Read this fantastic essay over at Best Defense. I meet a lot of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan through my work, as students, guest speakers, and through the various other interactions that allow a foreign policy MA program to function. I can't remember ever thanking...
Iraq war
I have some thoughts on the aftermath of the Wikileaks Iraq release over at World Politics Review: The release reaffirmed much that we already knew, including the high incidence of.
In honor of the trend of "How did I get it wrong" posts, this is a brief examination of how I managed to get it right on Iraq. Revisiting correct.
This is an admirable post by Matt Yglesias. What I especially like is his willingness to conclude that his mistake in judgment on a specific issue was a product not merely of idiosyncratic circumstances, but of a structurally flawed way of thinking about the world,...
Matt Duss shoots, guts, dries, and renders into tasty beef jerky the Chalabi-supporting wing of the neoconservative movement:Even after the invasion, after it became clear that there were no WMD.
Donny Rumsfeld, not quite lying:In his speech at West Point last night, Obama claimed that before he took office, "commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the.
St. Ignatius of Georgetown bestows his benediction on Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan, but, being a liberal columnist at the liberal Washington Post, he regrets that the announced plan fails to commit the nation explicitly to perpetual war:Obama thinks that setting deadlines will...
Tom Ricks:As a British naval historian friend I know once noted, the time when the British government could have helped -- and perhaps stopped the war -- was back in.
I should hope that the absurdity of conservative commentary on Afghanistan is self-evident, but to summarize briefly, the Obama administration is currently under wingnut fire for a) under-resourcing the Afghanistan.
Some interesting bits in this Telegraph report from last week:Top British commanders angrily described in the documents how they were not even told, let alone consulted, about major changes to US policy which had significant implications for them and their men.When the Americans decided, in...
I endorse most of what Gian Gentile says here about the Vietnam War, especially in the context of this quote from George Herring:…the war could [not] have been ‘won’ in.
I appreciate international society's need for mercenary companies. Developing military institutions is difficult and time consuming, and even though mercenaries are expensive, they can provide short term emergency relief. Mercenaries.