IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 813-09 October 19, 2009 DoD Identifies Army Casualties The Department of Defense announced today the death of four soldiers who were supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. They died Oct. 15 in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked their vehicle with an improvised explosive device. They were assigned to the [...]

I got this tweet today: The site seems cool — “‘Make It Rain,’ featuring 7 artists, celebrates the trend of throwing lots of dollar bills at strippers, i.e. ‘making it rain’,” for instance — but there is no reason to promote twitter-based hostility to Ezra. Like Joey Crack said: respect mines! Update: Actually, this site [...]

Today’s game-thread is guest-hosted by Statler. If I were writing it, I’d write a takedown of the unique mixture of pandering and sycophancy that is this Mike Lupica column about why we Yankee fans are the greatest fans in the history of sport. I am sick of having Yankee-fan stereotypes confirmed, Lupica. You are making [...]

Democracy In America has had enough of contrarianism: Contrarianism generally lines up with the “perversity” column in Albert Hirschman’s typology “The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy”. Here’s the thing: as history progresses, things change. And societies try to adapt to those changes. Experts come up with solutions to the problems the societies face. Those [...]

The Aus-Rotten-ification of Afghanistan proceeds, as CNN says 52 percent of respondents in a new poll say Afghanistan has become “another Vietnam.” Length-wise, they’re certainly right. If the “real war” part of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam was 1965 to 1973, then we’ve matched it, as the war entered its ninth year last week. More [...]

It’s pretty safe. From David Rohde’s account of being held prisoner by the Haqqani network in Miram Shah, North Waziristan: We arrived at a new house, and I was again surprised by the good conditions. It had regular electricity, and we could wash ourselves with buckets of warm water. I received a new set of [...]

I tried and didn’t really succeed at the Washington Independent to get the U.S. military command in Afghanistan to discuss the Pakistani offensive in Waziristan. Londonstani over at Abu Muqawama’s place is in Pakistan at the moment and has a very good post about how opaque everything appears from over there. So what’s really going [...]

From the Windy: [T]he Arab side is already expressing concern that all this means the Obama administration team is moving too far in the Israeli direction. Marc Lynch tweets that an Arabic-language al-Jazeera report, citing Palestinian Authority sources, is putting out there that President Obama is “backing away” from a Palestinian state. I’m pretty skeptical [...]

Hard to see how this isn’t the right thing to do, and the fact that it’s politically expedient doesn’t take away from that.

In a move of audacious hostility crafted, in part, to smother my career in its cradle, two of the best national security journalists around, Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, have launched a new blog, Declassified, for Newsweek‘s remixed-and-remastered website. The game/more fierce/etc.