Iraq War Casualty Predictions
Tim Lambert linked some prewar Iraq War casualty predictions collected by John Hawkins in early 2003: If we go into Iraq, how many casualties do you expect to see (on the side of the US and our allies) John Hawkins: "Probably 300 or less" Charles Johnson:"Very few" Henry Hanks: "Less than 200" Laurence Simon: "A Few hundred" Rachael Lucas: "Less than three thousand" Scott Ott: "Dozens" Glenn Reynolds: ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 17, 2009 07:39
How the FBI Broke Saddam
James Gordon Meek has a very interesting two-part story on how FBI Special Agent George Piro successfully interrogated Saddam Hussein. Shockingly, it does not involve waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, nudity, or German shephards. The FBI prides itself on “rapport-based” interrogations that have a high success rate for yielding confessions from the likes of 1993 World trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 28, 2009 07:51
Revolution is Not a Spectator Sport
Like James Poulos, "I like the Iranian reformers more than I like the mass politics of solidarity by symbolism." As such, I'm sympathetic to John Cole in thinking that the rabid coverage of the Iranian election controversy by enthusiastic American bloggers who know next to nothing about Iran is overblown. (I include myself in the decided non-expert on matters Persian category.) ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 16, 2009 09:07
Hit Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 Times with a Baseball Bat!
Stacy McCain offers a rejoinder to those of us queasy about the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in his first month in U.S. custody. Look, we hanged Saddam Hussein and sent the 101st Airborne to kill Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay. What is "waterboarding" compared to violent death? Who could possibly give a crap about the "rights" of ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 20, 2009 12:22
South Park Baathists
"South Park" creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker tell The Telegraph that they got a signed picture of Saddam Hussein from some Iraq Marines. During his captivity, US marines forced Saddam, who was executed in 2006, to repeatedly watch the move South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut, which shows him as gay, as well as the boyfriend of Satan. He was ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 9, 2009 07:19
Bush Iraq Trip: Hit by Shoes, Cheered by Troops
President Bush made a surprise farewell visit to Iraq and Afghanistan, suffering the indignity of having an Iraqi journalist hurl his shoes at him but being greeted warmly by American troops. Sudarsan Raghavan and Dan Eggen for WaPo: In Iraq, Bush said the conflict "has not been easy" but was necessary for U.S. security, Iraqi stability and "world peace." He hailed a ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on December 15, 2008 07:55
Bush’s Flight Suit
Glenn Greenwald notes that Joe Klein has changed his mind in the last five-and-a-half years about President Bush's now infamous flight suit gambit. Now: "The flight-suit image is one of the two defining moments of the Bush failure." Then: "[T]hat was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet fighter pilot in the movie Independence Day." Says Glenn, People who regret ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 26, 2008 11:49
Obama’s Afghanistan Plan
[caption id="attachment_27340" align="alignright" width="300" caption="German Bundeswehr army soldiers of the ISAF monitor a valley during a mission near Kunduz, Afghanistan on September 26, 2008. (REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch)"][/caption] Over at New Atlanticist, I discuss "Obama's Afghanistan Plan," noting that actually achieving results will prove far more difficult than criticizing the Bush administration. My main criticism is of his continued harping on catching Osama bin Laden: [I]t ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 11, 2008 08:04
Iraqi Yellowcake Uranium Moved to Montreal
Saddam's supply of yellowcake has been secretly sold to a Canadian energy firm and flown safely to Montreal. The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program - a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium - reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans. ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 7, 2008 07:28
Building Democracy, One Warlord at a Time
The Washington Post has a heartbreaking article which might as well be titled "The More Things Change..." regarding our current "progress" in Fallujah:[Col. Faisal Ismail al-]Zobaie, 51, knows the nature of the men in black masks. He is a former insurgent. Now, as the police chief, he has turned against the insurgency, especially al-Qaeda in Iraq. The U.S. military showcases ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 26, 2008 00:25
Getting it Right on Iraq
Taking a page from Christopher Hitchens' book, Jim Henley admits that he was right on the Iraq War. Predicting ahead of time that a given war is a bad idea isn't particularly hard, frankly. It's a bimodal choice (War/No War) and wars are almost always "bad" in some sense that would be defensible down the road even if ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 22, 2008 12:17
Hitchens on 5th Anniversary of Iraq War
As part of a retrospective commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, Christopher Hitchens admits to having been right all along. He does, however, reject the premise of the question. Anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with Iraq would have to know that a heavy U.S. involvement in the affairs of that country began no later than 1968, ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 18, 2008 08:06
Iraq, Five Years On
In recognition of the fifth anniversary of the U. S.-led and mostly U. S.-conducted invasion of Iraq and removal of the regime of Saddam Hussein, there have been a number of articles in the New York Times and elsewhere that have an odd sort of synergy to them. For example, there's this interview from the Times of London with ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 17, 2008 10:37
Iran and Iraq
The picture at right, of Iraqi President Talabani Prime Minister Maliki and Iranian President Ahmadinejad, was taken on President Ahmadinejad's recent visit to Iraq, the first ever by an Irenian leader: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hailed a new era in relations with neighbouring Iraq as he began the first visit by an Iranian leader to Baghdad yesterday. His presence, intensely controversial among many Iraqis, ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 3, 2008 16:22
Acireman Foreign Policy
I'd like to bring an article in the Hoover Institutions's publication, Policy Review, A Moral Core for U.S. Foreign Policy by Derek Chollet and Tod Lindberg, to your attention. In the article the authors note that …after two successive presidents of opposite political parties (Bill Clinton and George W. Bush) have argued that spreading American values is itself a ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on February 1, 2008 15:08
