William S. Lind

Looking idly at the front page of last Wednesday’s Washington Post Express as I rode the Metro to work, I received a shock. It showed a railroad station in Iraq, recently destroyed by an American air strike. So now we are bombing the railroad stations in a country we occupy? What comes next, bombing Iraq’s … Continue reading “US Military Riding the
Perfect (Sine) Wave”

The March 14 Los Angeles Times contained that rarissima avis, good news from Ramadi: "The commander of U.S. troops in Iraq wanted some sweets, and nothing was going to stop him. Not even the fact that he was tramping through a neighborhood that only days ago had been teeming with snipers and al-Qaeda fighters who … Continue reading “Flickers of Light”

It’s springtime for Congress, and the Washington Dodgers are batting 1,000 in the exhibition season. No, I’m not talking about baseball. I have just enough interest in sports to know that the Dodgers play in Los Angeles and Washington’s baseball team is the Nationals. The Dodgers I’m talking about are the Democratic majorities in the … Continue reading “The Washington Dodgers”

Bush’s splurge is already bringing premature claims of success, even though the first troops are just arriving in Iraq. A column in today’s Washington Times by Ollie North quotes an American officer in Iraq as saying, “Do they [members of Congress opposed to the war] even know that in the last two weeks we have … Continue reading “Insurgency May Be Back on Its Heels, but It’s No Setback”

One way to look at the situation in Iraq is to try to identify variables, elements that could change. Without change, the war is likely to end with troops having to fight their way out, if they can. The military situation in Iraq is not a variable. All that can change is the speed of … Continue reading “Identifying Variables”

On the surface, President Bush’s Wednesday night speech adds up to precisely nothing. The president said, “It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq,” but the heart of his proposal, adding more than 20,000 U.S. troops, represents no change in strategy. It is merely another “big push,” of the sort we … Continue reading “Less Than Zero”

For more than a decade, Somalia has been Exhibit A in the Hall of Statelessness, a place where the state had not merely weakened into irrelevance but disappeared. Somalia’s statelessness had defeated even the world’s only hyperpower, the United States, when it had intervened militarily to restore order. Fourth Generation war theorists, myself included, frequently … Continue reading “Somalia: A State Restored? Not So Fast”

Last week, the Iraq Study Group report [.pdf] burst upon a breathless world, and proved to be an empty piñata. None of its recommendations has the slightest chance of reversing the course of the war in Iraq. Only those who just got into town on the last truckload of turnips expected anything more. All Washington … Continue reading “Knocking Opportunity”

The latest serpent at which a drowning Washington Establishment is grasping is the idea of sending more American troops to Iraq. Would more troops turn the war there in our favor? No. Why not? First, because nothing can. The war in Iraq is irredeemably lost. Neither we nor, at present, anyone else can create a … Continue reading “More Troops?”

Lose a war, lose an election. What else should anyone expect, especially when the war is one we never had to fight? Had Spain defeated us in ’98, does anyone think McKinley/Roosevelt would have won in 1900? A logical corollary is, lose two wars, lose two elections. With the war in Afghanistan following that in … Continue reading “Lose a War, Lose an Election”