That one can pose a rational model that predicts preventive war does not make it the right model or necessarily do justice to the facts of the case.
Over the past few weeks we’ve had to endure military brass and top government officials falling over themselves to condemn American GIs – first for urinating on dead Afghans, and more recently for...
Dick Cheney's memoir apparently verifies an interesting political point from George W. Bush's memoir. Last November, I noted that the former President claimed that Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had...
The killing of Osama bin Laden allows political leaders to further disentangle Iraq, Afghanistan and the whole war on terror concept; to wind down some operations and refocus others; to bring some...
Dave Schuler and I are arguing (again) over the counterfactual question: would a Gore Administration have invaded Iraq?. I say, predictably, "no." Dave says, "yes." Weigh in, if so inclined, at his place.
Was the Iraq war designed to break up OPEC?Do OPEC states now have a perverse incentive to favor continued instability in Iraq?I explore these questions today on my blog: "Oil: the third rail of the Iraq debate."Sorry, I probably just should have posted it here.
Dan Drezner calls this piece in today's New York Times "the story that will occupy the blogosphere for today -- Baghdad is safer."Then, Dan excerpts a bit of the story by Damien Cave and Alissa J. Rubin that makes a point I've been stressing since General Petraeus made his optimistic report in September. Fewer Iraqis are dying because they fled the war zone: About 20,000 Iraqis have gone back to their Baghdad homes, a fraction of the more than 4 million who fled nationwide, and the 1.4 million people in Baghdad who are still internally displaced, according to a recent Iraqi Red Crescent...
I'm late in commenting on Joshua Muravchik's long defense of neconservatism in the October issue of Commentary (republished by the Wall Street Journal here). If you haven't read it, I recommend doing so. Muravchik outlines the basic tenets of neoconservatism, explains why neocons find the war on terror so compelling (he compares it explicitly to the long cold war struggle against an evil empire), and defends the decision to attack Iraq. He also claims -- like many other neocons -- that the US must confront Iran.Muravchik's punchline certainly attempts to justify all the ink he spills. In...
Bloggers on the right have been trumpeting the apparent decline in Iraqi civilian deaths as a clear sign that the surge is working. Apparently, we do body counts now that we like the numbers.However, I've been arguing since September that civilian deaths may well be down because Iraqis feel insecure and have simply fled their homes. Such self-segregation is a classic response to ethnic war and there's new evidence suggesting this viewpoint is correct. From the AP's Lauren Frayer on November 5:Deadly rivalries have forced Shiite and Sunni Muslims to flee once diverse neighborhoods across...
The Bush administration built an enormous embassy in Iraq -- and now cannot find volunteers from the State Department to fill it. Nearly 50 diplomats will soon be sent to Iraq on a "forced assignment" -- or be fired if they refuse to go. Perhaps because State's HR Department fears that many will resign or accept termination, it had to send a threatening letter to 250 employees. That's five candidates for each slot. The BBC reported yesterday that about 300 "angry diplomats" attended a meeting in response to the government's notice: Senior diplomat Jack Croddy, who once worked as a political...
I've warned before that one danger of war is that it can escalate. The Iraq war could escalate to include Turkey, which claims that it will attack Kurdistan Iraq. From Monday's Times of London (it is already October 22 there): Turkey will launch military action against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq despite frantic appeals for restraint from America and Nato, its Prime Minister has told The Times.Speaking hours before the PKK, the Kurdish Workers’ Party, killed at least 17 more Turkish soldiers yesterday, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Turkey had urged the US and Iraqi governments...
Yes, my headline is unfair. But the phrase "national reconciliation" appears 45 times in the ISG report. It even gets its own subsection (pp. 64-69).I'm far from the only blogger to note a certain fantasy-island quality to the ISG report: it calls for lots of different actors--the Iraqi Government, Iran, and Syria--to adopt policies that they either can't or most likely won't implement. In particular, it seems to assume that the Iraqi Government is, well, part of some sort of coherent state rather than a patrimonial and ineffectual microcosm of the civil conflict in Iraq.But I think its...