The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
JUNE 16, 2014 Polk Report How to Evolve an Exit Strategy From America’s Foreign Policy Shambles by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY and WILLIAM R. POLK, Counterpunch Attached beneath my introductory comment is an essay by the American historian William R. Polk. His subject is the American predilection for non-learning in foreign policy. My comment is intended …
Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Non-Learning in US Foreign Policy”
Phi Beta Iota: RYP wrote this in part to react to Abdullah’s cavalier rejection of the Iraq scenario playing out today, for Afghanistan. His over-all point is that both candidates — Abdullah and Ghani — have pluses and minuses that voters and donors must consider BUT that there is only one clean candidate capable of …
Dempsey Wants to ‘Rebalance the Use of Military Power’ By James Kitfield Defense One, May 12, 2014 At the top of the United States military’s vast, global bureaucracy sits the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking military officer in the land and the president’s senior military advisor. The chairman sits between the four-star …
The Crucible of Iraq The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq, by Hassan Blasim, is the most important book to come out of the Iraq War. Blasim, whom I met with last week in Princeton, N.J., has a faultless eye for revealing detail, a ribald black humor and a psychological brilliance that makes every story …
Continue reading “Chris Hedge: The Crucible of Iraq – Best Book from Worst War”
America – a failed state? By Johan Galtung Transnational.org, 3 April 2014 Depends, of course, on the criteria. A state has an inside towards its citizens, and an outside toward the state system. Depends on domestic and foreign policy, in other words. That means it can fail in two ways, by not catering to its …
Hew Strachan 5.0 out of 5 stars Greatest Book Ever — But Misses the Core Point, March 14, 2014 I love this book — absolutely required reading the war colleges as well as the civil service colleges. Perhaps its greatest value is in setting the stage for professionals to refuse illegal orders and begin the …
Continue reading “Review: The Direction of War – Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective”
This essay (also attached below, argues that Syrian civil war places the contradictions in US/UK foreign policy into sharp relief. While the author, Peter Oborn, does not say so, the proximate cause of these contradictions is a fatally-flawed grand strategic appreciation of the threats and interests implicit in the Syrian civil war (the criteria for evolving a …
Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Amateur Hour? Or Corrupt Idiots in Power in Washington?”
