Tom Engelhardt on The United States of Fear

"Tom Engelhardt, who founded and runs the popular website TomDispatch, is a politician's worst nightmare. In his new book, The United States of Fear, Engelhardt criticizes the right and the left in equal measure, challenging both former President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama for the wars they have engaged in and the costs associated with those wars. Engelhardt's popular columns... and his own site was borne out of the post-9/11 haze. That's according to Engelhardt himself, who told fellow TomDispatch writer Nick Turse in 2006: 'It was more an endless moment—those couple of months after 9/11 when, for a guy who was supposedly politically sophisticated, my reactions were naive as hell. I had this feeling that the horror of the event might somehow open us up to the world. It was dismaying to discover that, with the Bush administration's help, we shut the world out instead.' "

- Hamed Aleaziz, Mother Jones, February 2012