You can read Tom Ricks for all that, but this essay from Armed Forces Journal is making the rounds, and today I got an email from a friend at one of our country’s distinguished institutions for military education expressing disappointment in the courses he’s receiving. Anyway, here’s MG Scales: It’s that time again. About once [...]

The kids will have their motherfucking say: As part of the set, a Muslim punk rock musician, Marwan Kamel, 23, painted “Osama McDonald,” a figure with Osama bin Laden’s face atop Ronald McDonald’s body. Mr. Kamel said the painting was a protest against imperialism by American corporations and against Wahhabism, the strictest form of Islam. [...]

My ol’ boss, dealing with the Michael Oren/J Street controversy with characteristic (Solomonic?) judiciousness, writes: I don’t expect [Oren] to be departing any time soon unless and until the Netanyahu government falls. But Oren should quickly rethink the J Street decision. And even if he does, the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs should recall Oren [...]

I months in 2005 researching and writing a long feature about the overwhelming utility that American openness to both religiosity and immigrants has for national security. Why has the U.S. largely avoided the radicalization of its Muslim diaspora when, to a degree, Europe has been afflicted by the phenomenon? America’s blend of liberalism and religiosity, [...]

New CNAS release: Top National Security Reporters Eric Schmitt & Thom Shanker Join CNAS as Writers in Residence WASHINGTON, D.C., October 15, 2009 – The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) is pleased to announce that distinguished journalists Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, who cover terrorism, the military, and national security for The New [...]

It was probably only a matter of time until we starting talking about a Punjabi Taliban

al-Qaeda’s Mohamed Ilyas Kashmiri was believed to be involved in one of the 2003 assassination attempts on Pervez Musharraf ordered by Ayman Zawahiri. Last month, we were told, the Predator predatored him. Until he turned up to give an interview to the Asia Times. Butterfingers! Eli Lake gets the laugh-to-keep-from-crying quote: “While there were preliminary [...]

Lindsay sums this up well: Double-X racks up a lot of hits by hiring anti-feminists to diagnose the ills of contemporary feminism. Retaining a psychopath as a friendship guru is the logical next step. Obviously I’m not Double-X’s target audience. But this surely counts as a new low. Woman was drugged at a club and [...]

This is a fantastic piece about how the process of insurgent reconciliation in Afghanistan will actually work. It sort of covers a lot of territory that (to be a stickler) isn’t well-captured by the lede, but such is life when you’ve got to cram a ton of wonderful, significant and somewhat dissonant information into a [...]

Calling all Tribesmen and Tribeswomen: Let us set forth this solemn promise, to avoid comparing Thing-We-Dislike to anything Hitler did. New York magazine is now on our case, and while I am kind of skeeved out in a not-totally-rational way by the inference that we’re not saying “Fuck The Holocaust Comparisons” in one giant Hebraic [...]