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and a never ending world spanning war that at a minimum has killed about 300 times the number of people murdered in america on 9 11 then give him credit he was absolutely right days earlier congress had authorized bush to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations organizations or persons he determine d planned authorized committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on september 11 2001 or harbored such organizations or persons by then it was already evident as bush said in his address that al qaeda was responsible for the attacks but it was equally clear that he had no intention of conducting a limited campaign our war on terror begins with al qaeda but it does not end there he announced it will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found stopped and defeated 0 nick turse read more climate crisis at the top of the world global orders and catastrophic change alfred mccoy when midnight strikes on new year s day of 2050 there will be little cause for celebration there will of course be the usual toasts with fine wines in the climate controlled compounds of the wealthy few but for most of humanity it ll just be another day of adversity bordering on misery a desperate struggle to find food water shelter and safety in the previous decades storm surges will have swept away coastal barriers erected at enormous cost and rising seas will have flooded the downtowns of major cities that once housed more than 100 million people relentless waves will pound shorelines around the world putting villages towns and cities at risk as several hundred million climate change refugees in africa latin america and south asia fill leaky boats or trudge overland in a desperate search for food and shelter affluent nations worldwide will be trying to shut their borders even tighter pushing crowds back with tear gas and gunfire yet those reluctant host countries including the united states won t faintly be immune from the pain every summer in fact ever more powerful hurricanes propelled by climate change will pummel the east and gulf coasts of this country possibly even forcing the federal government to abandon miami and new orleans to the rising tides meanwhile wildfires already growing in size in 2021 will devastate vast stretches of the west destroying thousands upon thousands of homes every summer and fall in an ever expanding fire season 0 alfred mccoy read more countdown to world war iii it may arrive sooner than you think michael klare when the department of defense released its annual report on chinese military strength in early november one claim generated headlines around the world by 2030 it suggested china would probably have 1 000 nuclear warheads three times more than at present and enough to pose a substantial threat to the united states as a washington post headline put it typically enough china accelerates nuclear weapons expansion seeks 1 000 warheads or more pentagon says the media however largely ignored a far more significant claim in that same report that china would be ready to conduct intelligentized warfare by 2027 enabling the chinese to effectively resist any u s military response should it decide to invade the island of taiwan which they view as a renegade province to the newsmakers of this moment that might have seemed like far less of a headline grabber than those future warheads but the implications couldn t be more consequential let me then offer you a basic translation of that finding as the pentagon sees things be prepared for world war iii to break out any time after january 1 2027 0 michael klare read more welcome to the martians our world is increasingly like a science fiction novel tom engelhardt who knew that martians inside monstrous tripodal machines taller than many buildings actually ululated that they made eerily haunting ulla ulla ulla ulla sounds well let me tell you that they do or rather did when they were devastating london i know that because i recently reread h g wells s 1898 novel war of the worlds while revisiting an early moment in my own life admittedly i wasn t in london when those martian machines hooting away stalked boldly into that city hungry in the most literal fashion imaginable for human blood no surprise there since that was almost a century and a quarter ago still at 77 thanks to that book i was at least able to revisit a moment that had been mine long enough ago to seem almost like fiction yes all those years back i had been reading that very same novel for the very first time under the covers by flashlight i still remember being gripped thrilled and scared at a time when my parents thought i was asleep and believe me if you do that at perhaps age 12 or 13 you really do feel as if you ve been plunged into a futuristic world from hell ululations and all but of course scary as it might have been alone in the dark to secretly live through the martian desolation of parts of england and the slaughter of countless human beings at their hands actually more like the tentacles of octopi as if they were no more than irritating bugs i was always aware of another reality as well after all there was still the morning guaranteed to come my breakfast my dog jeff my bus trip to school with my friend jim my anything but exciting ordinary life and my sense in the ascendant cold war america of the 1950s of a future extending to the distant horizon that looked boring as hell without even a stray martian in sight how wrong i would turn out to be from the vietnam war years on 0 tom engelhardt read more is there a doctor in the house biden the bold vs joe the timid andrew bacevich is president biden afflicted with the political equivalent of a split personality his first several months in office suggest just that possibility on the home front the president s inclination is clearly to go big when it comes to america s role in the world however biden largely hews to pre trumpian precedent so far at least the administration s overarching foreign policy theme is take it slow joe biden is electrifying america like f d r so proclaimed the headline of a recent nicholas kristof column in the new york times even allowing for a smidgen of hyperbole the comparison is not without merit much like president franklin delano roosevelt during his famous first hundred days in office in the midst of the great depression biden has launched a flurry of impressively ambitious domestic initiatives in the midst of the great pandemic an american rescue plan an american jobs plan an american families plan and most recently an environmental restoration program marketed as america the beautiful 0 andrew bacevich read more reframing america s role in the world the specter of isolationism andrew bacevich the so called age of trump is also an age of instantly forgotten bestselling books especially ones purporting to provide the inside scoop on what goes on within donald trump s haphazard and continuously shifting orbit with metronomic regularity such gossipy volumes appear make a splash and almost as quickly vanish leaving a mark no more lasting than a trout breaking the surface in a pond remember when michael wolff s fire and fury inside the trump white house was all the rage it s now available in hardcover for 0 99 from online used booksellers james comey s higher loyalty also sells for a penny less than a buck an additional forty six cents will get you omarosa manigault newman s insider s account of her short lived tenure in that very white house for the same price you can acquire sean spicer s memoir as trump s press secretary anthony scaramucci s rendering of his tumultuous 11 day stint as white house communications director and corey lewandowski s inside story of the 2016 presidential campaign 0 andrew bacevich read more talking tough and carrying a radioactive stick the nuclearization of american diplomacy michael klare the mq 9 reaper a drone armed with hellfire missiles has been a workhorse in washington s forever wars across the greater middle east and africa but its days could be numbered according to air force magazine that service has grown skeptical that the reaper could hold its own against advanced nations like russia and china which could shoot the non stealthy aircraft down or jam its transmissions while more advanced drones may be coming however the reaper s still where it s at not so surprisingly then that plane is now being repurposed to use not just against afghans or iranians or iraqis or somalis but the chinese that fits with the pentagon s urge to leave those forever wars behind as tomdispatch regular michael klare author of all hell breaking loose the pentagon s perspective on climate change has been writing at this site for a surprisingly long time its top strategists would prefer instead to focus on recreating a nostalgia filled twenty first century version of the cold war one sign of this in recent naval exercises off the california coast in which three reapers performed airstrikes during a simulated amphibious assault on san clemente island the military unit responsible for those planes sported a dramatic new shoulder patch it displayed a reaper over a silhouetted all red map of well yes i guess it must still be red china and if you don t consider that ominous then check out klare s piece today on the nuclearization such a term should exist if it doesn t already of american diplomacy tom 0 michael klare read more murder he said america s maestro of death and destruction tom engelhardt yes when he was running for president he did indeed say i could stand in the middle of fifth avenue and shoot somebody and i wouldn t lose any voters ok it s like incredible then he won and this november 3rd or thereafter whether he wins or loses we re likely to find out that when it comes to his base he was right he may not have lost a vote yes donald trump is indeed a murderer but here s where his prediction fell desperately short as president he s proven to be anything but a smalltime killer it wasn t as if he went out one day on new york city s fifth avenue or even in kenosha wisconsin and shot a couple of people nothing so minimalist for the donald nor is it as if say he had ploughed the beast as his presidential cadillac is known into a crowd of black lives matter protesters as so many other drivers have done this year let s face it that s for his apprentices not the showman himself after all donald j trump has proven to be america s twenty first century maestro of death and destruction the p t barnum of as he put it predictively enough in his inaugural address american carnage in fact he s been a master of carnage in a way no one could then have imagined 0 tom engelhardt read more this vanishing moment and our vanishing future john hersey hiroshima and the end of world nick turse it was the end of the world but if you didn t live in hiroshima or nagasaki you didn t know it not in 1945 anyway one man john hersey brought that reality to americans in an unforgettable fashion in a classic 1946 report in the new yorker magazine on what happened under that first wartime mushroom cloud when i read it in book form as a young man and i did so for a personal reason it stunned me hersey was the master of my college at yale when i was an undergraduate and he was remarkably kind to me that report of his from hiroshima would haunt me for the rest of my life in 1982 i actually visited that city i was then an editor at the publishing house pantheon books i had grown up in a 1950s world in which schoolchildren ducked and covered diving under our desks in drills to learn how to protect ourselves i know it sounds ridiculous today should russian nuclear weapons hit new york the city i lived in yellow signs indicating air raid shelters were then commonplace on the streets in those years people not in cities were building their own personal fallout shelters stocked with food and some even threatened to shoot anyone who tried to join them there as the missiles descended a friend of mine remembers just such a threat delivered by one of his schoolmates about his father s shelter we were in other words in a cold war world that always seemed to be teetering at the edge of the apocalyptic and yet here was the strange thing with the obvious exception of hersey s book there were still in those years remarkably few ways to see under those mushroom clouds that had destroyed the cities of hiroshima and nagasaki 0 nick turse read more fire and fury like the world has never seen 2020 version tom engelhardt it was august 2017 and donald trump had not yet warmed up to kim jong un north korea s portly dictator in fact in typical trumpian fashion he was pissed at the korean leader and no less typically he lashed out verbally threatening that country with a literal hell on earth as he put it they will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen and then just to make his point more personally he complained about kim himself he has been very threatening beyond a normal state only a year and a half later our asteroidal president would of course say of that same man we fell in love still that threat by an american leader to it was obvious launch a nuclear strike for the first time since hiroshima and nagasaki were nearly obliterated in august 1945 was memorable the phrase would in fact become the title of a 2018 bestselling book fire and fury inside the trump white house by journalist michael wolff two years later amid so many other threatening phrases from this president fire and fury has however been left in history s dustbin largely forgotten by the world 0 tom engelhardt read more patton and westy meet in a bar a play of many parts in one act andrew bacevich it s only mid afternoon and army lieutenant general victor constant has already had a bad day 1 soon after he arrived at the office at 0700 the chief 2 had called come see me we need to talk the call was not unexpected any day now potus 3 will announce the next four star to command the war effort in afghanistan how many have there been and constant felt certain that he d be tapped for the job he d certainly earned it multiple tours in iraq and afghanistan and worse still at the pentagon if anyone deserved that fourth star he did unfortunately the chief sees things differently time s up vic i need you to retire thirty three years of service and this is what you get your walking papers with maybe a medal thrown in 0 andrew bacevich read more fourth world or american carnage from a pandemic president tom engelhardt the year was 1991 and the united states was suddenly the globe s lone superpower its ultimate hyperpower the last and greatest of its kind the soon to be indispensable nation the only one left alone utterly alone and triumphant atop the world who could have asked for more or better it had been a cold war fantasy of the first order until that other superpower the soviet union imploded in fact even that doesn t catch the true ...