The Petraeus Workout
It was a wet and chilly spring morning in Mosul, the sun barely up, and a handful of company commanders from the Fourth Brigade Combat Team of the First Cavalry Division started loosening up. Dressed...
View ArticleIraq Forever?
Having lost the battle over the surge, Democrats in the Senate are back to an incrementalist approach to the war. After Bush endorsed General David Petraeus's plan to return to pre-surge combat...
View ArticleThe Disgruntled General
No one pities retired Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez quite like he pities himself. His reputation destroyed after his disastrous year as U.S. ground commander in Iraq -- including, most notoriously, the...
View ArticleIn Iraq Forever
Foolish liberals. Just days after President Bush announced in January that he would deploy an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq as a temporary "surge," liberals came up with a different buzzword....
View ArticleGood News for Iraq?
It's a strange thought to entertain while the Turks consider invading Iraqi Kurdistan, but November 2007 is could be a fairly auspicious moment for sectarian reconciliation in Iraq. I know, I know,...
View ArticleThe Problem with Militias
Everywhere you go in Iraq, there's victory. The commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, told reporters last Wednesday that he had wiped al-Qaeda in Iraq out of the city. Stability in...
View ArticleExporting the Anbar Awakening
Imagine the Bush administration's war cabinet as a drunken gambler during a moment of sobriety-inducing panic. The fortune he thought he accumulated has proven illusory, and most of the money he...
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The Coming Fight for Northern Iraq
Mosul was fairly calm earlier this year as winter gave way to spring. Some nights at Forward Operating Base Marez, the major U.S. garrison in the multiethnic northern Iraqi city, explosions would boom...
View ArticlePetraeus '12
The world -- at least the world of the U.S. military -- is General David Petraeus' oyster. Nearly a year after Petraeus assumed command of Multinational Force-Iraq, as the military command in Baghdad...
View ArticleWireTAP: A Dialogue about The Wire (Episodes 1-3)
The fifth and final season of HBO's groundbreaking drama, The Wire, is upon us. Every three episodes, we'll bring you a discussion of the series between TAP Online writers. This week, Spencer Ackerman...
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The Counter-Narrative Candidate
There is a lot of speculation that Virginia Senator Jim Webb would make an appealing vice-presidential nominee for the Democrats. Some of it emanates from this magazine. It's not hard to see why. Webb...
View ArticleWireTAP: A Dialogue About The Wire (Episodes 4-6)
The fifth and final season of HBO's groundbreaking drama, The Wire, is upon us. Every three episodes, we'll bring you a discussion of the series between TAP Online writers. This week, Kriston Capps...
View ArticleIraq, Intelligence Failures, and Kelly Clarkson
When A.J. Rossmiller came home from Iraq, word spread across the liberal precincts of the blogosphere about a young intelligence officer who saw the illogic of the Iraq war from deep inside, who spent...
View ArticleWireTAP: A Dialogue about The Wire (Episode 10)
Throughout the fifth and final season of HBO's groundbreaking drama, The Wire, we've featured an ongoing discussion of the series with TAP Online writers. This week, we chat about episode ten -- the...
View ArticleFive Years Later
The Pentagon sponsored a conference call Monday with a Air Force colonel named Donald Bacon in Baghdad, who presented what he characterized as the findings of a major effort to understand al-Qaeda in...
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The Obama Doctrine
When Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama met in California for the Jan. 31 debate, their back-and-forth resembled their many previous encounters, with the Democratic presidential hopefuls...
View ArticleIron Man Versus the Imperialists
For any fan of the Iron Man comic books, Jon Favreau's new movie adaptation isn't just good, it's glorious. Robert Downey Jr. delivers an emotionally raw, ironic, and compelling portrait of brilliant...
View ArticleA Glossary of Iraq Euphemisms
Christopher Hitchens, critiquing his friend Martin Amis, once casually referred to "the moral offense of euphemism." It's a beautiful and cutting phrase. The inability to call something what it is...
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Human Wrongs
Liberalism in the 20th century made two enduring contributions to American foreign policy. Early on, it contended that global stability and prosperity were better guaranteed by architectures of...
View ArticleThe Obama Doctrine, Revisited
Several weeks before President Barack Obama announced an escalation of the Afghanistan War at West Point, a group of journalists and think-tankers met for dinner at the Washington, D.C., embassy of a...
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