Tom Engelhardt

What if the unipolar moment turns out to be a planetary moment in which previously distinct imperial events fuse into a single disastrous system?

Climate change, global warming, extreme weather — call it what you will — is the obvious deal-breaker in human, if not planetary, history.

The Washington Post, along with other news outlets, had by “an informal arrangement” agreed two years ago to suppress news of a secret Saudi drone base – at the request of the Obama administration.

No one seems to see the slightest contradiction in an administration that calls for legal limits on advanced weaponry in the U.S., yet is working assiduously to remove barriers to the sale of advanced weaponry overseas.

David Petraeus was always smoke and mirrors, always the farce, even if the denizens of Washington didn’t know it.

Tom Engelhardt reports on the institutionalization of targeting suspected “terrorists” through drone warfare and how this act has evolved under Obama’s presidency.

This article, written before Memorial Day weekend, discusses the U.S. government’s efforts to hide the realities of the Afghanistan war from the greater American public.

For several decades following the Vietnam War U.S. leaders were obsessed with viewing military campaigns through the Vietnam prism, however, the war in Afghanistan indicates that the Obama Administration did not learn the correct lessons from Vietnam and our government no longer views U.S. foreign policy from the perspective of the Vietnam syndrome anymore.

Poverty is not, after all, a cultural aberration or a character flaw. Poverty is a shortage of money.

How Drone War Became The American Way of Life

How Drones, Special Operations Forces, and the U.S. Navy Plan to End National Sovereignty As We Know It

The Complex is forever (at least as its managers see it). Despite modest rumblings in Washington about the Pentagon and intelligence budgets and the deficit, it”s not just considered too big to fail, but generally too big to question, and too deeply embedded to think much about.

When we build those bases on that global field of screams, when we send our armadas of drones out to kill, don’t be surprised if the rest of the world doesn’t see us as the good guys or the heroes, but as terminators.

And here’s the saddest thing: the Bush administration’s most extreme ideas when it comes to Global War On Terror are now the humdrum norm of Obama administration policies — and hardly anyone thinks it’s worth a comment.

In only one area of life are Americans officially considered 100% scared, and so 100% in need of protection, and that’s when it comes to terrorism.

Osama bin Laden had more impact on America than on the Middle East.

Facing the challenges of a world at the edge — from Japan to the Greater Middle East, from a shaky global economic system to weather that has become anything but entertainment — the United States looks increasingly incapable of coping.

Seeing Arabs demanding something we were convinced was the birthright and property of the West, of the United States in particular, has to send a shiver down anyone’s spine.

As we’ve watched the dramatic events in the Middle East, you would hardly know that we had a thing to do with them.

If, as 2011 begins, you want to peer into the future, enter my time machine, strap yourself in, and head for the past, that laboratory for all developments of our moment and beyond.