Michael Levenson, writing an “overview” of a major investigation into the U.S. “drone war” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria conducted by the New York Times, reports: Drawing on more than 1,300 documents from a hidden Pentagon archive, the investigation reveals that, since 2014, the American air war has been plagued by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed…
Tag: Syria
Samantha Power’s narrow tailoring becomes increasingly unraveled
You may not remember, though I obviously do, the language that Samantha Power, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, used to try to sell the American people on President Obama’s “plan” to use military force to persuade Syrian President Bashar Hafez al-Assad to behave himself: On the one hand, we Americans share a desire,…
Joe Biden gets tough with Iran by murdering innocent Iraqis and Syrians.
He sure did. The bad, and unsurprising news is, the Biden administration launched new attacks on “Iran-backed” militia, maintaining a tradition of the U.S. doing whatever the hell it pleases on the international scene whenever it damn well feels like it, which goes back at least as far as George H. W. Bush. The good,…
Donald Trump tries to do something right. DC aghast.
Yes, you read that right: Donald Trump is trying to do something right. Not only is he trying to take a staggering 2,500 troops out of Iraq, he’s trying to take a staggering 2,500 troops out of Afghanistan as well! Effectively ending America’s only official shooting war! Almost as if we weren’t, you know, in…
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…
Go Donald! Go Donald! (Some of the time)
Yes, it has come to this: the American “Establishment” is so blind, benighted, and beggared that it takes the installation of a complete mountebank1 in the White House to save that Establishment, and the United States as well, from that Establishment’s ever-compounding follies. I refer, of course, to Donald Trump’s precipitous withdrawal of a relative…
Donald Trump, president of peace?
Amusing, not to mention welcome, if true. My bête noire di tutti bêtes noires has set the Acela world on its collective ear if not its collective rear by his sudden decision to pull all American troops out of Syria, where they never should have been in the first place. You don’t get it, Donald!…
There’s a Tomahawk in your future, America! Lots of them!
When in doubt, blow shit up. That must be Donald Trump’s new motto these days, and why not? We all know the Donald lives for press, and he’s never gotten press since becoming president compared with the hysterical “today, he became a man” praise he’s receiving from our addle-pated mainstream media. The New York Times…
Our TV President
Wouldn’t it be fun if life were like a movie? If every time someone did something wrong, they got punished? Like with a Tomahawk missile? Well, you’re in that movie. The only thing is, I’m not sure the good guys win in this one. You know, it might be one of those dark movies, where…