Tom Engelhardt, creator of Tomdispatch.com and author of The United States of Fear, discusses why the US withdrawal from Iraq seemed a lot like defeat, despite the “success” story peddled by Obama; how the ambitious Bush administration, confident of a “cakewalk” victory, never got the “enduring bases” and tens of thousands of permanent occupation soldiers they wanted; a catalog of what the US took home, and what remains behind; Dick Cheney’s reasonable explanation (in 1994) why George H.W....

Tom Engelhardt, creator of Tomdispatch.com and author of The United States of Fear, discusses how the Bush administration’s version of the American Dream is dying on the vine; the dull-eyed Obama administration bureaucrats who have unthinkingly carried on the plans of radical visionaries from the Bush era; how Hillary Clinton’s imperial hubris makes her immune from logical contradictions (e.g.: “US forces are in the Persian Gulf to prevent foreign interference”); and why the Iraq War has...

Tom Engelhardt, creator of Tomdispatch.com and author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, discusses why the Cold War only ended for the Soviets in 1991, as the lone remaining superpower traded the “peace dividend” for 20 years of economic and military unilateralism; Chase Madar’s impassioned mock opening statement for the defense of Bradley Manning, featured at Tomdispatch; the death knell sounding for Pax Americana and US exceptionalism, as client states come under...

Tom Engelhardt, creator of Tomdispatch.com and author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, discusses Tomdispatch writer Nick Turse’s updated estimate of just how many US foreign military bases exist; how the official DOD tally omits bases in Iraq, Afghanistan and most of the Persian Gulf; why, in the age of billion dollar embassies and $130 million fuel depots, the US 'empire of bases' is not economically sustainable; and how your stimulus dollars are being used for...

Tom Engelhardt, author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, discusses the legacy of Blowback author Chalmers Johnson who died November 20, how Johnson changed from a self-described 'spear carrier for empire' to a sharp and authoritative critic of US foreign policy, learning from Blowback that covert ops have real consequences even if Americans don’t realize what is being done in their names, how positive initial book reviews of The Sorrows of Empire somehow failed to...

Tom Engelhardt, author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, discusses American ignorance of the unprecedented US empire of bases, fighting one-sided impersonal wars by remote control, forgotten lessons from George Orwell’s 1984, why the USAF plan to run the world from Guam and Diego Garcia won’t be easy, another Green Zone-style US 'embassy' planned for Islamabad in Pakistan and why the Obama administration seems to be floundering without the intense (if deluded)...

Tom Engelhardt, editor of TomDispatch.com, discusses the multitude of 'other' surges in Afghanistan overshadowed by the troop deployments, the costs excluded from Obama’s 30 billion dollar surge estimate, the unfounded belief that a Democratic president can’t end a war, the difficulty of defining — much less achieving — success in Afghanistan and how Bush’s wars continue even though the geopolitical strategy that created them is gone.

Tom Engelhardt, founder and editor of TomDispatch.com, discusses the mainstream media's reverence of error-prone hawkish pundits, the over-reliance on force in U.S. foreign policy, the large numbers of dead or displaced Iraqis and the Obama administration's disdain for the historical success rate of foreign intervention in Afghanistan.

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...

Tom Engelhardt, proprietor of TomDispatch.com and editor of the new book, The World According to Tomdispatch: America in the New Age of Empire, discusses his recent article 'The Greatest Story Never Told' about the immense permanent military bases the U.S. has built throughout Iraq, how most Americans are oblivious to this, the lack of media coverage of the U.S. bombing escalation of Iraq, how Americans would react if we were attacked, how few Americans grasp the enormous number of civilians...