There’s a new study of the costs of the Iraq War. It got some publicity yesterday on memeorandum, among other places. Counting war casualties is almost always fraught with uncertainty and is one of the areas most ripe for exploitation … Continue reading →
It’s amazing that Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist managed to live past the year 1944, much less live long enough to die in his bed at the age of ninety. A brave man and the last surviving member of the Valkyrie plot: … Continue reading →
I haven’t yet read the book Triumph Forsaken, but it sounds like a fascinating so-called “revisionist” history of the Vietnam War. And this comment at the Amazon link treads familiar ground, does it not?: A key contributor to the downfall … Continue reading →
Vali Nasr has written a book, a portion of which has been excerpted in Foreign Policy. His piece represents another curious effort to discredit Obama from the left, and is far more hard-hitting than Bill Keller’s. Nasr is a Tehran-born … Continue reading →
Yesterday commenter “Lizzie” wrote: I remember watching the PBS “Ethics in America” episode where Charles Ogletree asked Peter Jennings & Mike Wallace what they would do if they were embedded with and the enemy, and they realized the enemy was … Continue reading →
James Lileks offers his take on the 1920s. As usual with Lileks, it’s both interesting and fun. It’s always kind of strange to imagine what is was like to live in a decade we’ve heard about but weren’t around for. … Continue reading →
…but it’s not such a big deal, although my saying that may surprise you. First of all, let me state that I have disagreed, and continue to disagree, in the strongest possible terms with Obama’s actual foreign policy, which can … Continue reading →
General Norman Schwarzkopf has died at the age of 78 of complications from pneumonia. Those of us who were around during the 1991 Gulf War remember him as a television personality explaining it all, and a man who was popular … Continue reading →
…nominates Massachusetts Democratic Senator John Kerry for the post of Secretary of State. I’ve written about this choice before (including earlier, when Kerry was being considered for Secretary of Defense). So I’ll just quote myself: …[T]his would be another example … Continue reading →
And I fear we never shall. When I was in school, World War I was hardly touched on in my history classes, so eager were the teachers to get to World War II before the year was over. It was … Continue reading →
A reader has alerted me to the news that the tunnel “Harry” featured in the movie “The Great Escape” has been found (not the movie set tunnel; the real deal). If you’ve loved that movie for many decades, as I … Continue reading →
Thomas Friedman surprised me by offering an interesting take on the state of the Middle East today. I’d summarize it as: Iraq is at present the most stable country in the Arab Middle East, at least relative to the others. … Continue reading →