It’s become common wisdom to say one of the many huge mistakes of the postwar era in Iraq was to disband the army. But it’s always puzzled me that so many people seem to think it’s a self-evident truth. I’ve … Continue reading →
Remember those tests of perception known as figure/ground drawings? As a child I was fascinated by their magical “now you see it, now you see something else” mutability. Here are two of the most popular—the vase/profiles one and the young … Continue reading →
Bush’s speech yesterday seems to have spawned a further opening of that wound that’s never really closed, the Vietnam War. Bush’s critics are incensed: after all, Iraq/Vietnam is their analogy, always good for a negative spin on what we’re doing … Continue reading →
In today’s speech in Kansas City to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, President Bush gave the reconstruction efforts in Iraq the historical context some of us have been writing about for some time: the need to avoid the sort of … Continue reading →
The truck bombs that exploded two days ago in Iraq took a horrific toll. Whether the final tally of human life will be 250 or 500 (the exact figure may never be known), virtually all of the victims were Yazidis, … Continue reading →
The intrepid Michael Totten has some of the best reporting out of Iraq these days. Read his riveting eyewitness (minus night goggles, but armed with camera) account of a night raid in Baghdad with the 82nd Airborne on the lookout … Continue reading →
I don’t know whether it shocks you, but it still has the capacity to shock me that the Democrats don’t seem to care about the consequences of their current stance on Iraq. Perhaps that’s the best indication that they are … Continue reading →
A while back I had lunch with Michael Totten during one of his rare moments in this country. He’d just returned from a recent visit to Iraq and Kurdistan, and was telling me what it was like to travel there. … Continue reading →
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has presided over a legislature that so far has done very little that the Democrats set out to do when they won the 2006 election, except to further political squabbling. The country remains bitterly divided … Continue reading →
Jules Crittenden has a well-worth-reading takedown of the NY Times’s editorial demanding that we get out of Iraq ASAP. I’m not going to spend a great deal of time exhaustively fisking the Times piece; Crittenden and others have done so … Continue reading →
In a remarkable column by Terence Samuels at The American Prospect, the author praises Montana’s Democratic Senator Jon Tester for the following suggestion regarding the dilemma of what to do about the war in Iraq: He begins with the idea … Continue reading →
Groucho Marx had a signature greeting song, always good for a laugh: “Hello I Must Be Going:” Hello, I must be going I cannot stay I came to say I must be going I’m glad I came But just the … Continue reading →