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 30, 2009

Strategic concerns dominates tactics

By Fester:


Strategic aims dominate tactical aims.  If tactical aims do not aid in the achievement of a strategic goal, than tactical success is irrelevant at best if not seductively counter-productive.  This is basic policy analysis that will be reworded in various domains including the field of Clauswitzian analysis of military policy.  This is just a simple reminder that political outcomes (not defined as day to day partisan advantage and insta-polling) dominate street level outcomes, and by that metric, there is no such thing as success in Iraq against any plausible pre-war US war aims and political objectives; at best, there is a decent outcome.  More likely, it is a decent interval of non-chaos to allow for a significant US withdrawal.   


Tom Ricks at Foreign Policy reiterates this basic point --- the surge failed strategically:



My worry is that I don't see the political situation as being much different than it has in the past. Nothing much has changed from the previous rush to failures. As readers of this blog have seen me say before: the surge succeeded tactically but failed strategically. That is, as planned, it created a breathing space in which a political breakthrough might occur. But Iraqi leaders, for whatever reason, didn't take advantage of that space, and no breakthrough occurred. All the basic issues that faced Iraq before the surge are still hanging out there: How to share oil revenue? What is the power relationship between Shia, Sunni and Kurd? Who holds power inside the Shiite community? What is the role of Iran, the biggest winner in this war so far? And will Iraq have a strong central government or be a loose confederation? And what happens when all the refugees outside the country and those displaced inside it, who I think are majority Sunni, try to go back to their old houses, now largely occupied by Shiites and protected by Shiite militias?


If the political questions are either not resolved or resolved by a slightly softer dictatorship backed by the occassional use of US airpower to beat down on domestic foes, then tactical success is irrelevant. 



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  1. SRW1June 30, 2009 at 4:11 PM

    Actually, isn't this kind of an outcome a strategic success for the neo-cons? The Iraki government might be reluctant to really press for a US exit in 2011 if it were to conclude that it will have a need for 'the occasional use of US airpower to beat down domestic foes'.

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