@GlobalistHulk: FOLKSY WAR ADDICT NEED DECLARE IR PARADIGM AT OUTSET! OR YOU BE FOLKSY STRAW MAN! @FolksyWarAddict: Gee, I guess I’m not sophistimicated enough for that. I just believe in a STRONG America devoted to LIBERTY. And to ALL CAPS. @GlobalistHulk: YOU SO FOLKSY, WHY NOT BE FOLKSY FOR SOFT POWER? ALL SMASH ALL TIME [...]

As an ex-squid, I should probably hate Marines. But the smartass in me has always liked them: Notwithstanding their hoo-rah, “kill kill” reputation, the jarheads have a greater tolerance than most military organizations for nonconformity, innovation, and out-of-step thinking. See also: “semper gumby.” Nowhere has this tendency been more evident than in counterinsurgency: The Corps [...]

…not with a bang, but a crapload of paperwork and actuarials. So reports the Associated Press from Joint Base Balad in Iraq. Your money grafs: The orderly withdrawal is a far cry from the testosterone-fueled push across the berm separating Kuwait and Iraq, when Marines and soldiers pushed north in the 2003 invasion, battling Saddam [...]

Well, I’ll be the second volunteer to poke my head up and say hello. (Hello). I’m Jenn, and I basically threw my hands up in the air like a dorky girl in history class until Spencer called on me, from the comments, and let me play along. You can find me most days at my [...]

Warning! Everything that follows in this post is idle barstool-though-I’m-still-at-work speculation! So you may have heard that U.S. and Iraqi forces killed Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al Masri, the leadership of al-Qaeda in Iraq, in a joint Sunday raid. If this was 2006, we’d all be freaking out. I might be making an [...]

He’ll go to Joint Forces Command, so he’s being promoted. So does that mean some post like Marine Corps Commandant will suddenly open up for Gen. Mattis? I don’t happen to know if Commandant is a fixed-term position, but it seems from Wikipedia that commandants serve about four or so years, and that would indicate [...]

In what might be the least surprising thing to have ever happened in Iraq, the Sadrist referendum on whom the JAMsters ought to back for prime minister rejected the two leading candidates who, in office, used military force against Moqtada al-Sadr and embraced the one former Iraqi premier who didn’t. Ibrahim Jaafari forevers! Gregg Carlstrom [...]

In the past 36 hours, some organization wearing the uniforms of Iraqi soldiers pulled off a brazen mass murder of Awakening members in Arab Jabour. (“Methodically” was the adverb the Los Angeles Times used to describe the pace of slayings that took place across four houses for a death toll of 25.) To the north, [...]

If you’ve never read a profile of Gen. Petraeus and you don’t mind really purple, sycophantic prose — “[W]hen Petraeus tests himself, he usually wins” is a line that survived the editing process — then by all means check out Mark Bowden’s thing in Vanity Fair. But that’s not going to describe anyone who reads [...]

So who does Moqtada al-Sadr hate more these days — Nouri al-Maliki or Iyad Allawi? Both have tried to crush him. Maliki’s just the most recent to attempt it. According to the Times, Sadr has a creative way to demonstrate that he’s the real boss of the Iraqi parliament: his people are going to hold [...]