With Both Hands

Sign in Subscribe

Iraq

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 2008-01-28: Iraq as Parable; The Grossraum Fallacy

I do find it interesting that John J. Reilly’s comment here on a primary function of government, the promotion of just order: The Iraq War might stand as a metaphor for the whole episode of Movement Conservativism in American history. It started well enough, and it got rid of

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 2007-08-24: The Sublimity of Bush; Health Care Misdirection; Immigration & Bubbles

I read a lot of David Warren, because John read him. Much like John, David later came to regret some of his enthusiasm for the Iraq War, and retreated to a life of prayer and contemplation, much like Benedict XVI. Warren’s quote here reminds me of my youth, when

The Long View 2007-01-11: Bush on Iraq; the Conversion of Islam; Scandals & Bad Motives

Since David French has done the unspeakable by defending the indefensible sixteen years later, here is a moment of sanity from John J. Reilly in 2006: Regarding the official Democratic reply to the president's address, I think that Senator Dick Durbin was quite mistaken in expressing the desire

The Long View 2007-01-02: Overdiagnosis; Literature Maps; Starship Jesus Conversion from Islam; Spengler's Deal; Shabby Hanging

I do agree with John here that our diagnostic tools often don’t improve health, and that the definitions of “disease” are often too broad, but I disagree about why healthcare doesn’t do much as you might think to improve our health. I definitely don’t blame administrative costs,

The Long View 2007-01-01: Whatever Can't Continue Won't

Here is John J. Reilly’s New Years’ predictions for 2007. Let us see how he did: * The Sunni Insurgency in Iraq. Flat wrong. This went on for another four years or so. And even after it petered out, the former Ba’athists enabled the later rise of ISIS. * Sub-replacement