Dear Common Dreams Readers:
Tom Engelhardt
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book is, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World (with an introduction by Glenn Greenwald). Previous books include Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (co-authored with Nick Turse), The United States of Fear, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.
Articles by this author
 |
Views Thursday, August 17, 2017 Pardon Me! High Crimes and Demeanors in the Age of Trump Let me try to get this straight: from the moment the Soviet Union imploded in 1991 until recently just about every politician and mainstream pundit in America assured us that we were the planet’s indispensable nation, the only truly exceptional one on this small orb of ours. We were the sole... Read more |
 |
Views Thursday, July 27, 2017 "Collateral Damage" Isn’t Collateral, It’s Central You would barely know it, living in this country, but the essence of modern warfare is what our military tends to call “collateral damage”: the killing or wounding of civilians, not combatants. The Global War on Terror -- more than 15 years later a no-name set of conflicts still spreading across... Read more |
 |
Views Thursday, July 20, 2017 Empire of Destruction: Precision Warfare? Don’t Make Me Laugh You remember. It was supposed to be twenty-first-century war, American-style: precise beyond imagining; smart bombs; drones capable of taking out a carefully identified and tracked human being just about anywhere on Earth; special operations raids so pinpoint-accurate that they would represent a... Read more |
 |
Views Monday, July 10, 2017 Aiding and Abetting the Tweeter-in-Chief I don’t tweet, but I do have a brief message for our president: Will you please get the hell out of the way for a few minutes? You and your antics are blocking our view of the damn world and it’s a world we should be focusing on! Maybe it was the moment, more than a week ago, when I found myself... Read more |
 |
Views Tuesday, June 20, 2017 The US Military Can’t Get Out (No Matter the Country or the Conflict) Not that anyone in a position of power seems to notice, but there’s a simple rule for American military involvement in the Greater Middle East: once the U.S. gets in, no matter the country, it never truly gets out again. Let’s start with Afghanistan. The U.S. first entered the fray there in 1979... Read more |
 |
Views Tuesday, June 13, 2017 America Last: Will Trump Set a Record for the History Books? In its own inside-out, upside-down way, it’s almost wondrous to behold. As befits our president’s wildest dreams, it may even prove to be a record for the ages, one for the history books. He was, after all, the candidate who sensed it first. When those he was running against, like the rest of... Read more |
 |
Views Monday, May 29, 2017 Little Big Man: Into the Whirlwind He’s huge. Outsized. He fills the news hole at any moment of any day. His over-tanned face glows unceasingly in living rooms across America. Never has a president been quite so big. So absolutely monstrous. Or quite so small. He’s our Little Big Man. I know, I know... he induces panic, fear,... Read more |
 |
Views Sunday, May 14, 2017 Mosul, Thomas Friedman, and the Globalization of Misery The closest I ever got to Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, was 1,720.7 miles away -- or so the Internet assures me. Although I’ve had a lifelong interest in history, I know next to nothing about Mosul’s, nor do I have more than a glancing sense of what it looks like, or more accurately what it... Read more |
 |
Views Thursday, May 11, 2017 The War on Terror Is a War of Chaos Here’s a footnote to America’s present wars that’s worth pondering for a few moments. The U.S. Air Force is running out of ordinary bombs, smart bombs , and in some cases missiles . No kidding. The air war over Syria and Iraq that began in August 2014 and is now two-and-a-half years old has eaten... Read more |
 |
Views Monday, April 24, 2017 The Chameleon Presidency MOAB sounds more like an incestuous , war-torn biblical kingdom than the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, aka “the mother of all bombs.” Still, give Donald Trump credit. Only the really, really big bombs, whether North Korean nukes or those 21,600 pounds of MOAB, truly get his attention. He... Read more |