So about that exit strategy that President Obama apparently wants. Here’s Hillary Rodham Clinton on ‘Meet The Press’: We want to get Al Qaeda. We want to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat those who attacked us. And we want to be able to give the Afghans the tools that they need to be able to defend [...]

We don’t do enough sheer naming-and-mockery-of-fools in this business anymore. Andrew Sullivan, who’s really hitting a stride lately, shows how it’s done. And by the way, governor Palin, since you clearly read this blog: which of the 32 lies we have already documented can you rebut? We’d be delighted to give you a platform to [...]

Good Los Angeles Times piece about the vexed question of giving money to the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence agency because of its ties to, like, the people we’re fighting next door. The payments have triggered intense debate within the U.S. government, officials said, because of long-standing suspicions that the ISI continues to help Taliban extremists [...]

Farls’ review makes me really want to read this book. Kennan, it seems to me, is constantly understood only superficially, and Nitze is criminally under-studied. I was a pretty poor/disinterested college student, but I loved every minute of my senior-year “U.S. Foreign Policy From 1898 To The Present” course from Cold War revisionist historian Lloyd [...]

David Broder has his priorities in order: It is evident from the length of this deliberative process and from the flood of leaks that have emerged from Kabul and Washington that the perfect course of action does not exist. Given that reality, the urgent necessity is to make a decision — whether or not it [...]

I say this not as a normative judgment about strategy — let me say that from the outset. But with the caveat that the Obama administration’s Afghanistan strategy appears to be rather fluid in its development, one emerging contour — at least as of Monday– is an effort by Gen. Stanley McChrystal to reorient military [...]

God I love ThinkProgress for ensuring I never miss anything by not watching Sunday shows. This is — well, this is just delicious. LIZ CHENEY: You could also look at the comparison and think, Cheney 2012. WALLACE: Really?! How far do you want to go with that? KRISTOL: Let Liz make news. Cheney/Palin. WALLACE: Or [...]

He put this in comments on my KSM post and now he’s put it on his own blog — which you ought to be reading by the way –  and whatever the venue, I liked this point a whole lot: You see once KSM and his cohorts are dragged in front of a jury and [...]

Tell me if this excerpt from 50′s new book is as ironic as I think it is: Think of it this way: dependency is a habit that is so easy to acquire. We live in a culture that offers you all kinds of crutches — experts to turn to, drugs to cure any psychological unease, [...]

From the White House’s transcript of remarks made by Presidents Obama and Medvedev in Singapore, here’s what Medvedev had to say about Iran: Another topic we discussed with President Obama is Iran. Indeed, recently we’ve had a series of consultations where both parties participated. We have reached certain results, but I believe that, thanks to [...]