Happy New Year, n’est-ce pas? Or, perhaps more appropriately, WTF? I’m getting too old for this shit, and I didn’t sign up for it in the first place. In the old days, like December 31, 2019, one of the harshest, and truest, charges against Vladimir Putin is that he carried out the assassination of people…
Search Results for: iraq
Old Man War Machine, he jes’ keep rollin’ along
(Editor’s Note: I wrote this piece to describe the military intellectual complex’s endless search for a new Cold War. But Donald Trump seems to be looking for a hot one.) The Washington Post’s recent release of the “Afghanistan Papers”, which reported at least a significant portion of the near-infinite number of lies told to justify…
Fred Kaplan says it’s time to worry about war with North Korea “again”. Why?
Why indeed? But it’s not just Fred, though I think Freddie was first off the mark with “It’s time to worry about war with North Korea again.” (Dec, 17), but his shrill concerns have been ably amplified by none other than the totally unbiased New York Times “U.S. Braces for Major North Korean Weapons Test…
The War in Afghanistan has been a total disaster, the Washington Post says. After “selling it” for more than a decade.
Who could have seen this coming? The Washington Post has released, with great fanfare, “The Afghanistan Papers”, a massive study documenting what a massive disaster the War in Afghanistan has been. It’s too bad, however, that the Post has “forgotten” how earnestly it pushed that misbegotten war, as recently as August of this year, something…
Shorter Admiral McRaven: Will invade foreign countries for food
Okay, that should be “Will invade foreign countries for rank and appropriations” but Literature R Us puts snark over accuracy every time. What is indisputable is that retired Admiral William McRaven is shit fit petrified that drunken Donald Trump might actually knock over the punchbowl that has, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, ladled…
Samantha Power and the art of looking away
(Editor’s note. Sometimes I write ‘em short, and sometimes I can’t shut up. This is one of the latter occasions.) Several hundred news cycles ago, Samantha Power’s autobiography/memoir The Education of an Idealist was in the news. Well, I am nothing if not slow, so I am just getting caught up with Samantha, who really…
Young people different from old people, old man discovers
I was recently at a rest stop on an interstate, one of the large ones that contain half a dozen fast food outfits, and even a Starbucks for us la-di-da types. The place was swarming with young people, at least a hundred of them, almost all of them white and all of them wearing blue…
The U.S. is betraying the Kurds? What else is new?
Donald Trump’s disastrous, incoherent withdrawal from Syria is, in all its disarray, entirely appropriate in one respect—it allows the conclusion of a disastrous misadventure to mirror its start, which was also disastrous and incoherent. (That’s enough “disastrous’s” for one sentence, don’t you think?) The plight of the Kurds, now left to the less than tender…
Donald Trump’s Syrian “policy”: At least it’s good for a laugh!
That seems to be the reaction of the great Dan Drezner over at the Washington Post. Ole Dan feels he just has to chuckle at the consternation of his “realist” colleagues, who find that you should be careful what you wish for, a problem, Dan tells us, for all foreign policy mavens. This [the consternation…
Myth Busters! Afghanistan ain’t that rich!
Well, it ain’t. Propagating the myth is the sometimes sensible paleo-populist James K. Pinkerton, who, while parking his fedora at the American Conservative, serves up a sensible take on Afghanistan, a-wishin’ and a-hopin’ that his sometime main man Donald Trump would not listen to the military intellectual complex and get the hell out of central…