Matthew Duss

Michael Cohen of Democracy Arsenal correctly flags a potentially disastrous development in Barack Obama‘s race for the Democratic nomination: Bill Kristol’s prediction that Obama will likely win the Democratic nomination. Given Kristol’s record as one of the most consistently and comprehensively wrong pundits in America, this could be a harbinger of doom for Obama’s campaign. […]

Ha’aretz has this story on a potentially significant meeting between Palestinians and Israelis in Hebron: The heads of the largest Palestinian clans in Hebron met with the Kiryat Arba local council chief and prominent leaders of the Jewish community in Hebron on Wednesday in what both sides described as a meeting of reconciliation, Army Radio […]

A story in this morning’s NY Times on how the U.S. Army buried a report critical of post-war planning in Iraq: [The RAND Corporation] submitted a report in the summer of 2005 called “Rebuilding Iraq.” RAND researchers provided an unclassified version of the report along with a secret one, hoping that its publication would contribute […]

International Crisis Group has just published a new report entitled “Iraq’s Civil War, the Sadrists and the Surge.” It’s findings are summarized thusly: The dramatic decline in bloodshed in Iraq – at least until last week’s terrible market bombings in Baghdad – is largely due to Muqtada al-Sadr’s August 2007 unilateral ceasefire. Made under heavy […]

Shorter Mike Huckabee: “Wanting to end the war in Iraq shows that Barack Obama and other Democrats just don’t get it about the Holocaust.” Interesting that an American presidential candidate takes to the pages of the Jerusalem Post to deliver these sorts of attacks. Also interesting is that, according to Huckabee’s fundamentalist Christian Zionist eschatology, […]

Victor Davis Hanson, reviewing Oprah Winfrey‘s speech at a weekend rally for Barack Obama: [Oprah] seemed to be mimicking, through a sort of mock-wimpy intonation, those (mostly white elite?) feminists who were shocked about her endorsement of Obama. And then she started rousing the crowd in a sort of loud faux-gospel mode, answering to her […]

Gershom Gorenberg writes about how hardened assumptions about the Middle East, combined with a tendency to willfully ignore the interests of individual regimes in favor of a grand strategic framework, have often blinded American policymakers to reality in the region. Ever since it turned out that Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction were the […]

Indulging in one of his periodic tirades against Christians who have the bad form to call attention to the widespread human rights abuses of the Israeli occupation, Marty Peretz inveighs against those perfidious Methodists, noting with apparent satisfaction a drop in church membership: Nearly 70 years ago, in 1940, when the US had 100 million […]

Newsweek reports on Muqtada al-Sadr‘s role vis-a-vis the surge: Gen. David Petraeus has been deservedly praised for tamping down violence in Iraq, but an unlikely character deserves some credit—Sadr. Five months ago the firebrand cleric ordered his followers to lay down their arms, and they’ve largely obeyed…American officers now talk about “splitting the seams” within […]

Barack Obama last night, with the money: If we were concerned about Iranian influence, we should not have had this government installed in the first place, [and] we shouldn’t have invaded [Iraq] in the first place. It was part of the reason that I think it was such a profound strategic error for us to […]