Philip Hammond, author of “Darfur: the Dangers of Celebrity Imperialism” in the Spiked Review of Books, discusses the folly of liberal “humanitarian” interventionism, why complicated conflicts like that in the Darfur region of Sudan are often described as “genocide” and why waging empire in the name of helping people never does any such thing.

MP3 here. (36:16)

Philip Hammond, a senior lecturer in media and communications at London South Bank University, is the author of Media, War and Postmodernity.

Tom Engelhardt, editor of TomDispatch and of The World According to TomDispatch, chronicles the failures of the Bush Administration and their misguided faith in the dark side of force, the state of complete catastrophe inside Afghanistan and on its border with Pakistan, the precarious situation in Iraq, Bush’s failure to get Iran to stop enriching Uranium (his standard), how U.S. policy has benefited Hamas and Hezbollah, the worst crisis on earth: the U.S.-caused war in Somalia and the rise of much more radical forces there than those whose power the invasion was meant to thwart.

MP3 here. (23:32)

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.