Unqualified Offerings

Now that I have comments I’m experiencing many things I only heard about before. Just tonight I had the first “fake trackback,” where someone sends a trackback to a post of yours without actually linking it. Lamer! Into the Deleted bin with you. Have fun with the online casino guys.
UPDATE: Oops! Now it’s there. My [...]

Apparently John McCain told Tim Russert today that “The biggest mistake I think we made after September 11 was not calling on Americans to serve. We shouldn’t have just told them to go shopping or take a trip.” But after September 11 we had an appropriately sized military for an appropriately sized war on terror. [...]

The closest thing to hard data on the success of Operation Thunderbolt, about which a bunch of us wondered in advance, comes from Reuters today:
General William Webster, the U.S. commander for Baghdad, said on Saturday a month-long sweep known as Operation Lightning had halved the number of car bombings in the capital.
Webster goes on to [...]

Matthew Yglesias and Spencer Ackerman are right. To the extent we have a chance of achieving a good outcome in Iraq it depends on setting a date certain for withdrawal. There are two reasons for this. First, it concentrates the mind of our more-or-less allied actors in Iraq. It removes a major moral hazard in [...]

It’s using terrorism as an excuse for stupid policy. In addition to saying we’re in Iraq because “we were attacked,” President Bush informs us that
“Some may disagree with my decision to remove
Saddam Hussein from power, but all of us can agree that the world’s terrorists have now made Iraq a central front in the war [...]