Unqualified Offerings

We’ve talked before about the seasonally adjusted ratcheting pattern of insurgent violence. I think there’s a facet of the data that gets overlooked, though. The recent Pentagon report has the crucial graph on page 25, the one that plots the frequency of “Enemy-Initiated Attacks” is a stacked-bar graph with three components: attacks on coalition forces; [...]

Jack Keane and Frederick Kagan show some foresight in the Washington Post this morning – they want their excuses for any failure of the so-called “surge” strategy on the record early. Specifically:
Reports on the Bush administration’s efforts to craft a new strategy in Iraq often use the term “surge” but rarely define it. Estimates of [...]

Gerald Ford is dead. My hobbyhorse is Carter-Presidency revisionism, not Ford-Presidency revisionism, but I have a soft spot for any president where you can’t quite remember what happened while he was in the White House. Ford was dealt an economy that Johnson and Nixon had spent ten years wrecking. His only answer to the problem [...]

The apparently liberal Economist’s View blog reminds us that Hayek found fairly comprehensive kinds of social insurance entirely defensible. I remember reading somewhere off the internet that this was exactly the source of Ayn Rand’s antipathy to Hayek. On Rand’s view, Hayek’s arguments supported no principled case against any kind of government intervention.
Via a commenter [...]

Hesiod’s comment below prompted me to install enough Quicktime/iTunes to watch the trailer for the next Fantastic Four movie. It’s a chase scene between the Human Torch and the Silver Surfer and – it looks bitchin’. There’s one fakey horizontal shot at 1:25-26, but the rest of it is very impressive, and exciting.
Ironically, the process [...]

Here’s the most cynical thought I think I’ve ever had. Maybe the Administration’s odd publicity offensive about the equally odd detainings of some Iranian officials in Iraq – officials in Iraq at the behest of Iraqi poobahs Jalal Talabani and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim – isn’t really about ginning up support for a war on Iran [...]

Tim F. at Balloon Juice says the ISG report on Iraq matters after all.

Clifford May writing in the Corner:
“Syria is annexed to Iran.”
Who says so? The Lebanese Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt. This is why the notion of negotiating Syria away from Iran is so naïve.
As opposed to the naivete of taking whatever Walid Jumblatt says at face value, I suppose.
Via All War All the Time via Yglesias.

Love the player. Love the library. Love the subscription concept. But your software – at least the Best Buy-branded version – sucks seventeen different kinds of ass.
1. You keep signing me out at the end of or during downloads.
2. You keep generating script errors.
3. Your search engine makes idiosyncratic decisions to fail. So far today [...]

Can anyone tell me what the aim of Ethiopia’s new war in Somalia is? That is, on what party does the government of Ethiopia hope to impose its will on what matter using military force? I’m leaving aside for the moment the quaint question of legality – an attack on the territory of another nation [...]