Well, you won’t, Dan. Just because I’m painfully slow and stumbling off the mark, and not much better down the stretch, you thought you could slip a few fast ones by me, but nuh-uh. I’m onto your game, and you’ll pay the price. The first of Dan’s “curve balls” (to vary the metaphor) came a…
Tag: Iraq
I should grow the hell up, Daniel Drezner? I think maybe YOU should grow the hell up!
Yeah, I got Daniel Drezner—“Obfuscatin’ Dan”, I like to call him—on my mind, on my mind. I got Daniel Drezner on my mind. Again! I just got finished praising ole Obfuscatin’ Dan to the skies in a recent post for his recent post at Reason, “There Is No China Crisis”, calling it “absolute gold”. As…
Neocons suffering withdrawal symptoms in Afghanistan
There are about 13,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Now that number is coming down to about 8,600. Yet from the growls n’ howls emitted by unrepentant neocons like Thomas Joscelyn of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, writing in the anti-Trump Dispatch—“No Deal Is Better Than a Bad Deal”—and Iranian-born Shay Khatiri, writing in…
Qassem Soleimani didn’t kill 600 American soldiers in Iraq; George Bush did
As “conservatives” rally to explain why murdering a high-ranking official of another country is a good thing, one of the most potent—or at least most frequently repeated—arguments is that Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq. The Washington Post tells us of “Soleimani’s legacy: The gruesome,…
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…
Dolchstosslegende at the Washington Post
Over at the American Conservative, Gil Barndollar, former Marine Corps officer and currently Military Fellow-in-Residence at the Catholic University of America’s Center for the Study of Statesmanship, has an excellent article on the modern American version of Dolchstosslegende (“dagger stab myth”)—the claim made by the German Right and immensely amplified by Adolf Hitler that Germany’s…
War! What is it good for! APPROPRIATIONS!
Some time ago—well, thirty years ago, more or less—I read a reminiscence on the journalism biz by Michael Kinsley, recalling the words of journalistic wisdom he received as a tyro from a legendary pundit whose name I have forgotten: “Always sell the same piece at least three times.” By that standard, I’m a motherfucking journalistic…
H.W.–the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
De mortuis nihil nisi bonum? Speak nothing but good of the dead? Well, I leave that to the fancy outfits. If you want to read about what a wonderful guy Il Giorgio, aka “Aitch Dubya,” was, well, read the Post or the Times, or whomever. Here at Literature R Us, we mix the good with…
Peter Beinart: Cogent, with a caveat
Actually, more than cogent. Beinart, a chastened former liberal hawk who supported George’s W. Bush’s massively flawed and fraudulent invasion of Iraq, has learned his lesson pretty well, setting forth his conviction that “America Needs an Entirely New Foreign Policy for the Trump Age”, though I would much prefer another term for “the present” than…
Real presidents effectuate regime change
When did “regime change” become the mark of a “real” president? Well, not to keep you in suspense, but it was in the brief reign of George Herbert Walker “Bad Ass” Bush. While still a mere VP, Georgie wanted President Reagan to green light the removal of Panama strongman Manuel Noriega—basically a CIA “asset” gone…