Robert Farley

LEFT AND CENTER. Adding to what Matt and Blake have already written, I’ve long been curious as to precisely how a centrist Vermont governor became the voice of the Left in the United States. Although Dean’s non-Iraq policy preferences don’t place him as far right in the Democratic spectrum as Jack Murtha, they did leave […]

CROSS-POLLINATION. Hey, did anyone notice that Don Rumsfeld stepped down? I don’t have anything immediate to say; I think Ben’s right that this will play well for the Dems. Interestingly, we now have a military officer as head of the CIA and a former DCI as head of DOD. Don’t know what the implications of […]

YARMUTH. As Garance notes, Jim Yarmuth is hardly a conservative Democrat; Northup went after him for some of his past writings in Leo, which while fairly tame by the standards of an alternative weekly is still, well, an alternative weekly. Indeed, Northrup’s campaign accused Leo of taking Yarmuth’s columns offline. I saw Yarmuth in the […]

TRYING TO DISAGREE. I’m also not sure that Matt and I disagree all that much about counter-insurgency, but I’m going to press foward as if we do. Matt’s argument, I think, is that a focus on operational questions such as counter-insurgency doctrine ignores the basic political question of what could have been achieved in Iraq […]

BLOOD AND GUTS PETERS. Everybody’s talking about Ralph Peters‘s “give up on Iraq” bit, and I think that Glenn Greenwald and Spencer, among others, have demonstrated how dishonest and incoherent his new position is. Peter’s previous argument is also worth some attention, as he summarizes what has come to be the new dodge on the […]

COUNTER-INSURGENCY AND GOOD GOVERNANCE. I think Matt is missing the point of the renewed emphasis on counter-insurgency doctrine in the U.S. military. Matt’s focus is on the Iraq campaign, and he’s making two arguments. First, not invading Iraq would have been a better idea than developing an outstanding counter-insurgency strategy. Second, bad counter-insurgency is one […]

WAR ON WHAT NOW? Timothy Garton Ash makes a good (if familiar) point on the naming of the War on Terror: Apart from anything else, to use this language dignified the terrorists with the status of belligerents when they should have been treated as criminals. In a backhanded way, the coinage was itself a kind […]

TAX BREAKS FOR DEPENDENTS = FASCISM. Matt Duss dredges the depths of The Corner and finds that opposition to abortion and the taking of positive steps to encourage families to have children is the equivalent of fascism. At least, that is, if such steps are taken in Iran. President Ahmadinejad is pushing a program that […]

YOU’VE GOTTA LOVE POWERPOINT. A fun slide from a presentation at Central Command finds its way to the New York Times, upshot being that the situation is worse now than it ever has been before. The presentation was given to President Bush and SecDef Rumsfeld on October 18; maybe it helped spur the “We are […]

HUMAN CAPITAL. Ezra, I think that the lower middle class is more or less the correct answer, although I don’t have ready statistics on the socioeconomic backgrounds of military personnel, either. The military still provides a ready avenue for upward mobility, which means that people on lower economic rungs will find it correspondingly more attractive. […]