In a response to an essay posted over the weekend at Daily Kos, The Weekly Standard‘s Dean Barnett provides a perfect example of how toxically warped up our foreign policy debate has become. Citing an article about the pullout of British troops from Basra, Kos diarist Jeffrey Feldman runs with a suggestion offered by British […]

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Last week, The Economist noted that Iran scholar Shaul Bakhash had come up blank in a search for one of Norman Podhoretz’s favorite Ayatollah Khomenei quotations: We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up […]

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There have been plenty of links over the weekend to this ABC News story, which is generally interpreted as saying that waterboarding was only ever used, very briefly, on three detainees, and that its use was discontinued way back in 2003. (I’m not sure why this is being treated as a novel disclosure: NBC had […]

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It’s already been very widely linked, but if you haven’t seen this analysis by a former Navy trainer for SERE (the military’s interrogation resistance course), it’s something of a must-read.

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I meant to link Brian Doherty’s column from last week, which makes a number of sound points, of which perhaps the most important is that in war even more than in most cases, assessing how things worked out “in the end” is often a matter of when you decide to stop the story. Eventually, Iraq […]

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Via roomie Dave, a group called Freedom Watch has produced a series of ads urging the importance of staying in Iraq. Their nominal argument (for some appropriately loose sense of that term) is something along the lines of: 9/11! Iraq! 9/11! Iraq! We’re going to keep mentioning these things in close proximity! Even at this […]

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Since an earlier post of mine seems to have prompted this dead-on and entertaining polemic from Gene Healy, I should probably clarify that I’m in full agreement with his take on the sort of ludicrous warrior pose that seems to animate so much war boosterism. My point wasn’t that we should welcome the opportunity to […]

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The AP reports that Army suicide rates have hit a 26-year high, a result that should not be enormously surprising to anyone who looked at the report released by the Pentagon’s Mental Health Advisory Team back in May. The risk of mental health problems for troops increases with longer deployments, and as tours of duty […]

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Andrew Sullivan’s prose equivalent of a single-finger send-off for Karl Rove resonated with me: Rove is one of the worst political strategists in recent times. He took a chance to realign the country and to unite it in a war – and threw it away in a binge of hate-filled niche campaigning, polarization and short-term […]

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Atrios spots a groan-inducing summary of the provisional government’s approach to the Iraqi economy in this Reuters article: [Paul Brinkley, deputy under-secretary of defense for business transformation in Iraq,] said early economic planners had made the understandable mistake of assuming that a free market would rapidly emerge to replace what he described as Saddam’s “kleptocracy”, […]

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