FEIGNING OUTRAGE. Apropos of the recent discussion of Marty Peretz’s unsuitability for inclusion in polite society, I’m reminded of this little gem that Matt Duss caught before someone apparently decided to take it off the main page of the Spine. It’s still available, though, through the permalink. I actually believe that Arabs are feigning outrage […]
Robert Farley
Robert Farley is an assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce, University of Kentucky. He contributes to the blogs Lawyers, Guns, and Money and TAPPED.
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IED SKEPTICISM.
IED SKEPTICISM. It’s taken as an article of faith in some parts that a large number of IEDs in Iraq are coming from Iran, and that this phenomenon is indicative of clear Iranian hostility to the creation of a stable Iraq. To begin with, there are a couple of logical flaws; even if we accept […]
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SATELLITE DESTRUCTION.
SATELLITE DESTRUCTION. China has destroyed a satellite, joining Russia and the United States as the only countries capable of both putting objects in space and blowing them up. Some angles: Deterrence: First and foremost, this looks like a deterrent move aimed at the United States. The U.S. military isn’t completely dependent on spy satellites (in […]
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Disaster by Design
When it comes to Iraq, liberal hawks have much to answer for. They underestimated both the malfeasance of the Bush administration and the malleability of the Iraqi polity. The Democratic foreign policy elite that inhabits the Brookings Institution and other major think tanks ignored its responsibility to carefully evaluate both the means and goals of […]
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STRATEGIC LEVEL FAILURES.
STRATEGIC LEVEL FAILURES. After some time in the wilderness, I’m coming around to Matt’s way of thinking about the U.S. intervention in Somalia. Armchair Generalist puts it well when he writes: I’m all for a good military operation, but I’d like to know that it was a logical plan with a strategic objective. And merely […]
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SURGE OF NONSENSE.
SURGE OF NONSENSE. Donald Stoker is correct insofar as he notes that the success record of insurgencies isn’t great. Yglesias and Drum note that the successful counterinsurgency campaigns that Stoker points out were fought by local governments rather than occupying powers, which is more or less correct, although there are some definitional problems. The Greeks, […]
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UNBELIEVABLE.
UNBELIEVABLE. Anne Applebaum is making sense. I know; I’m just as surprised as you are. Today she argues that the United States and coalition forces in Afghanistan should abandon poppy eradication in favor of a quasi-legalization strategy designed to bring opium cultivation out of the legal netherworld. Such a move might well undercut Taliban influence […]
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THE OTHER, NON-SURGE WAR.
THE OTHER, NON-SURGE WAR. So, there’s an airstrike in Afghanistan. NATO claims that 150 insurgents were killed. The Afghan Army claims that fifty were killed. The Afghan Ministry of Defense claims that eighty were killed. The actual number killed can’t be counted because the battlefield is too remote, but we do know that one insurgent […]
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ANTI-SURGE.
ANTI-SURGE. The British Army? Not so much on the surging. According to Reuters, Britain will withdraw 2700 of its 7200 strong contingent by May 31. British forces are concentrated in southern Iraq, but in principle could be used anywhere, especially in the context of a major reshuffling of American and Iraqi forces. Also, if the […]
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FALLON.
FALLON. I’m unconvinced by the more alarmist interpretations of Admiral Fallon’s shift to CENTCOM. SecDef Rumsfeld argued from the beginning of his tenure against the practice of assigning combatant commands to particular services. In this context, the shift can be understood as part of the effort to reduce territoriality and increase “jointness” among the services. […]
