The United States of Fear
Description
In 2008, when the U.S. National Intelligence Council issued its latest report meant for the administration of newly elected President Barack Obama, it predicted that the planet’s sole superpower” would suffer a modest decline and a soft landing fifteen years hence.
In his new book The United States of Fear, Tom Engelhardt makes clear that Americans should don their crash helmets and buckle their seat belts, because the United States is on the path to a major decline at a startling speed. Engelhardt offers a savage anatomy of how successive administrations in Washington took the Soviet path” pouring American treasure into the military, war, and national security and so helped drive their country off the nearest cliff.
This is the startling tale of how fear was profitably shot into the national bloodstream, how the country gripped by terror fantasies was locked down, and how a brain-dead Washington elite fiddled (and profited) while America quietly burned.
Think of it as the story of how the Cold War really ended, with the triumphalist sole superpower” of 1991 heading slowly for the same exit through which the Soviet Union left the stage twenty years earlier.
Author Bios
Tom Engelhardt created and runs the TomDispatch.com website, a project of the Nation Institute, where he is a fellow.
He is the author of The American Way of War and The United States of Fear, both published by Haymarket Books, a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the cold war, The End of Victory Culture, and a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. Many of his TomDispatch interviews were collected in Mission Unaccomplished: TomDispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters. With Nick Turse, he has written Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001–2050. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire, a collection of pieces from his site that functions as an alternative history of the mad Bush years.
TomDispatch is the sideline that ate his life. Before that he worked as an editor at Pacific News Service in the early 1970s, and, these last four decades as an editor in book publishing. For fifteen years, he was senior editor at Pantheon Books, where he edited and published award-winning works ranging from Art Spiegelman’s Maus and John Dower’s War Without Mercy to Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy. He is now Consulting Editor at Metropolitan Books, as well as the cofounder and coeditor of Metropolitan’s the American Empire Project, where he has published bestselling works by Chalmers Johnson, Andrew Bacevich, Noam Chomsky, and Nick Turse, among others. Many of the authors whose books he has edited and published over the years now write for TomDispatch.com. For a number of years, he was also a Teaching Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is married to Nancy J. Garrity, a therapist, and has two children, Maggie and Will, and a grandchild, Charlie.
More Info
Publication date: December 13, 2011
Table of Contents
1. Hiroshima Story
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/108624/
2. When Was the Last Time You Visited Iraq? Exporting American Democracy to the World http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175223/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_all_the_world%27s_a_stage_%28for_us%29
3. Believe It or Not (2010 Imperial Edition), U.S. War-Fighting Numbers to Knock Your Socks Off http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175228/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_numbers_to_die_for__
4. Gods and Monsters, Fighting American Wars From On High http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175232/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_view_from_mount_olympus__
5. Yes We Could… Get Out! Why We Won’t Leave Afghanistan or Iraq http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175238/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_urge_to_stay
6. Yawn… How Many Times Have You Seen This Headline? http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175243/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_all-volunteer_wars
7. Obama’s Flailing Wars, A Study in BP-style Pragmatism http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175248/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_obama%27s_afpak_flip-flop_
8. American Denial, Living in a Can’t-Do Nation http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175255/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_living_in_the_51st_state_%28of_denial%29___
9. Call the Politboro, We’re in Trouble, Entering the Soviet Era in America http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175261/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_washington_drunk_on_war
10. America Detached from War, Bush’s Pilotless Dreams, Smoking Drones, and Other Strange Tales from the Crypt http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175265/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_perfect_american_weapon
11. Why Are We in Afghanistan? As Petraeus Takes Over, Could Success Be Worse than Failure?http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175272/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_petraeus_syndrome
12. The Opposites Game, All the Strangeness of Our American World in One Article http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175277/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_clueless_in_afghanistan_--_and_washington__
13. Whose Hands, Whose Blood? Killing Civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175282/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_out%2C_damned_spot!
14. What If Washington… Five Absurd Things That Simply Can’t Happen in Wartime Washington http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175285/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_war_mentality
15. Will Our Generals Ever Shut Up? The Military’s Media Megaphone and the U.S. Global Military Presence http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175291/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_pentagon_triumphant_on_the_media_battlefield
16. The American Way of War Quiz, This Was the War Week That Was (Believe It or Not) http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175294/tomgram%3A_engelhardt_and_turse%2C_the_wacky_world_of_american_war
17. One and a Half Cheers for American Decline, The Future’s Not Ours -- and That’s Good News http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175298/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_why_the_troops_are_coming_home
18. The War Addicts, 2016 and Then Some http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175302/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_forever_war
19. A World Made by War http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175308/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_american_warscapes
20. Handicapping the Global Midterms, Winners and Losers http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175312/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_placing_your_global_bets
21. Ballot Box Blues, The Most Dispiriting Election of a Lifetime (Mine) http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175315/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_pentagon_lovers_and_welfare_queens
22. The Stimulus Package in Kabul, I Was Delusional – I Thought One Monster Embassy Was the End of It http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175320/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_war_to_the_horizon
23. How to Schedule a War, The Incredible, Shrinking Withdrawal Date http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175324/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_general_petraeus%27s_two_campaigns
24. The National Security State Cops a Feel, Taking Off the Gloves (and Then Everything Else) http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175325/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_united_states_of_fear
25. One November’s Dead, The American War Dead Disappear Into the Darkness http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175328/tomgram%3A__engelhardt%2C_epitaph_from_the_imperial_graveyard
