A few outliers aside, Republicans have stumbling over themselves to critique Obama for the withdrawal from Iraq, despite that fact that this position polls very badly. Some thoughts: 1. As Jonathan Bernstein has repeatedly argued, primary campaigns are about capturing the party elite, not capturing the popular vote. In foreign policy, the neocons are still […]
Tag: Iraq
Why did anti-Iraq War protests never reach the crescendo of their anti-Vietnam predecessors? There’s been some decent scholarly work on the determinants of public support for wars, but as a very
Rodger Payne highlights a contradiction between Mitch McConnell’s roles as GOP leader and US Senator from Kentucky: Dick Cheney’s memoir apparently verifies an interesting political point
Interesting article on why the Iraqi Air Force didn’t fight in 2003: Rather than being afraid to fight in 2003 as the Americans initially speculated, Iraq was simply following the same pattern it had set nearly twenty years before. Ever since the Iran-Iraq War, Baghdad had tried to protect its air force from its enemies […]
It’s kind of a minor point, but if a Democratic Senator made a similar error (especially in the context of arguing for military disengagement) I suspect that we’d hear no end of rage and m
Michael Lind asks if anyone in America believes in the rule of law? It’s a good question, but his response to it reveals it’s a much tougher one to answer than he imagines. First, he excor
I gave up on the Lancet fight a long time ago; I can’t remember now whether the flurry of allegations and counter-allegations about error and fraud raised sufficient question in my mind about Lancet’s conclusions, or if the entire discussion just became too technical and complicated for me to follow. In any case, I was […]
There’s obviously much of interest in the Wikileaks Iraq release; for the moment the Iran stuff holds the bulk of my attention: But the field reports disclosed by WikiLeaks, which were never int
Depressing but true: Well the latest Wikileaks disclosures ought to shut them up for good (it won’t, of course). “Our” side has both committed war crimes directly and has acquiesced, enabled, an
Like I say, every country has its neocons: In his first interview since his capture after the fall of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein’s former top deputy Tariq Aziz tells the Guardian that it would be wrong for the U.S. to pull out of Iraq now. Speaking only days after Obama confirmed that the US would be […]
I’m in the midst of Charles Tripp’s excellent A History of Iraq, and I’m curious about the Russian interest in Persian Gulf stability during the war. The Soviets played footsie with
While I’m on the subject of Tom Ricks… Last month, Tom Ricks visited the Patterson School and gave a couple of talks about Iraq. One talk was for the Patterson students, and the other for