Lawrence Freedman—or “Sir Lawrence” as they call him at Kings College in London, where he is Emeritus Professor of War Studies—has an interesting blog, “Comment Is Freed”, and an interesting post at that blog, Assessing the Assessors What did analysts get wrong about the Russian invasion?, which considers a recent paper, The Russia-Ukraine War: A…
Tag: neocons
Stop the world. I want to get off. Immediately.
If you think the news from the Middle East couldn’t get any worse, well, wait ten minutes. This once inconceivable sequence of horrifying events seems destined to rumble on until, well, until it stops. I am generally a fan of finger pointing, but this constant barrage of disasters is, naturally, spawning an orgy of outrage…
David Brooks confesses his sins; just not the right ones
Frequent breast beater and all-around intellectual marshmallow David Brooks has touched off a real foofaraw, if not an outright hullabaloo, around the internet with his recent post for the New York Times, What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?, arguing that the rule of “us”, that horde of Ivy League educated sissy britches who hold…
Yo, New York Times! Want to know who started the War in Iraq? Look in the goddamn mirror!
20 Years On, a Question Lingers About Iraq: Why Did the U.S. Invade?, rumbles “Interpreter” (that’s what they call him) Max Fisher, subjecting us to a shitload of obscurantist chin-stroking before reaching an all too convenient non-answer/confession of ignorance, topping off this banal exercise in disingenuosity with this laughable quote as a closer: “I will…
Yo, “conservatives”! Haven’t you heard? You’re totally f*cked!
Yes, it’s schadenfreude time around the Literature ‘R Us corral once more, and, yes, it is morally lazy in the extreme to snicker at the other side’s weaknesses without considering one’s own, but life is short, after all, and we’ll soon be in the clay, so before we submit to the clammy embrace of viscous…
The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party? Part II Part 2: Matthew Continetti and The Right
A few years ago, I wrote an extended piece bearing the title The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party?. Recently, in response to a couple of engaging (relatively) meas culpas—Matthew Continetti’s The Right The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism and Tim Miller’s Why We Did It—I began preparing an update. I originally planned to…
Who won the Cold War? Why, Jimmy Carter, of course!
At least, that’s the way Chris Miller tells it in Chip War The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, his best-selling but not always convincing story of the computer chip and how it “changed the world”. It seems that in 1977, Silicon Valley entrepreneur William Perry was brought in to serve as undersecretary of…
George Packer, Packin’ the Con in “Neocon”!
I’ve never actually met George Packer, but I have read him, in the current issue of the Atlantic, so I’ll go out on a limb and say I can probably throw him farther than I can trust him. Yes, I am hip to old Georgie’s jive, right from the get-go—right from his “head”, as a…
Yo, Francis Fukuyama! Righteous rage may be hazardous to your health! And mine too!
Francis Fukuyama, who is probably my most favorite living neo-Hegelian, has sadly gone off the rails more than a little with this ecstatic, triumphalist treatise, Why Ukraine Will Win, which sounds to me a lot like the late Charlie Krauthammer on steroids and scotch circa 2004, rejoicing over the new American empire, on which, he…
Joe Biden likes being a Cold War President
It is common wisdom that presidents tend to concentrate on domestic policy when first arriving in office and then pivot to foreign affairs, where they can act without having to worry, too much, about the reception their ideas will receive on Capitol. It can be said of Joe Biden that he’s making the switch in…