Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
The War in Iraq Archive
September 23, 2008
Precedent
As we contemplate the Bush Administration's latest demand for a blank check, let's not forget what happened the last time we wrote them one....
August 22, 2008
"How can you say I am not betrayed?"
Is it OK with Bush that Maliki is going after the Sunni sheikhs who switched sides at American urging and joined the "Sunni Awakening"?
August 17, 2008
Ron Suskind, Gutter Journalist? or Dick Cheney, Ultimate Subversive?
Suskind's book contains additional accusations against Cheney than have appeared in the Press. Nevertheless, the bigger scandal may be the idiocy of the US intelligence community and not how it was subverted by Dick Cheney.
July 23, 2008
Obama, the Surge, and opportunity cost
Surging in Iraq meant not surging in Afghanistan. Yes, the results in Iraq exceeded expectations. But, on balance, did the Surge make us safer?
July 12, 2008
If Bush takes Obama's advice about Iraq, that's ... good for McCain?
We need to get some troops of Iraq pronto to shore up the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. Where have I heard that argument before?
July 08, 2008
Maliki "betrays" McCain
... says he wants a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.
May 23, 2008
Question for Sen. McCain
How much time are you prepared to buy? And how many lives are you prepared to pay?
May 16, 2008
"Completely divorced from reality"
Phil Carter thinks John McCain needs his "vision" corrected.
April 19, 2008
Iraq, al-Qaeda, and John McCain
When McCain says that if we pull out of Iraq "al-Qaeda in Iraq" will wind up "taking a country," he's saying something demonstrably absurd. Michael Cooper and Larry Rohter provide the demonstration, with Kenneth Pollack of Brookings in the role of Deputy Clown.
March 24, 2008
Analysis and error
How could a policy analyst have gotten the choice about Iraq so disastrously wrong? Because policy analysis is not an activity that generates certain truth.
Accountability
Why pay attention to those who were right about Iraq, when you could listen to, and even elect, those who were wrong?
"Bush resolute in face of Iraq death toll"
Reflections on the four thousandth U.S. combat death, from one of the people responsible.
March 19, 2008
"It is time, once again, for America to lead. "
Obama today:
"The central front in the war against terror is not Iraq, and it never was. What more could America’s enemies ask for than an endless war where they recruit new followers and try out new tactics on a battlefield so far from their base of operations? That is why my presidency will shift our focus. Rather than fight a war that does not need to be fought, we need to start fighting the battles that need to be won on the central front of the war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan."
March 08, 2008
Crazy, sure. So crazy it just might work.
Abe Lincoln, always with the wild ideas.
March 06, 2008
Every day is Veterans' Day
Whatever their views on the war, few Americans claim not to "support the troops." Yet outrage over the way returning and discharged troops are treated seems fairly thin on the ground. The Walter Reed scandal was too graphic not to garner a lot of attention, if not for long. But the routine indifference and even hostility to veterans, from the...
January 29, 2008
Clintion and Obama on Iraq
Bush: “Ladies and gentlemen, some may deny the surge is working, but among terrorists there is no doubt.”
Clinton leaps to her feet, applauding. Obama remains seated.
January 23, 2008
A postcard from Arbil
Arbil for tourists: don't rush
January 09, 2008
McCain Disqualifies Himself for the Presidency
There's been lots of ink spilled about John McCain's assertion that we should stay in Iraq for 100 years, but this latest quote might be even more damaging--or at least it should: As for pulling out of Iraq, McCain said there is only one man who will determine when that is appropriate and the name he mentioned was not his...
January 03, 2008
A hundred years
That's how long John McCain thinks we should have soldiers in Iraq.
December 29, 2007
Wrecking the army (cont'd)
In response to my moan about the wreckage that's been made of the military over the past four years, (based largely on Andrew Tilghman's reporting), a hawkish reader, formerly, following his family tradition, an Army E-6, writes: The sorry part is how soon into the war this was a 100% straight-line mentat- predictable computation. When I watched the Baghdad Museum...
December 17, 2007
Receding horizon?
"Out in two years" is a winning campaign slogan for any Democrat running in 2008. It beats the Hell out of the Republican commitment to "In forever."
November 11, 2007
The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad
It's too big, and sends exactly the wrong political message. Let's give it away and build something more like an embassy and less like a viceregal palace.
November 09, 2007
Lead balloon
Poppy Bush defends his son's Iraq fiasco.
October 13, 2007
Having Gen. Sanchez's back
If you're against the war and the Bush Administration, you should try to say nice things about Gen. Sanchez.
Wish-I'd-said-that Dep't
Jonathan Rauch:
Some optimists say that in Army Gen. David Petraeus, Bush has finally found his Gen. Grant. That may or may not be true, but it is beside the point. The problem is that Petraeus has not yet found his President Lincoln.
September 24, 2007
September 20, 2007
Shipwrecks
henry Kissinger wheeled out to defend sticking it out in Iraq.
September 16, 2007
Gaffe
Secretary of Defense Gates as much as admits that Iraq wasn't even working on WMDs in 2003.
September 15, 2007
1,220,580
The new highest estimate of Iraqi deaths, brought together with the others.
September 14, 2007
Blegging for information: the Senate rules and the Webb proviso
It looks to me as if the Senate Democrats can make the Webb Proviso stick with 51 votes, but the newspapers say they need 60. Can someone explain my error?
Iraq strategy for the Democrats
No need for a filibuster-proof or veto-proof majority. Stick the Webb Amendment on the Defense Appropriation, and refuse to let it, or a Continuing Resolution, get to the President's desk without that amendment attached.
Getting weaker
Occupying Iraq has made the country weaker around the world. Those who want us to get out, and Democratic candidates, need to keep repeating this until the press starts to treat it as a commonplace.
September 11, 2007
al Qaeda where?
"Al Qaeda in Iraq" has become just "al Qaeda".
September 10, 2007
"General Betray Us"
Does Karl Rove have a mole in MoveOn?
September 09, 2007
Gen. Petraeaus's ethical lapse
David Petraeus is allowing himself to be made into a partisan figure. That's an ethical lapse of Constitutional proportions. Will any of his retired colleagues call him on it?
September 03, 2007
Brits leave Basra to its fate
Britain leaving Basra under a smokescreen.
August 31, 2007
Nightmares
Rep. Jon Porter, Nevada (R), has just reported on the views of U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, Iraqi Deputy President Tariq al-Hashimi and Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh: To a person, they said there would be genocide, gas prices in the U.S. would rise to eight or nine dollars a gallon, al-Qaida would continue its...
August 27, 2007
Wish-I'd-said-that Dep't
Hilzoy nails it: Keeping U.S. troops in Iraq to prevent violence is like swapping your Prius for Hummer to prevent global warming.
August 24, 2007
Leaving Saigon again
Leaving Baghdad would not be leaving Saigon.
August 22, 2007
No, Hillary didn't "support the surge"
Of the top three Democratic contenders, Hillary Rodham Clinton would be my fourth or fifth choice. I think she's the Democratic candidate most likely to allow the Republican to win in an otherwise impossible year, because she will mobilize a Republican base which would otherwise stay home in droves. Worse than that, having her at the top of the ticket...
August 19, 2007
Why "WMD" is a poorly-framed category
Nuclear weapons raise the destructive potential of warfare. So do (some) biologicals. Chemical weapons are illegal, but they simply don't present the same level of risk.
August 15, 2007
The Petraeus/Crocker report ...
... won't be written by Petraeus and Crocker, but by the WH spin doctors.
Why was this bombshell in the 30th paragraph of the story in the LA Times?
August 06, 2007
August 01, 2007
What we're buying time for
Factional murder and torture within the Iraqi Interior Ministry. Senior figures need bodyguards within the Ministry building itself, to protect them from other Ministry officials.
July 31, 2007
Mantra
We're buying time with our soldiers' lives, says Ambassador Crocker. Let's start counting the days, and the lives.
Bacevich pulls no punches
"Petraeus must show that his strategy of buying-time-to-reconcile can produce tangible results. Yet an exploration of what the buying-time strategy actually means reveals that the prospects of its success are exceedingly slim. The cult of Petraeus exists not because the general has figured out the war but because hiding behind the general allows the Bush administration to postpone the day when it must reckon with the consequences of its abject failure in Iraq."
In short, we're screwed.
July 06, 2007
Fehlleistung
Parapraxis in Iraq
June 25, 2007
The deaths in the pottery barn
Bogus and credible estimates of deaths in Iraq, with mine of 613.000.
June 22, 2007
The shades of generals
How will General Petraeus be remembered?
May 31, 2007
Economies of scale
If this doesn't shut up the whiners and skeptics about Bush's war, I don't know what will. The surge has let us ramp up production to the point where we can use real mass production methods, and good old American knowhow can lead to even greater efficiency in the future, a virtuous circle of organizational learning. Let's see if lefty...
May 28, 2007
And we have a winner ...
... for the Latin-antiwar-slogan contest.
Progress in degeneracy
Mark Twain hoped that the supporters of the Spanish-American war would be horrified at the suffering that war inflicted on the Filipinos is was supposed to "liberate." I wonder if that's true of the supporters of the War in Iraq?
A Memorial Day Message
Looking at the photograph that Mike just posted, I have to recall the appropriate epitaph for the management of the war, set forth by my friend Gideon Rose in a Washington Post article. Writing in 2005, the always-cautious Rose said that it was too early to judge whether anything could be salvaged from the war, but it is not too...
"Romani ite domum" Dep't
Kevin Drum wants to say "bring 'em home" in Latin. Apparently the closest you can get is "Copiae subducentes sunt."
I promessi sposi
An engaged couple reflects on their future together on a beautiful Memorial Day. -John Moore/Getty Images; from the NY Times today...
May 27, 2007
"We're helping guys that are trying to kill us"
Our soldiers in Iraq are getting tired of training their own enemies.
Narcissism-of-small-differences Dep't
Neither voting for the Iraq funding bill (appearing to support giving Bush a blank check to continue with his policy of open-ended war) nor voting against it (appearing to be willing to cut off supplies to an army in combat) was an attractive choice. We ought to be able to respect, and continue to work with, those who accepted either of those bad alternatives.
May 15, 2007
The plot unmasked
John Hawkins of Right Wing(nut) News has it figured out; liberals are denouncing the "stab-in-the-back" legend now developing about the War in Iraq because we're all part of a vast conspiracy to stab the country in the back.
May 06, 2007
Battlefield ethics in Iraq
Good news, and bad, from a survey of U.S. troops in Iraq. Less than half think their officers and NCOs are physically courageous.
April 29, 2007
How do you say "Monica Goodling" in Arabic?
Apparently it's pronounced "Bassima Luay Hasun al-Jaidri." She works in al-Maliki's office, firing army commanders who are going after Moqtada al-Sadr's militia: A department of the Iraqi prime minister's office is playing a leading role in the arrest and removal of senior Iraqi army and national police officers, some of whom had apparently worked too aggressively to combat violent Shiite...
April 24, 2007
Wag the Dog
"Old Shoe," Jessica Lynch, and Pat Tillman.