Eisenhower's Warning: The Military/Industrial Complex

Knowing that Ike was a career military man makes his warning all the more poignant.

We Meant Well

FreshAir has a great interview with State Department employee Peter Van Burenon on trying to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people (transcript).
Peter talks in his book We Meant Well about the corruption and absurdities of what passes as rebuilding. It would be funny, if "rebuilding" Iraq wasn't costing American lives and a fortune we can ill afford to waste.

TED Talk: British MP Rory Stewart on Afgtanistan

British MP Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan after 9/11, talking with citizens and warlords alike. Now, a decade later, he asks: Why are Western and coalition forces still fighting there? He shares lessons from past military interventions that worked — Bosnia, for instance — and shows that humility and local expertise are the keys to success.

Almost $20 Billion Given to Pakistan in Foreign Aid

Major Source On Iraqi Weapons Of Mass Destruction Admits He Lied

Interesting article on the Iraqi refugee code-named Curveball who wowed the CIA with tales of Saddam Hussein's mobile bioweapons trucks admits he just made up the stories.  His stories were used to justify the invasion of Iraq, even though a careful analysis of his stories would have shown them to be false.  Curveball states he would do it all over again in spite of the 100,000 civilian casualties caused by the war since he hated the regime so much. An account of Curveball is at Amazon.com.

Tunisia and Iraq

The US spent over a trillion dollars and thousands of our soldiers' lives to give Iraq a chance at democracy; Tunisia gets a shot at democracy from free twitter and facebook accounts.  Who knew?

A Lesson from the War of 1812

"We have considered ourselves of too much importance in the scale of nations. It has led us into great errors. Instead of yielding to circumstances which human power cannot control, we have imagined that our own destiny and that of other nations was in our hands, to be regulated as we thought proper." 

Virgina Federalist Daniel Sheffey on the eve of the war of 1812 from The War of 1812 A Forgotten Conflict by Donald Hickey p300.