A year after the Cairo speech, Pew finds Muslim antipathy to Obama and his foreign policies, the outlier to a poll that generally finds foreign receptivity to the U.S. to have increased in the Obama era. What’s that demonstrate? That public diplomacy, plus or minus substantive policy changes, equals… well, the results of the new [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 504-10 June 17, 2010 DOD Identifies Marine Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a Marine who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Lance Cpl. Michael C. Bailey, 29, of Park Hills, Mo., died June 16 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. He was assigned to 3rd Battalion, [...]

A few days before Richard Holbrooke made his infamous August 2009 “we’ll know success when we see it” comment about identifying success in Afghanistan, I had a conversation with an administration official about the Afghanistan strategy. It was nominally a journalistic activity but mostly shit-shooting. Official X observed the precipitous contemporaneous drop in public opinion [...]

Sharon Weinberger attends a Special Operations contractor industry conference and emerges with tales of Emergent Destruction Technology. Tell me this isn’t ill: Some unmanned aircraft are more futuristic, including a drone created by the Air Force Research Laboratory, which is shaped and painted to resemble a real bird. Though not ready for deployment, the bird [...]

It’s a sorry state of affairs when liberal Zionists have to struggle in the august non-official conference just to get the Congress to reaffirm the necessity of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And it’s also a sorry state of affairs when liberal Zionists push through a resolution reaffirming a settlement freeze, rather than [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 503-10 June 17, 2010 DOD Identifies Marine Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a Marine who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Cpl. Jeffrey R. Standfest, 23, of St. Clair, Mich., died June 16 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. He was assigned to 3rd Combat Engineer [...]

I’ve got a dentist’s appointment at 9. So news: don’t break while I’m away, yeah?

Andrew Exum writes a very valuable post hinging off the Tony Cordesman piece that I cited earlier, and the point of both posts is to test the tensile strength of the assumptions behind the Obama administration’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. As a meta-point, it amuses me when critics accuse counterinsurgents of dogmatism or closed-mindedness. Ex [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 500-10 June 16, 2010 DOD Identifies Army Casualties The Department of Defense announced today the deaths of four soldiers who were supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. They died of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked their vehicle with an improvised explosive device June 7 in Konar, Afghanistan. They were assigned to the 2nd [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 499-10 June 16, 2010 DOD Identifies Army Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. Spc. Christopher W. Opat, 29, of Spencer, Iowa, died June 15 in Baquah, Iraq of injuries sustained from a non-combat related incident. He was assigned to the [...]