Wouldn’t it be nice if the U.S. had a Middle Eastern expert who was, you know, actually from the Middle East? Someone who understood Islamic culture from the inside out, someone with wide experience and education in western academia but also well-traveled throughout the Islamic Middle East and Asia, someone with long years of hard…
Search Results for: iraq
Gregory Mankiw: Clever? Yes. Honest? Not so much.
Harvard big shot economist Gregory Mankiw* has gotten a lot of mileage out of his recent screed, “Defending the One Percent,” basically claiming that rich folks should get the “just deserts” of their labors, which most wondrously enrich the lives of the rest of us uncreative schmucks, and arguing that the more we uncreative schmucks…
Meaney, Fukuyama, and Mishra, Round 2
Yesterday, I talked up the Nation’s Tom Meaney and his subjects/victims Pankaj Mishra and Francis Fukuyama and today I’d like to return to the fray. In his review of Fukuyama’s most recent book, The Origins of Order, Meaney, recapitulates, in a not too friendly manner, Fukuyama’s intellectual progress from his famous/infamous “The End of History?”…
The World’s Grown Honest
Or so, President Obama has decided, it would be convenient for him that we should believe. At any rate, the president’s “left” speech, an actual gesture, a genuine rhetorical bone for us peaceniks to gnaw on, is more than we’ve gotten for the last four years. It’s better than murder, isn’t it? The basic idea is…
Thank you, Washington Post!
I am often not a fan of the Washington Post, but, well, May 22nd was an unusual day, a day on which Post reporters Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung lowered the boom on David “Lover Boy” Petraeus, explaining how Dave’s “toot your horn/cover your ass” approach to congressional relations helped create a monumental PR headache for the not…
Boston bombing not quite as terrible as it could have been
Two young men with a chip on their shoulders murder four and injure more than a hundred, while significantly reducing the quality of life for 300 million people. It’s wonderful what you can do with a couple of pressure cookers and some black powder. It’s definitely on the upside that we won’t be invading anyone…
It’s not too soon to tell that Paul Wolfowitz is a lying asshole
Yes, Paul Wolfowitz, everyone’s favorite lying asshole, is up to his old tricks again, acting like the lying asshole he is, claiming that “it is too soon to tell” if the invasion of Iraq was a good idea. After all, Paulie tells us, for decades after the Korean War ended, South Korea “struggled.” But sixty…
WMD: The Right Lies Well
The tenth anniversary of the war in Iraq has come and gone. For those of us who always thought that the Bush Administration lied us into a fraudulent war, which they then conducted with stunning and disastrous incompetence (and of course lied about all of that as well), we are, in political terms, remarkably “fortunate”…
Darkle this!
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…
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…