{"id":34584,"date":"2018-05-29T06:31:23","date_gmt":"2018-05-29T11:31:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34584"},"modified":"2018-05-29T06:31:23","modified_gmt":"2018-05-29T11:31:23","slug":"tomgram-making-sense-of-americas-empire-of-chaos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34584","title":{"rendered":"Tomgram: Making Sense of America’s Empire of Chaos"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: Making Sense of America’s Empire of Chaos<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: <\/strong>Every week <\/em>Truthout chooses a book, a \u201c<\/em>progressive pick<\/em><\/a>,\u201d to highlight (and sell). This coming week, it\u2019s my new book, <\/em>A Nation Unmade by War<\/a>. As part of the process, I did an interview about the book\u2019s themes with <\/em>Truthout\u2019s Mark Karlin who was kind enough to let me post it here on this Memorial Day weekend for <\/em>TomDispatch readers. So check it out, then go to their book club and buy a copy<\/a>, if the mood strikes you, or should you want a signed, personalized copy of the book, donate $100 to this website ($125 if you live outside the U.S.) and it’s yours. Check out <\/em>our donation page<\/a> <\/em>for the details, but first read my thoughts below. Tom<\/em>]<\/p>\n

A Truthout<\/em> Progressive Pick Interview with Tom Engelhardt<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mark Karlin: <\/strong>How much money has gone to the U.S. war on terror and what has been the impact of this expenditure?<\/em><\/p>\n

Tom Engelhardt: <\/strong>The best figure I\u2019ve seen on this comes from the Watson Institute\u2019s Costs of War Project at Brown University and it\u2019s a staggering $5.6 trillion<\/a>, including certain future costs to care for this country\u2019s war vets. President Trump himself, with his usual sense of accuracy, has inflated that number even more, regularly speaking of $7 trillion<\/a> being lost somewhere in our never-ending wars in the Greater Middle East. One of these days, he\u2019s going to turn out to be right.<\/p>\n

As for the impact of such an expenditure in the regions where these wars continue to be fought, largely nonstop, since they were launched against a tiny group of jihadis<\/em> just after September 11, 2001, it would certainly include: the spread of terror outfits across the Middle East, parts of Asia, and Africa; the creation — in a region previously autocratic but relatively calm —<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: Making Sense of America’s Empire of Chaos [Note for TomDispatch Readers: Every week Truthout chooses a book, a \u201cprogressive pick,\u201d to highlight (and sell). This coming week, it\u2019s my new book, A Nation Unmade by War. As part of the process, I did an interview about the book\u2019s themes with Truthout\u2019s Mark Karlin who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1949,259,12674,7413,827,3142],"class_list":["post-34584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-america","tag-empire","tag-tom-engelhardt","tag-tomdispatch","tag-united-states","tag-us-empire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34584"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34585,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34584\/revisions\/34585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}