Online Journal of Politics and Foreign Affairs
My first piece for Reason, “Bombing to Lose: Why Israel failed in Lebanon,” has been posted. It expands upon the writing I’ve done here and elsewhere on this general theme. An excerpt: Like O.J. Simpson’s search for the real killer, however, Olmert’s review begins with a false premise. By any meaningful measure, Israel lost this [...]
My latest for TCS Daily, “YouTube Politics” (working title, “Political Misperceptions Can Make a Macaca Out of You”) is up. It was sparked by the latest George Allen controversy but focuses on the larger issue of public figures getting defined by snap impressions: None of us would like to be judged by our worst moment, [...]
Why latest for TCS Daily, “Why Israel Lost,” argues that the current cease-fire is a defeat for Israel: Israel has accepted a truce that falls far short of its original war aims, failing to establish control over their border with Lebanon, let alone deliver a crushing blow to Hezbollah. As many of us have argued [...]
My latest for TCS Daily, “Killing Us Softly” (original title: “Terrorists Win Even When they Lose”) is up. The lede: The news that Scotland Yard managed to foil a terrorist attack that would have conceivably dwarfed the 9/11 attacks is not quite as good it might first appear. Certainly, the prevention of “mass murder on [...]
My latest for TCS Daily, “Two Parties, Like it or Not,” is up. The thesis: It is no accident that our Republic has had a two party system in place in virtually every election cycle since the founding and that the Democrats and Republicans have taken turns governing since 1860. The Constitution all but assures [...]
My latest for TCS Daily, “Panoptic War,” is up. Written before this morning’s news of Zarqawi’s killing, it’s even more apropos now. This is an asymmetric war, with the world’s best military trying to contain a guerrilla force that, as Christopher Hitchens notes, is reduced to “the use of random murder to create a sectarian [...]
My latest for Human Events Online, which was submitted as “Tastes Like Iranian Chicken” but retitled by the editors as “U.S. Offer to Iran Has Eerie Similarity to Failed 1994 Deal With North Korea,” is now up. It is a substantial expansion–and rethinking of–a quick blog post I wrote yesterday. Jon Henke gets a substantial [...]
My lastest piece for TCS Daily, “Twin Anniversaries, ” is posted. It begins, At noon on January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan took the oath of office as President of the United States. Minutes later, the remaining hostages who had been held captive for 444 days at the American embassy in Teheran were freed. The Iran [...]
My latest piece for TCS Daily, “Suicide Girls,” is now up. The piece examines the history of female suicide terrorists and how differently they are regarded than their male counterparts. Suicide has been used as a weapon of resistance since the Zealots of the 1st Century A.D. and suicide bombings have been around since the [...]
My latest piece at TCS Daily, “Real Power Is Something You Take,” is up. The title comes from the world of pop culture: Fictional DallasĀ patriarch Jock Ewing once told his equally fictional son, Bobby, that “Nobody gives you power. Real power is something you take.” All of our great presidents — and some of [...]
My latest at TCS Daily, “The Triumph of ‘Angry and Stupid’,” is up.* It’s about the poisonous tone of American political rhetoric. The win at all cost mentality, which is more a function of the permanent campaign and the ever-increasing role of the federal government than anything Kos has done, is corrosive. There was a [...]
My latest article, “Does Criticism of the War Undermine Troop Morale?” is up at Tech Central Station. The conclusion: Soldiers ultimately decide for themselves whether their mission is “worth it.” To the extent that they are concerned with political debates in Washington, it is mostly about the small picture: ensuring they get the tools and [...]
My latest piece, “Counterinsurgency and the American Way of War,” is up at Tech Central Station. The conclusion: The problem in Vietnam and Iraq is not so much that the U.S. military is bad at counterinsurgency but that insurgencies are incredibly hard to defeat. Whereas a conventional force fights in the open and can be [...]
A revised and extended version of my early morning post on those who would appease the terrorists who bombed London’s tube yesterday has been published by Tech Central Station as “Please Appease Me.” Correction: I’m informed by a reliable source that Galloway’s comments to the House of Commons did indeed include a diatriabe on the [...]
My latest Tech Central Station piece, “Applying Free Market Logic to an Unfree Market,” tackles the D.C. baseball stadium fiasco. The upshot: While libertarians rightly bemoan the notion of forcing taxpayers to subsidize wealthy team owners, they should understand that the market works both ways. If sports leagues have the leverage to demand public financing [...]
My latest TCS piece, “What Are They Volunteering For?” is up. Soldiers sign up willing to make huge sacrifices, including putting their lives on the line. In exchange for this, we owe it to them to stop hiding the nature of this obligation from those who willingly volunteer for military duty. The military’s recruiting pitch, [...]
My latest TCS column, “Civil War Enthusiasts,” is up. It takes a look at Matthew Yglesias‘ assertion over at TAP that not only is an Iraqi civil war inevitable, it’s already underway. The piece incorporates and builds upon a longish post by Gregory Djerejian over at Belgravia Dispatch, which I stumbled upon doing research for [...]
My long-awaited Book Review: Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror is up at Strategic Insights. The conclusion: Regardless of whether one is persuaded by Anonymous’ arguments with respect to how the war should be fought, it is hard to agree, even by his own standards, with assertions like this one: [...]
My latest piece at Tech Central Station, “Intel Reform 2.0,” is now up. It argues for a go-slow approach to implementing the 9/11 Commission recommendations and provides some historical contrasts with the last such effort: The current system, which stood the nation in good stead for over half a century, was the product of slow [...]
My article “Iraq and Jihadist Terrorists” is up at Strategic Insights. The conclusion: Whether toppling Saddam’s regime in Iraq was worth the opportunity cost of diverting forces from other targets-let alone the immense continuing cost in blood and treasure-is beyond the scope of this paper, and is surely a matter the reader is competent to [...]