Matthew Duss

In his continuing coverage of the NRO fabulist, Andrew Sullivan directs us to the Human Province, a Lebanon-based blogger who further disassembles W. Thomas Smith, Jr.’s fantastical tales of phantom Hezbollah brigades invading Beirut. It just so happens that I live on the East side of town in one of the “Christian areas of Beirut,” […]

While I’m glad that the conclusions of the newly released NIE have pushed the prospect of an inevitably disastrous Iran invasion substantially farther off the table for now, I think we’re still left with very serious questions both about the brazenly dishonest process by which the President, the Vice-President, and their apparatchiks were clearly trying […]

Interesting: A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains on hold, contradicting an assessment two years ago that Tehran was working inexorably toward building a bomb.[…]The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy […]

Scolding Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for what he considers unacceptably conciliatory rhetoric at last week’s peace conference, Commentary’s Eric Trager suspects the source of Olmert’s outrageous moral unclarity: Jimmy Carter‘s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid and Mearsheimer and Walt‘s The Israel Lobby and U.S Foreign Policy: “[W]hile the American Jewish community was busy debating whether […]

I hope you’re enjoying the NROBS saga as much as I am. If not, go read about it. Tom Edsall has done some great work here. (Greenwald and Sullivan also have some good follow-up.) In what I can only hope will come to be remembered as the most regretted post of her career, editor Kathryn […]

I just got back from a CMEP-sponsored panel on Annapolis and what it all means, and though there were differing views on where things would go from here, all the panelists were unanimous in their relief and enthusiasm for renewed U.S. engagement in the process. Daniel Levy, who was one of today’s panelists, wrote this […]

Last week, Chris Hayes had a great story in the Nation about the phenomenon of the right wing email forward, and how this new form of “folk media” serves to keep various rumors and urban legends alive. One of the most notorious of these is the notion that Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim extremist […]

Anthony Cordesman takes a realistic look at claims of the surge’s success: “US and Iraqi forces are scoring important, if regional, tactical victories. However, these cover only western and central Iraq and may well be temporary. For all the claims that the “surge” worked, it is clear that it did not work purely on its […]

Via Rob, Frank Gaffney establishes the new standard by which all future spittle-flecked neoconservative hyperbole will be judged: “It is fitting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice chose the U.S. Naval Academy for the venue of today’s so-called Mideast peace conference. The reputation of that extraordinary institution in Annapolis has been sullied in recent years by […]

Demonstrating the aluminum bat-like subtlety which, combined with an enthusiasm for rehabilitating the paradigms of 19th century colonial discourse, has made him a foreign policy guru for wingnut racists everywhere, Ralph Peters offers his version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in today’s New York Post: “In the end, the problem’s difficulty can be put in New […]