Posted on Categories Podcast Info, Politics

Tom Englehardt on Obama’s Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Tom Englehardt, book editor and proprietor of TomDispatch.com joins us to talk about his book, compiled from dispatches, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s. This is the next installment of the Boiling Frogs interview series, co-hosted with Sibel Edmonds. Englehardt recounts how TomDispatch evolved from emails he wrote in opposition to Bush’s foreign policy, and how he has assembled a group of smart wonks and writers to join the effort. We talk about the media’s failure to challenge the propaganda it delivered, how Obama has embraced the myth of the success of the “surge” in Iraq as he has escalated the US presence in the failed state of Afghanistan, the contrast between the mad visionaries of the Bush era and the cool managers of the Obama team, and the huge worldwide footprint of the US military, citing Chalmers Johnson’s estimate of more than 800 bases around the world, 75 related to the open-ended war on terrorists.