Crossings
Stop Saying Our Wars Are Over, Mr. President. They’re Not.
“In America, and in Iraq,” Vice President Joe Biden assured an audience in Baghdad last December, “the tide of war is receding.” For its callowness, this observation was noteworthy. (The tide of war was not receding from Iraq; Joe Biden was.) President Obama, introducing his plan to cut defense expenditures a few weeks later, offered up this analysis by way of justification: “The tide of war is receding.” READ MORE >>
The Bizarre, Strategically Bankrupt Evolution of the Parties’ Views on Defense Spending
The Obama administration has managed to upend the laws of ornithology. The simple fact of a Democratic commander-in-chief has transformed yesterday’s Republican hawks into today’s doves. No less miraculously, and certainly for no more high-minded reasons, Democratic doves have metamorphosed into something like hawks. READ MORE >>
Where Is the Ticker-Tape Parade?
From Iraq, I boarded an “Angel Flight”—a cargo plane that ferried the dead—back to Kuwait in 2006. As the C-130 taxied away into the night, there was the consolation that the bodies of the American soldiers would be washed, well-tended, buried with honors, and, eventually, memorialized along parade routes. The living, too, would surely be greeted with floats and hurrahs when they left behind Iraq’s rotten, sand-blown landscape. READ MORE >>
To Be Sure…
Open Wide
More Questions Than Answers
Failed Analogy
Those showers in Washington last week? That wasn’t rain. That was Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, and the other architects of post-war American foreign policy looking down and weeping on us. Or worse. READ MORE >>
Engagement Ring
Oilmen have feelings, too. Take the industry executive who lobbied the White House last year to lift the ban on U.S. corporations doing business in Libya. When National Security Council officials rejected his plea, he broke down and wept. The Libyans, he sniffled, were a gentle people. They deserved better. White House officials offered him a tissue. READ MORE >>
Vietnamization
Knowledge Gap
Maybe it was a slip of the tongue. But, when Nancy Pelosi confessed last year that she felt "sad" about President Bush's claims that Al Qaeda operates in Iraq, she seemed to be disputing what every American soldier in Iraq, every Al Qaeda operative, and anyone who reads a newspaper already knew to be true. (When I questioned him about Pelosi's assertion, a U.S. officer in Ramadi responded, incredulously, that Al Qaeda had just held a parade in his sector.) Perhaps the House speaker was alluding to the discredited claim that Al Qaeda operated in Iraq before the war. Perhaps. READ MORE >>
