A History of the World, BRIC by BRIC
Pepe Escobar on rising powers
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.
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Memory Failure at the Pentagon
Call it a mantra, a litany, or a to-don’t list, but the drip, drip, drip of Afghan disaster and the gross-out acts accompanying it have already resulted in one of those classic fill-you-in paragraphs that reporters hang onto for whenever the next little catastrophe rears its ugly head. Here’s how that list typically went after … Continue reading “Memory Failure at the Pentagon”
How to Trump a Superpower
Chalk it up to the genuine strangeness of our second Afghan War. Americans, according to the latest polls, are turning against the conflict in ever greater numbers, yet it’s remarkable how little — beyond a few obvious, sensational events — they know about what’s actually going on there in their name. Take as an example … Continue reading “How to Trump a Superpower”
What the Laws of War Allow
Plenty of killing, says Chase Madar
Why Washington’s Iran Policy Could Lead to Global Disaster
Juan Cole on past Iran interventions
The Afghan Syndrome
Take off your hat. Taps is playing. Almost four decades late, the Vietnam War and its postwar spawn, the Vietnam Syndrome, are finally heading for their American grave. It may qualify as the longest attempted burial in history. Last words — both eulogies and curses — have been offered too many times to mention, and … Continue reading “The Afghan Syndrome”
Joining the Whistleblowers’ Club
The world can be a luckless place, but every now and then serendipity just knocks you off a cliff. In what passed for my real life before TomDispatch intervened, I was (and remain, on a part-time basis) a book editor in mainstream publishing. The “slush pile” in a publishing house is normally the equivalent of … Continue reading “Joining the Whistleblowers’ Club”
Data Mining You
I was out of the country only nine days, hardly a blink in time, but time enough, as it happened, for another small, airless room to be added to the American national security labyrinth. On March 22, Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Jr. signed off on new guidelines allowing … Continue reading “Data Mining You”
Republican Math and the Pentagon Budget
Math has never been my strong suit, but even I can see that the Pentagon — whose officials treat “weapons program” and “cost overrun” as synonyms — has a monster math problem. Not surprisingly, it’s also a place that has never successfully passed an audit. Its top officials have talked endlessly about the giant cuts … Continue reading “Republican Math and the Pentagon Budget”
A New Age of Enemies
Just a couple of days after “Sergeant Massacre” left his base in southern Afghanistan and single-handedly perpetrated the My Lai of the Afghan War, shooting and evidently in some cases stabbing to death 16 Afghan villagers, including nine children, a district police chief in Kapisa Province reported that a NATO air strike had killed three … Continue reading “A New Age of Enemies”