A couple of nights ago, the PBS News Hour had a roundtable discussion of the historical parallels of American occupation after a war victory. Michael Beschloss, once again provided his trademark search for overlooked historical minutiae (here the prospect that Hitler had survived in the Bavarian hills) instead of offering broader-picture analysis of historical movement […]
This has been a fast-changing news cycle over the last week or so (and MFK has been behind a bit catching up…), but it’s amazing how the further and faster we go, the more we’re still in the same place. First, the Iraq war of course: the administration’s new uranium-intelligence scandal is bringing up debates […]
Things have been busy here at Marxists for Keynes, so haven’t been able to post as regularly…apologies. Dan Kennedy today weighs in on the WMD issue.
President Bush now has a chaotic mess on his hands — a mess that was predicted by those of us who opposed going to war without an explicit UN mandate.
Nevertheless, […]
Isn’t Thomas Friedman mixing his metaphors just a wee bit?
[t]his interim Iraqi authority should not focus on holding national elections - the hardware of democracy. Elections should come last. Instead, it must start with the software - building, brick by brick, the institutions of a free society - so that when people do get […]
The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall has a commentary piece today arguing that Europe needs to form a common supra-national front in order to gain some leverage against the US and help curb a “unipolar” world order. I imagine that right now his position is not all that different from other UK and continental commentators across the […]
History doesn’t simply repeat itself, of course, but Catharin Dalpino of the Brookings Institution has a great essay showing how each of our mistakes in Vietnam - underestimating nationalism, reinforcing religious and ethnic divisions, importing political leadership, and creating the illusion of democracy to hide realpolitik - is replaying itself out on the political stage […]
I’ve used the Guardian’s George Monbiot as a straw man before, but I’ll use him again, for his piece today, arguing that the only way Britain can resist the US’s power is by joining the Euro. Military competition is futile, and trade boycotts would simply be symbolic he argues. Instead, Monbiot wants to attack the […]
A number of liberal-left commentators are eating crow over their doomsday pronouncements over the war… okay, not as many as the Weekly Standard would like. After all, things aren’t finished yet, we still haven’t installed meaningful democracy in Iraq, much less spread it to any place else. I’m still convinced this is a war of […]
It seems that secret plans aren’t what they used to be. Not only do we have word from the Guardian that US bigwigs are drawing up secret plan for US-run postwar Iraq, this comes only a couple of weeks after the (London) Times boasted of obtaining a “a confidential plan to establish a post-Saddam government […]
Will the Iraqis rise up to cheer the Anglo-American forces (let’s stop calling them “coalition forces”) or will they see the U.S. particularly as colonialist invaders? Part of the problem in answering the question is that we have no trustworthy account; conservatives and Iraqi ex-pats are eager to see proof that Saddam needed to be […]
As Robert Byrd said today, Bush’ bill for war costs is only a downpayment. How else do we make sense of the $ 3.5 Billion slated for Iraqi relief and reconstruction? It sounds like a lot, but here’s the rough breakdown (from the OMB website): $1B for oil field repair, $1.7B for infrastructure repair, […]
Matthew, of a cross-town blog, has a survey of NYC anti-war protestors. Probably not completely scientific sampling at only 200 entries, but still interesting. The results confirm my suspicions that many of the anti-war left don’t object to the specifics of this war as to any war the U.S. might engage in, including our 2001 […]
There has been talk (encouraged by Josh Marshall’s article in The Hill) about the differences between postwar reconstruction of Germany and Japan and the possibility of rehabilitating Iraq as a democracy. Joseph Nye’s piece in the Globe today, for instance, argues that “conditions in the Middle East today are not like Germany and Japan in […]
So now the war is on, and while I don’t think that there’s a good reason that dissent can’t and shouldn’t continue (I’m still mad at the political and diplomatic strong-arming in all of this), in sum I probably agree with Dan Kennedy that it’s in all of our interests that the invasion and overthrow […]
Daniel Gross’s profile of Wall Street’s war bullishness in Slate raises an interesting issue: to what extent is this week’s bull run a vote that this war is good for the U.S. economy? Gross argues that essentially, it’s 90s-style herd mentality returning:
In this odd time - war declared but not yet started - the first […]