iraq with Steve Inskeep of National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. Here is part of that interview: “NPR: I want to start, Mr. Secretary, with something you said recently. You were at a meeting with troops, taking questions from troops. You … Continue reading

An Iraq Correspondent Comes Home

Dahr Jamail, an independent reporter from Alaska, covered our occupation of Iraq for much of 2004 and the beginning of 2005 before coming home early this year. As a “unilateral,” he was a distinctly atypical figure in Baghdad. Unlike reporters for major papers, wire services, and the TV news, he lacked the guards, vehicles, elaborate … Continue reading

The Smoking Gun Memo

In its June 9 issue (on sale this week), the New York Review of Books will be the first American print publication to publish the full British “smoking gun” document, the secret memorandum of the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair’s top advisors in July 2002, eight months before the Iraq War commenced. Leaked … Continue reading

The Iran Crisis in Global Context

At a moment when the North Koreans claim to have just “harvested a nuclear reactor for weapons fuel,” the latest flare-up in the Iranian/European Union negotiations involving the “Iranian bomb,” well described below by Dilip Hiro, only highlights the increasingly precarious state of nuclear proliferation on our poor planet. It’s almost impossible to tell quite … Continue reading

The Nuclear Renaissance

On Aug. 6, 1945, the day that was to prove the blindingly bright dawn of the atomic age, Little Boy, a 9,700-pound baby with the look of “an elongated trash can with fins,” had already been loaded into the specially prepared bomb bay of a B-29. The night before, in large letters, mission commander Col. … Continue reading