Tom Engelhardt

From TomDispatch: You know we’re in an increasingly extreme world when a young American airman burns himself to death outside the Israeli embassy in Washington to protest Israel’s nightmarish war in Gaza. (“Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people,” he wrote in an … Continue reading “Is Tehran Winning the Middle East?”

Reprinted from TomDispatch: Make no mistake, artificial Intelligence (AI) has already gone into battle in a big-time way. The Israeli military is using it in Gaza on a scale previously unknown in wartime. They’ve reportedly been employing an AI target-selection platform called (all too unnervingly) “the Gospel” to choose many of their bombing sites. According … Continue reading “‘Emergent’ AI Behavior and Human Destiny”

Originally posted at TomDispatch. War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. So that classic late 1960s song claimed. Still, for Bill Astore and me (and, I have little doubt, Joe Biden, too), such a thought didn’t cross our minds as we played with toy soldiers on the floors of our rooms as kids. I … Continue reading “Bombing Muslims for Peace”

Consider this strange: Seventy-eight years after the first and only nuclear weapons were used on Planet Earth, anyone with half a brain knows that a nuclear war would be an incomparable disaster for this planet and everyone living on it. So, remind me, why the endless nuclear pantomime? Why, as last year wound down, for … Continue reading “Full Speed Ahead on the Global Titanic”

I was uptown in New York City on September 11, 2001, but I still remember the distant smoke that you could see over the Hudson River. If you had told me then that, thanks to those four hijacked planes and a tiny group of al-Qaeda operatives, my country would launch a 20-plus-year “Global War on … Continue reading “Israel, the United States, and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror”

In war, people die for absurd reasons or often no reason at all. They die due to accidents of birth, the misfortune of being born in the wrong place — Cambodia or Gaza, Afghanistan or Ukraine — at the wrong time. They die due to happenstance, choosing to shelter indoors when they should have taken … Continue reading “Remote Warfare and Expendable People”

Originally appeared at TomDispatch: How strange to be living through it a second time, however different the form. I’m thinking, of course, about a devastating set of totally unexpected attacks on one’s homeland. On September 11, 2001, it was the World Trade Center in downtown New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., with … Continue reading “Sunsetting the War on Terror – Or Not”

Originally appeared at TomDispatch: On a picturesque beach in central Gaza, a mile north of the now-flattened Al-Shati refugee camp, long black pipes snake through hills of white sand before disappearing underground. An image released by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shows dozens of soldiers laying pipelines and what appear to be mobile pumping stations … Continue reading “The Killing of Gaza’s Environment”

This hasn’t exactly been a year of good news when it comes to our war-torn, beleaguered planet, but on November 15th, U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping took one small step back from the precipice. Until they talked in a mansion near San Francisco, it seemed as if their countries were locked … Continue reading “The US and China at Year’s End”

In my childhood, we at least acknowledged the ominous existence of nuclear weapons, no matter how weirdly. I’m thinking about those times we kids spent at school “ducking and covering” under our desks, practicing for… yes, the atomic annihilation of New York City by the Soviet Union. Even at 12, I was certainly aware that … Continue reading “What Daniel Ellsberg Knew About Doomsday”