Tom Engelhardt

Gazze'nin yanışını izlerken, aynı zamanda tüm gezegeni Gazze benzeri bir felakete çevirdiğimizi de hatırlamakta fayda var. Bu sadece göreceli yavaş çekimde oluyor.

Tom Engelhardt'ın 13.07.2023 tarihinde TomDispatch'te yayımlanan metnini Nil Sarrafoğlu'nun çevirisiyle paylaşıyoruz.

Right now, at the invaluable Antiwar.com website -- overflowing with blazing headlines -- you can see two worlds of trouble awkwardly intertwined.

Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, the sort of place that -- with its multiple bus routes, more than 30,000 inhabitants, PXes, Internet cafés, fast-food restaurants, barracks, and all the sinews of war -- we like to call military bases, but that are unique in the history of this planet.

On stage, it would be farce. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, it's bound to play out as tragedy.

Yes, we could. No kidding. We really could withdraw our massive armies, now close to 200,000 troops combined, from Afghanistan and Iraq (and that's not even counting our similarly large stealth army of private contractors, which helps keep the true size of our double occupations in the shadows).

Recently, I wrote about a crew of pundits and warrior-journalists eager not to see the U.S. military leave Iraq. That piece appeared on the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times (and in a longer version at TomDispatch.com) and then began wandering the media world.

What does economic "recovery" mean on an extreme weather planet?

Don't Count on It

It's just a $5,812,353 contract -- chump change for the Pentagon -- and not even one of those notorious "no-bid" contracts either. Ninety-eight bids were solicited by the Army Corps of Engineers and 12 were received before the contract was awarded this May 28th to Wintara, Inc.

The Million Year War. How Never to Withdraw from Iraq