All through reading Michael Ignatieff’s NYT Mag contribution to the chastened hawk’s mea-minima-culpa genre, it took a tremendous effort of will to suppress the urge to grab the nearest fork and make like Oedipus. (No, no, Mom, the other thing.) But the Wheel of Karma turns, and David Rees’ takedown at Hufflepuff returned a solid […]

[Read more →]

Randy Barnett has a, well, rather odd op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal. Barnett is anxious to point out that Ron Paul’s strident anti-war stance is not shared by all libertarians, nor required by libertarian ideology, because it “would be a shame if this misinterpretation inhibited a wider acceptance of the libertarian principles.” WIth upwards […]

[Read more →]

Rand Simberg steals a base: By the way, it would also be nice if [news that London’s bomb plotters were doctors] finally puts to bed the ongoing “progressive” myth that terrorism is caused by poverty and alienation, or by our foreign policy (the latest manifestation of this nonsense is the nutty notion that we are […]

[Read more →]

Twin defenses of Guantanamo Bay today in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal make the case against closing this delightful vacation spot. The enthusiasm on display here is a bit odd given that the White House itself insists it considers the prison’s closure a priority. (Of course, in politics, everything is a […]

[Read more →]

Security expert Bruce Schneier has an excellent essay at Wired drawing some much-needed attention to the increasingly obvious fact that very many of the scary terrorists who want to KILL us!!!1!!1!! are laughably impotent Keystone Jihadis. This worth bearing in mind, because lots of hawkish rhetoric seems to tacitly assume that the proper metric of […]

[Read more →]

It was long a favorite hawk trope to accuse anyone with reservations about various “innovative” policies—indefinite detention without trial, warrantless wiretapping, crusades to remake the world by force of arms—of being trapped in a “September 10th mind-set.” I don’t know whether he’s the first to use it in this way, but Andrew Sullivan has a […]

[Read more →]

Kevin Drum links Spencer Ackerman’s recent Washington Monthly feature, arguing against the use of “support the troops by bringing them home” rhetoric: Haunted by Vietnam, Democrats are determined to express support for the troops. This is admirable. The truth of the matter, however, is this: many troops in Iraq, perhaps even most of them, want […]

[Read more →]

Andrew Sullivan finds more disturbingly apt analogues.

[Read more →]

I meant to link earlier this week Glenn Greenwald’s essay pointing out that while “precipitous” withdrawal from Iraq may well lead to more chaos and violence, so might staying.

[Read more →]

No, no, I’m not talking about the local S&M club, but Hilzoy’s post on a recent report concluding that “harsh methods” or “enhanced interrogation techniques.” or (if you insist on being gauche) torture is not a very effective method for gathering intelligence: When I read arguments written by people who support torture, many of them […]

[Read more →]