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War on Terror

Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry

A With Both Hands Mini-Review The initial Joe Ledger novel stuck out to me in 2009 as an interesting combination of Islamic millennialism and the zombie genre. Fourteen years later, one of the most interesting theories I have come across for why shambling hordes took over popular entertainment in the

The Long View 2008-11-29: Mumbai and the Tranquility of Order

In retrospect, I have criticized John and a lot of other people for the things they said or the courses of action they took in the years after 9/11. However, if you get yourself back in the mindset you might have had at the time, something like the 2008

The Long View: Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism

This 2004 book review by John J. Reilly slipped through the cracks. It is an interesting combination of what now seems like insane warmongering about Iraq, but was in fact totally normal at the time across almost all sectors of America, and this little gem of foreign policy: One of

The Long View 2011-06-11: Notes on Afghanistan

Casey Cho pointed out to me that John J. Reilly had written something about a previous President’s plan for withdrawing from Afghanistan ten years ago. John’s strategic assessment is interesting. He makes an argument that as of 2011 the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were successes, with important

The Long View 2008-04-11: The Maliki Counter-Offensive

This is a great reflection on war and violence by John J. Reilly: The organized use of violence is everywhere culture-specific. This is the great limitation to the precision-instrument military that Donald Rumsfeld (and his predecessors for 20 years) had been trying to create before the distraction of Iraq. Victories

The Long View 2008-01-22: Don't Panic; Panic in 2016; Victory with Demobilization; Mahdi Watch

The James Fallows Atlantic piece “Countdown to a Meltdown” from 2005 is an absolutely fascinating bit of political prediction, let’s look at it in more detail, as it combines some of John’s obsessions with some of my own. Fallows wrote the article as advice to the incoming President

The Long View: The Scorpion's Gate

Richard Clarke was often featured on The Long View, as a hostile insider to the Iraq policies of President George W. Bush. Re-reading this review of the novel, The Scorpion’s Gate [Amazon link] by Clarke, I feel that Clarke didn’t necessarily have quite as terrible a grasp of