Tom Engelhardt

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”

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”