The Hall of Fire

Good point, Voronwe- notice the sub-rosa racism implied in all this? That only American deaths "count?" This perhaps underlies some of the "end the war" rhetoric- the war counts as 'ended' if it's just Arabs getting killed.

Back down the other trouser-leg, to Vietnam: A considerable part of the American morale collapse after Tet can be laid at the feet of the estimable gentlemen of the Fourth Estate. Now I'm not taking the Limbaughish liberal-media-conspiracy line here: simply that journalists in war zones rarely see t...

Quote: U.S. counterterrorism officials are looking at an emergency proposal on the legal steps needed to postpone the November presidential election in case of an attack by al Qaeda, Newsweek reported on Sunday. [....] There's all the difference in the world between 'postpone' and 'suspend'. The '8...

Bush declares marshall law and suspends the 2008 elections. There follows a series of abuses for which Bush is eventually overthrown and put on trial. To what extent might we say that he did what he did with the support of the US citizenry? - given that all this would be perfectly constitutional No...

However it is not correct that the Jews were unaware of the danger until after Kristalnacht. The sense of urgency increased tremendously at that point, naturally, but those who could began vacating the country as soon as Hitler came to power because his anti-Semitic policies were implemented almost...

The National Socialist Party was illegal in Germany until Hitler struck his deal with the Chancellory, allowing Nazi's to run for Parliament as long as they agreed that a Nazi candidate could not be Chancellor. In that first election in which Nazism was legal, they took 22% of the vote, iirc. Hitle...

solicitr, in the same vein, I am confident that neither the Germans nor the Japanese thought that the US intended a permanent occupation to expropriate their natural resources, and I am equally confident that this perception does exist in Iraq today. One of the things that you have to remember is t...

there was a place where baby boomers were sent to be eliminated from the bottlenecked job market. Expecially if they were Black. *ahem* Two-thirds of the soldiers sent to Vietnam, and 86% of the casualties, were white. Two-thirds of Vietnam personnel were volunteers. I should also perhaps point out...

Did it escape your attention that the Viet Cong won the war? And that the precise moment when we knew they were going to win the war was the Tet Offensive? The attack on Saigon demonstrated so effectively the military supremacy of the Viet Cong in that particular military situation that I consider ...

Couldn't have said it better myself, Primmie

For any readers who aren't licensed as Spawn of Satan by their state Bars, you can find a good layman's summary of the case in Hammond & Scull's Reader's Guide, under "Ace Books Affair."

Ah, you're wondering what the Iraqis should do? God knows. They have a low-grade civil war right now, which will rapidly become a high-grade civil war when we leave. If history is any guide, the winners will probably be the biggest bastards. President al-Sadr, anyone?

Y'know, Ace is the company that "pirated" LotR back in the '60s. (They took advantage of a loophole in copyright law to put out a paperback edition for which they paid no royalties to Tolkien.) (Yes, this should be split off) There was no loophole. Mythology notwithstanding, Ace found a '...

BT: it was Israeli military intelligence, not the Mossad, which went after the Munich terrorists. And the concept was an excellent one, albeit under-resourced. But think of all the money we've dumped into Iraq, and how much 'wet work' that would buy. Project Phoenix was one of the principal reasons ...

OK, bt, I see your point now: but all of these miscreants were American citizens on American soil; and, except for Bonnie & Clyde (and probably Dillinger) we attacked them using the modalities of law enforcement and criminal justice.* Same with the Unibomber and Eric Rudolph. We can't do that wi...

I don't disagree that these are umbrella strategies but they are hardly the part of the equation that is in question. What is the shape of the arena? What strategy fits the arena? Do I need to change the arena to one in which I can win? These are the questions, and where our DoD is concerned they h...

The second was that, again, having learned the lesson of Versailles, the Marshall plan poured money into the rebuilding of Germany rather than shipping its resources out. Not precisely. Germany got Marshall Plan aid only after sufficient factories had been destroyed or shipped out to reduce its ind...

And I don't think that is necessarily such a bad thing.

Yes it is. It's just less bad than the other options.

(Still wishing Pat Moynihan had run for President.....)

what was the intended purpose of the Enumerated Powers Doctrine and is that purpose no longer desirable? Sorry for the delay, Yo, I simply missed this. Back in 1787, we had thirteen newly independent States which regarded themselves as just that: nation-states. The old Articles of Confederation wer...

But the only alternative is to create a society that marginalizes them and grants them no public validity. And create this society where? Pakistan?* Iran? Algeria? Gaza? Good heavens, even the Brits have yet to "create a society that marginalizes them and grants them no public validity:" ...

But a decent third-party run takes more than just money: a necessary but not a sufficient condition. One also needs to find a wedge issue to identify with, and something like Perot's quirky charisma, which Bloomberg most emphatically doesn't have. It's a decided plus, if not a downright requirement,...