I realize that the recent terrorist attack in San Bernardino may forbid rational discussion of any topic for the next six months, or even longer. Still, wouldn’t be nice to have foreign policy discussion that consisted of more than a choice between Tweedle-Dick and Tweedle-Hillary? I mean, I’m not asking for six degrees of separation,…
Tag: Iraq
Jon Meacham’s biography of George H W Bush? I think it kind of sucks
I say I think so, because I haven’t read it yet, which is often considered a prerequisite for saying something intelligent about a book. However, I have read an extract that appeared in Politico Magazine, claiming that Bush 41 launched the first invasion of Iraq in 1991 out of moral revulsion, not realpolitik. Around Christmas…
The Pentagon’s Short- and Long-Term Memory Loss
In a story appearing in Politico, “Obama team split over next steps with Iran”, Michael Crowley writes that a “senior administration official” denied that there was any possibility of a presidential visit to Iran—“we continue to have very serious differences with Iran.” Crowley remarks that “That sentiment will be appreciated by military officials who hold…
The Judith Miller Show: Weaving new false narratives to replace the old
After the French Revolution, it was said that of the old aristocracy that they had forgotten nothing and learned nothing. After the disastrous second Iraqi war, it may be said of the Wall Street Journal that it had learned nothing and forgotten everything. The latest entropy effusion from the WSJ Memory Hole is Judith Miller’s…
Liberals and the war in Iraq: still not getting it
Frank Rich has an article in New York that pivots off the publication of The Last Magazine, the posthumous novel of deceased journalist Michael Hastings that, as Rich tells it, chastises those liberals who supported the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003: It’s the default position of liberals to lay the blame for this…
What Robert Gates said that no one said he said
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, former Secretary of State Robert Gates’ memoirs of his years as SecDef, have been excerpted and/or discussed by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. If you follow this sort of thing, you know that Bob loved Hillary, definitely a feather in her…
The “Golden Hour” that wasn’t; an old Iraqi hand pretends that we could have gotten it right
James Clad is an adjunct fellow at Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University. According to NDU’s website, “Before joining the National Defense University’s Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies James Clad was U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for South and Southeast Asia from 2007-09. He also served as…
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”…
Well, if Hillary Clinton jumped off a cliff, would you do that? And the same for the Roman Stoic Musonius Rufus
The New York Times has a long, all too-informative article on leading Catholic windbag and Princeton University professor Robert P. George who explains that he can’t be blamed for supporting the invasion of Iraq because Hillary voted for it. He goes on to say that he doesn’t like to talk about sex because the Roman…
Ross Dumbfuck does it again
A few weeks back I took a trivial slap at Ross Douthat for a lame squib he wrote at the expense of poor Adrian Grenier (yeah, that Adrian Grenier) who I suspect is not quite as untalented as Ross says he is. Well, today it’s a lot more serious, thanks to an abysmal post Ross…