Category: The Dish

James Martin untangles another media bungling of Catholic theology.

Orin Kerr wonders when you should show up to get a seat at the Supreme Court for DC vs Heller.

Badford Plumer weighs the pros and cons.

The great news of last year has been buffeted by brutal news such as yesterday’s suicide bomb attack against five US soldiers. The image of a man coming up to those soldiers  – who were on patrol, chatting up residents, doing what we have asked them to do – and calmly exploding himself is hard to get out of one’s head. It captures the awful, soul-sapping difficulty of fighting a death cult with no scruples, no rules, no morality, no honor. Now we have more solid data:

Newly declassified statistics on the frequency of insurgent attacks in Iraq suggest that after major security gains last fall in the wake of an American troop increase, the conflict has drifted into at least a temporary stalemate, with violence levels remaining stubbornly constant from November 2007 through early 2008.      

I don’t feel in any way vindicated. I don’t know what the underlying dynamics are in Iraq – dynamics that are very hard to understand and constantly shifting. The surge has achieved much more in tamping down violence than I expected. But it isn’t a panacea; and it can’t work miracles. The ditch we’re in is deep, as surge supporter Michael O’Hanlon acknowledged today. Only more candor – from Obama and McCain – can help us.

Thomas Barnett’s Esquire piece may well have done him in. Who knows what this says about Iran policy? Or Iraq policy? Fallon was known as a believer that the indefinite Iraq occupation was slowly wrecking the US military.

Jonah links to a useful NYT story from last December that did Greg Craig’s job a while back.

The Army envisioned "fleets of new armored vehicles, ground robots and flying drones … linked together by a wireless internet for combat." Known as Future Combat Systems (FCS), the cost so far is steep:

[Slated] at $200 billion, Future Combat Systems is already the biggest modernization program in the history of the Army — enough, approximately, to buy 200,000 of the new, heavily-armored vehicles bound for Iraq (more than 20 times the number slated to go); 1,000 of the Air Force’s latest, most expensive stealth fighter (about 50 times more than planned); or 25 next-generation aircraft carriers, (more than double the current fleet).

And it could be junked.

An online gallery by people who endure migraine headaches can be seen here. Oliver Sacks blogs about it here.

Is Steve Jobs responsible for a wave of violence?

Ack.