Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Tuesday, June 2, 2009

A Coalition Of One?

By Steve Hynd


From John Vinocur at the New York Times (h/t Kat) comes a report that the Obama administration have given up on asking recalcitrant European allies to shoulder part of the fighting burden in Afghanistan.



It�s June 2009 and this just in from Oslo, where the NATO Parliamentary Assembly met last week: absolution. For the first time in years, said one of those attending, Denis MacShane, a Labor member of Parliament and a former minister of state for Europe in the British government, no Europeans got their heads banged �for not dying and refusing to pull their weight.�


Could that be, he was asked, because the war in Afghanistan was now fully, nonblushingly America�s, even Obama�s?


�Right on the button,� Mr. MacShane said. �The tactics and materiel and commanding general are changing. The emphasis is on special operations. The Americans just don�t need it anymore, this other long battle persuading the Germans, Spanish and Italians to get out and fight.�


Another official, from Continental Europe, requesting anonymity, said he considered the circumstances ones that brush the quasi-historical: in his view, the United States has de facto abandoned the idea of asking Europe to go to war while the administration re-Americanizes the conflict in Afghanistan.


So what's to be the role of NATO in this new world of America fighting alone? Apparently, to become the proxy administrators of the American hegemony's foreign conquests.



These days, in Mr. Gates�s words, what America is really interested in from its European allies is a �civilian surge in terms of experts in agriculture and finance and governance,� plus support from European paramilitary police forces.


...Amazingly, Egon Bahr, the imaginative German geostrategic gadfly, was not far away from this theme five years ago when he argued that it was a pathetic and futile waste of time for Europe to chase after the United States in military respectability. Instead, he urged that a really viable NATO partnership would define America�s job as �forcing� peace while Europe tends to its �maintenance.�


Or, as Vinocur characterises it "a caricature of a NATO future split into boom-boom for the Americans and handing out bonbons for the Europeans."



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  1. HyperIonJune 2, 2009 at 8:50 AM

    Egon Bahr seems to be expressing a POV similar to Thomas Barnett's: one force to create the "peace", another one to nurture it. And he thought the US would do the former and the Europeans would do the latter.
    Of course, the Pentagon's NEW map now looks a lot like the Pentagon's OLD map. I wonder who Barnett is giving his briefing to now.

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