Unqualified Offerings

Much less Shiite militia-related activity (in or out of Iraqi Army uniform) is driven by Baby Sadr than the media would lead you to believe. Quite a bit of it stems from Badr or smaller groups. The emphasis on Sadr reflects the American habit of personalizing every foreign policy problem, and the fact that Sadr [...]

Andrew Olmsted responds to Frederick Kagan, and considers the only course of action he thinks might salvage the situation in Iraq:
Is it possible to pacify Iraq? Sure. But it would take a huge number of troops to do it, and most of those would have to be American troops. 500,000 would be a good start, [...]

Last week Steve Verdon had great fun using graphs to show how the evil Republicans and Saudis manipulated gas prices in advance of the 2003 and 2005 national elections – his point being, of course, that we don’t have national elections in odd years, so if you see the same pricing patterns then as in [...]

Scott Horton seizes the teachable moment our MBA President provides.
Kind of start to understand why all his business ventures kept failing if he doesn’t even get the “sunk costs” fallacy – the President, I mean, not Horton.

Hey, it’s the traditional fifth anniversary gift. But I totally forgot the usual “Look, the blog’s another year older post” on Saturday.
Anyway, the blog’s another year older. Thank you for reading it.

Frederick Kagan tries to buck us all up in the Washington Post, writing
The implication of these arguments is clear: The United States should prepare to leave Iraq, after which the Iraqis will work out their own troubles — or they won’t. In any event, we can no longer help them. This notion is wrong and [...]

Speaking of the Reason happy hour, an incident there convinced me not to vote for Ben Cardin over Michael Steele after all.
At one point I had to go to the men’s room. There was this woman blocking the hallway I needed to get down, and she had her back to me, and I couldn’t get [...]

Had lunch at a place with
A TV.
Tuned to FoxNews.
With no sound.
Quite the phenomenon. The President had had his press conference in the morning, and for the most part, the crawl was of the form “Bush: [Thing the President Said].” It was like watching the All Union Programme during the Brezhnev era. You get the feeling [...]

I had a great conversation with Jason Kuznicki of Positive Liberty last night at the Reason happy hour about All Things Ticking Bomb. He said something that really struck me, and I urged him to blog it. So he did, marbling it overmuch with kind words about me, so I excerpt it here to save [...]

Another State Department traitor speaks the truth on Iraq, just a couple days after Alberto Fernando told Al-Jazeera – in Arabic! – that “without doubt, there was arrogance and stupidity by the United States in Iraq”:
Mr White was the head of the state department’s Iraq intelligence section until last year.
He told the BBC that the [...]