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In a feature article entitled “We Are Winning. We Haven’t Won.” in this week’s Weekly Standard, Max Boot elaborates on his assessment of the Surge based on his recent sojourn in Iraq. It turns out that he and Bing West, who published a condensed version of the longer article in Monday’s Los Angeles Times, traveled [...]
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While one swallow does not a spring make, a seemingly off-hand remark in a post by Max Boot in Commentary’s blog, ‘Contentions’, last week about Gen. David Petraeus’ possible promotion to Supreme Allied Commander at NATO struck me as at least a hint that neo-conservatives and their allies in the administration may be engaged in [...]
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In an article that expands our knowledge base about the anything-but-grassroots “Freedom’s Watch” (about which I have posted here and here), Paul Kane and Jonathan Weisman wrote about its ambitions — among other things, to raise $250 million this year to become the right-wing answer to MoveOn.org — in the Washington Post Sunday. The [...]
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Defense Secretary Robert Gates offered still more evidence this past week that he has become the most important actor in steering the Bush administration’s foreign policy toward a more realist course, particularly with respect to the Middle East and Iran. (I wrote an article about this for IPS at the end of December.)
No, I’m not [...]
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If President George W. Bush’s main purpose in visiting the Gulf last week — as indicated by his call in Abu Dhabi last Sunday to confront Iran “before it is too late” — was to rally Washington’s Sunni-led regional allies, particularly Saudi Arabia, behind a containment-and-isolation strategy against Iran, especially in the wake of last [...]
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He was probably Donald Rumsfeld’s single closest adviser, as well as the Pentagon’s intelligence czar, who, among other things, reportedly helped determine how prisoners were treated at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, etc. and who also set up a special unit within the Pentagon to run what were essentially covert operations abroad without notifying the in-country U.S. [...]
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If you need an example of just how sophomoric both Bill Kristol’s ‘Weekly Standard’ and AEI’s Michael Rubin can be, don’t miss Rubin’s latest article in the Standard, entitled “Living in a Dream World: The Political Fantasies of Foreign Service Officers”. Rubin’s target is the contents of a regular column in the State Department’s in-house [...]
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I don’t pretend to know whether the U.S. Navy’s version or the Iranian version of last Sunday’s incident in the Straits of Hormuz is more accurate or whether the two versions may not even be mutually exclusive, but I think there are two interesting points worth making — the first, regarding the reaction (or, more [...]
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In a new blow to the neo-conservative hard-liners at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), their hero, Gen. David Petraeus, has apparently concluded that Iran is indeed following through on its reported pledge earlier this fall to the Iraqi government to cut its alleged supply of weapons to Shi’a militias in Iraq. That assessment comes from none [...]
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The New York Times’ decision to add Bill Kristol to its stable of weekly columnists seems pretty shocking to me and not only because Kristol, as pointed out by Josh Marshall, has virtually charged the Times with treason. As the main foreign policy muse of David Brooks — call him Kristol-Lite — Kristol was already [...]
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