According to a new Pew Research poll, 18% of Americans think Barack Obama is a Muslim. Surprisingly, even organizations like the Associated Press, who ordinarily have a hard time differentiating honest debate from blatant falsehood, in this case repeatedly take the unequivocal position that this view is “incorrect”. There’s a couple things going on here [...]

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — One consequence of coming here is that I couldn’t see something I’ve desperately wanted to witness for years: the departure of the final U.S. combat brigade from Iraq. Luckily, the creaky internet access I’ve got here lets me read the Post‘s account. And the AP’s. And this briefing with State’s [...]

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — I interviewed Gen. Petraeus on Tuesday in Kabul for Danger Room. In this post, Petraeus provides his most fulsome explanation to date of how he’ll structure troop reductions after July 2011. And in this one, he discloses the intense operational tempo that Special Operations Forces are experiencing this summer; discusses [...]

Last week, Adam linked to Drew Conway’s great illustration of the Wikileaks data at Zero Intelligence Agents. Today Mike Dewar, Drew and their team came out with a new animated graphic representation of the data, showing the surges and falls of incidents over time, as a heat map. Check out those summer months–it’s like a [...]

A few months ago, in response to a small flurry of disingenuous claims of military service by political candidates, Orin Hatch decided something had to be done. In an unusual demonstration of legislative agility, he quickly proposed amending the original 2005 “Stolen Valor Act” to include criminal provisions for “false claims in order to obtain [...]

Thanks to a fortuitous retweet, I found out that Andrew Bacevich, veteran, professor, and author of several books on American foreign policy, will be doing a reading/discussion at a bookstore a couple blocks from my apartment tonight. I’m going to try to make it, so does anyone have anything they would like asked? Or any [...]

So, by training, I’m a fiction writer. Yep, I make stuff up and have the degree to prove it. Fun, right? When I look at war reporting, I’m often interested in the narrative construction of the stories we tell and the stories we hear, and how that affects our absorption of what’s going on. There’s [...]

The buzz from this weekend was General Petraeus on Meet the Press, advising a drawdown in Afghanistan based more on ground conditions than on deadlines. From the Post: Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, warned of a bloody civil war and Taliban takeover if the United States fails there. He said the [...]

I’m getting increasingly uncomfortable with where we find ourselves going. It’s moving quickly past mere reprehensible politics, fueling itself with more vitriol, more lies, more fear and more hatred, taking us all too fast to a place that, as an American, I believed was behind us for good. Think about what we’re all tied up [...]

At the risk of tackling a topic I’ve talked about before (a couple times), something stuck out to me in the Gates-a-palooza of the last few days. From Fareed Zakaria’s Op-Ed in WaPo: Gates likes to point out that there are more musicians in U.S. military marching bands than members of the Foreign Service. In [...]