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GWOT

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

The Long View 2007-09-11: September 11; Real Intelligence; True Fanatics; The Other Public; The Subterranean Reactionaries of Manhattan

John opines here that chant ought to be slow, but the priest who used to celebrate the old Mass for us always got annoyed if the choir was too slow. He liked a brisk pace. September 11; Real Intelligence; True Fanatics; The Other Public; The Subterranean Reactionaries of Manhattan Another

Iron Wolves: Order of the Centurion Book 2 Review

In Iron Wolves, we get to see a part of the Legion inhabited by men less high-minded than Cohen Chhun or Subs, the Dark Ops legionnaire from Order of the Centurion. Men on the borderline of control. Men interested in chasing skirts. Men who might have trouble adjusting to civilian

The Long View 2006-12-20: Space Marines; Dissimulation; The Fall of Civilization

John Reilly links to Orson Scott Card’s Ornery American website in this post, which I hadn’t thought about in a very long time. When I see Card mentioned on Twitter, usually it is in combination with an adjective like “deplorable”, but in today’s context that mostly means

The Long View 2006-03-19: Iraq after Three Years; Life's Solution; Reading Habits

Three years later, John was honest enough to find a rather embarrassing prediction he had made about the course of the Iraq war. With the benefit of hindsight, I've found a few more, but the point of that exercise here is to remind us how easily we can

The Long View 2006-02-24: Future Teeth; The Golden Mosque; The Two Wicked Cities

John Reilly mentions William S. Lind in this post, because Lind repeatedly predicted defeat for the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. John predicted victory, and some kind of friendly democratic government in both countries. What actually happened is somewhere in-between. Lind's predictions of defeat were too dire,

The Long View 2005-11-30: Won Wars; Lost Films & Doctrines

Here is a prediction that did not pan out: There is also this: Post-911 veterans are not Vietnam veterans. Their numbers are smaller, of course, but they are already an admired and self-confident minority. They will transform the military and, one suspects, domestic politics. At this point, it seems that