Tom Engelhardt

Forget the dead for a moment and think about the living. We’re talking about a minuscule, 25-mile strip of land on which, before recent events began, an estimated 2.4 million people lived, went to school, worshiped, farmed, did whatever. When Israel responded to Hamas’s nightmarish October 7th attack by bombing northern Gaza into rubble and … Continue reading “Israel’s Onslaught of Revenge”

Originally appeared at TomDispatch. Yes, the number of deaths in Gaza in the last seven months is staggering. At least, 35,000 Gazans have reportedly perished, including significant numbers of children (and that’s without even counting the possibly 10,000 unidentified bodies still buried under the rubble that now litters that 25-mile-long stretch of land). But shocking … Continue reading “Constant Killing: The Pentagon’s .00035% Problem”

One, erratic and often unhinged, blew up the U.S.-Iran accord that was the landmark foreign policy achievement of President Obama’s second term. He then ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general visiting Iraq, dramatically raising tensions in the region. The other is a traditional advocate of American exceptionalism, a supporter of the U.S.-Iran agreement … Continue reading “Handling – and Mishandling – the Iran Nuclear Program”

Originally appeared at TomDispatch. I was born on July 20, 1944, barely a year before the world (potentially) ended. On August 6 and 9, 1945, the U.S., which had already been torching Japanese cities from the air, dropped the first atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The explosions were unlike anything humanity … Continue reading “There Is Only One Spaceship Earth”

Originally appeared at TomDispatch When you watch the latest TV news on Israel’s war in Gaza, it feels as if its military had invaded another country. So, it’s important to remind ourselves that the tens of thousands of weapons the Biden administration has been sending to Israel since October 7th, including most recently, as the … Continue reading “Dead on Arrival: Israel’s Blowback Genocide”

Guantánamo? Remind me, what’s that? Oh, wait, how could I have forgotten? It’s that all-American offshore prison of injustice, opened in January 2002, that became the holding area for this country’s prisoners in its “war on terror,” many of whom had been tortured at CIA “black sites” elsewhere on the planet. They had, in a … Continue reading “The Peril of Forgetting Guantánamo”

This originally appeared at TomDispatch. TomDispatch is distinctly a forever-war creation. When I began it almost 23 years ago, the U.S. had just invaded Afghanistan and, of course, there wasn’t the faintest sense that what had been launched then, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on this country, would still be going on globally … Continue reading “US Epic Fail in Niger”

It’s true that no nuclear weapon has been used (except in tests) since the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 to end World War II. And yes, we now know that, were there to be a nuclear confrontation on this planet (think: the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 without the … Continue reading “Failure as the Pentagon’s Ultimate Success Story”

Reprinted from TomDispatch. It’s one of the stranger phenomena on this planet. By 2023, the U.S. was estimated to spend more money on its “defense budget” than the next 10 countries combined. Yes, the next 10! And yet, whether you’re talking about Korea and Vietnam in the last century, or Afghanistan, Iraq, and so many … Continue reading “Cutting the Pentagon Down to Size”

As I write this, more than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and, as Aya Batrawy reported for NPR, thousands more are “unaccounted for – either missing under the rubble, buried hastily in side streets, or decomposing in areas that can’t be safely reached.” Significant numbers of the dead are women and children, and … Continue reading “Gaza: Blocking the Aid Trucks, Letting the Tanks Roll”