Alan Bock

I‘m not quite sure why I am not red-faced with anger at the fact that President Obama has set such a long tentative timetable for removing U.S. troops from Iraq. It’s to be 19 months before all “combat” troops are out, and after that 35,000-50,000 will be left, presumably as a sort of colonial permanent … Continue reading “Resignation Setting In?”

Perhaps it has taken warnings to U.S. college students considering where to undertake the traditional undergraduate (and beyond) practices of drinking too much and looking for sex in a warm climate during spring break to bring the situation home to Americans. Various colleges and even the U.S. State Department have warned that something close to … Continue reading “Drug War Tragedy in Mexico”

It is difficult to avoid the perception, as the U.S. (and world) economy continues to melt down, that our political leaders are suffering something resembling a mass delusion or even a group psychosis. One may hope that the insertion of 17,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan, for example, is what some Obama aides have told … Continue reading “Empire at the End of Its Rope”

For the sake of all the people who have either lost their jobs, seen their mortgages turned upside-down, or at least been plunged into anxiety, one certainly hopes that the $790 billion "stimulus" package, the most expensive piece of legislation ever passed, will do whatever it is supposed to do to the economy. Unfortunately it … Continue reading “The War Recession”

The votes are not officially tabulated yet, and it will take a while for the implications [.pdf] of the recent provincial elections in Iraq to become apparent. But it is not too early to take note that they were conducted almost entirely by the Iraqis themselves, under Iraqi rather than American direct supervision, and that … Continue reading “Iraqis Back in Charge?”

The closest thing to good news about the future of U.S. engagement in Afghanistan is that while the Obama administration is committed to sending as many as 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan, several news stories have suggested that the purpose of doing so is to achieve a bit more stability to buy time to reevaluate … Continue reading “Quit Digging in Afghanistan”

It is hard for me to imagine the staffs of National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page actually, personally, physically torturing somebody, though a few might overcome their inherent wussiness and be able to do it. Whether they would be able to do it themselves or not, however, it is … Continue reading “Sadism, Not Substance,
Behind Torture Advocacy”

Well, it looks as if we will soon have a president who is able to string sentences together in a reasonably coherent fashion, if sometimes a little slowly and with lots of pauses. At least Barack Obama, whether it’s true or not, will give the impression that the pauses reflect consideration of the question rather … Continue reading “The More Things Change…”

The gang over at The New Republic has been scrambling to develop and publicize a case that the choice of former Clinton White House chief of staff (and before that OMB director and eight-term congressman from northern California) Leon Panetta to head the CIA was something other than a serious misstep possibly resulting from something … Continue reading “Was Panetta Picked in a Panic?”

My early reaction to the Israeli ground invasion of the Gaza Strip is perhaps more U.S.-centered than some others’. But the most significant aspect of the U.S. response, implicitly acknowledged in most news reports and commentary, is precisely that nobody really expects the U.S. to respond in anything other than a ritualistic fashion. The world … Continue reading “The Empire Shrugs”