Tom Engelhardt: Biden's indirect admission highlights the steady decline of American empire

By Dilip -

It was all so long ago, in a world seemingly without challengers. Do you even remember when we Americans lived on a planet with a recumbent Russia, a barely rising China, and no obvious foes except what later came to be known as an "axis of evil," three countries then incapable of endangering this one? Oh, and, as it turned out, a rich young Saudi former ally, Osama bin Laden, and 19 hijackers, most of them also Saudis, from a tiny group called al-Qaeda that briefly possessed an "air force" of four commercial jets. No wonder this country was then touted as the greatest force, the superest superpower ever, sporting a military that left all others in the dust.

And then, of course, came the launching of the Global War on Terror, which soon would be normalized as the plain-old, uncapitalized "war on terror." Yes, that very war — even if nobody's called it that for years — began on September 11, 2001. At a Pentagon partially in ruins, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, already aware that the destruction around him was probably Osama bin Laden's responsibility, ordered his aides to begin planning for a retaliatory strike against… Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Rumsfeld's exact words (an aide wrote them down) were: "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."…

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/biden-american-empire/

Chauncey DeVega: Trump is mentally ill but our real sickness runs much deeper

America isn't breaking. It was already broken. By Andrew Gawthorpe // Why This Time Is Different. By Dahlia Lithwick

TOM ENGELHARDT: A World at the Edge

Is Donald Trump the Second 9/11? Or Is He the Third? By Tom Engelhardt

Trump, Troll-in-Chief, wags the Impeachment Dog by Going to War with Iran

Donald Trump has blundered into a crisis of his own making with Iran. By Mohamad Bazzi

Victor Jara murder: ex-military officers sentenced in Chile for 1973 death

Andrew Bacevich: High Crimes and Misdemeanors of the Fading American Century

Lucian Truscott: Trump wants to end the forever wars - except the one about oil and money

Alfred McCoy: The crumbling delusion of Washington's endless world dominion

William Astore: The U.S. Military’s Lost Wars // Chris Hedges: The American Empire Will Collapse Within a Decade, Two at Most

Tom Dispatch - William Astore, From Deterrence to Doomsday? // C. Wright Mills on The Structure of Power in American Society (1958) // The Week the World Almost Ended by Nate Jones and J. Peter Scoblic

Angela Mitropoulos - Fascism, from Fordism to Trumpism // The hucksters of discontent

DANIEL LEWIS - Daniel J. Berrigan, Defiant Priest Who Preached Pacifism, Dies at 94 // Catonsville 9 Statement written by Dan Berrigan, S.J.

Alfred McCoy: The crumbling delusion of Washington's endless world dominion

Steve Bannon Documentary, 'The Brink', Will Leave You Cold

Mohammed Hanif: The rest of the world has had it with US presidents, Trump or otherwise

Donald Trump's gift to America: Realizing we've never been a liberal democracy. By PAUL ROSENBERG

Zack Stanton: Violent Christian Extremism in the USA


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