I join with Andrew Sullivan in ridiculing William Kristol’s o’erwrought take on the tragedy of Chuck Hagel’s appointment as secretary of defense. Quoth* Bill The plain is darkling. The world grows more dangerous. Yet we heedlessly slash our military preparedness. Iran hastens toward a nuclear weapon, which would pose an existential threat to Israel and…
Search Results for: WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
Beirut and Benghazi: A Tale of Two Administrations
On April 18, 1983, a truck carrying 2,000 pounds of explosives crashed into the American Embassy in West Beirut, killing 63 people. On October 23, 1983, 241 American Marines and 48 French soldiers stationed in Beruit were killed by two truck bombs. A day later, both American and French intelligence felt they had hard evidence…
Hey, Hey, President Obama! How many kids did you kill today?
If you see a couple of kids in Afghanistan digging a hole beside a road, what do you do? Open fire! Yep, that’s how it goes in the big A, or Afstan, or whatever it is that GIs call Afghanistan. Dan Lamothe and Joe Gould, staff writers with the Military Times, flesh out my brief…
Tampa Socialites Behaving Badly
What Jill hath wrought, eh? Beware of FBI agents, baring chests. Perhaps if the FBI didn’t regard itself as a favor machine for dudes trying to make it with busty married chicks* we wouldn’t be in this mess. FBI DUDE # 1: “Do you think there’s even a possibility of a crime here?” FBI DUDE…
How about that Charlie Sheen? I hear he gets more tail than General Petraeus!
Glenn Greenwald devotes perhaps too many column inches to the otherwise valid point that usually when a public figure gets caught with his pants down he’s the recipient of delighted, scurrilous ridicule, but that when it’s a four-star general named Petraeus, the rules are different. So, Glenn, I’m helping. More seriously, Petraeus has one major…
How many stupid foreign policy advisors does President Obama have? One less than he used to
Foreign Policy is a pretty serious magazine, right? No Best Bikini Bods need apply. And a job title like “Counselor to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy” sounds pretty intense. So why does a recent article in Foreign Policy by Rosa Brooks, former Counselor to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy at the…
Barack Obama, luckie duckie
Imagine if Muslim demonstrators in Egypt hadn’t gathered outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo on September 11 to denounce a bizarre and obscure video speaking ill of Mohammed. Then the murderous attack on the American consulate in Benghazi would have been seen as a pre-meditated terrorist attack from the beginning, and the entire focus of…
Ryan Crocker: the silence of a wise man
Ryan Crocker, retiring U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and former ambassador to Iraq, where he presided over President Bush’s “surge,” might have a few interesting things to say about U.S. foreign policy in the post 9/11 decade. And, in a recent interview in the New York Times, he does, if “vague and cautious” means the same…
David Rieff, assigning blame where blame is due, some of the time
Over at Foreign Affairs, David Rieff has a rather portentous, even penumbral, take on world events, notably the concurrent U.S. disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, taking a few pokes at the liberal optimism that brought these about. Dave’s nut graph, or perhaps “money shot,” is quite prolonged, but, well, in for a penny, in for…
9/11. the last refuge of a scoundrel
Or a sycophant. Andrew Sullivan, whom I often like, runs off the rails in his devotion to President Obama here, praising his indiscriminate use of murder drones and claiming that if the U.S. doesn’t function like an intermational Murder, Inc., well, would you prefer “religious terrorists from mountains in Middle Asia successfully invading and terrorizing…