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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Saturday, August 8, 2009

U.S. Officials Comparing Afghanistan To Vietnam

By Steve Hynd


My friend Derrick Crowe noticed that US officials are now using the words "Afghanistan" and "Vietnam" in the same breath.



Top U.S. officials have reached out to a leading Vietnam war scholar to discuss the similarities of that conflict 40 years ago with American involvement in Afghanistan, where the U.S. is seeking ways to isolate an elusive guerrilla force and win over a skeptical local population.


The overture to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Stanley Karnow, who opposes the Afghan war, comes as the U.S. is evaluating its strategy there.


�When asked what could be drawn from the Vietnam experience, Karnow replied: �What did we learn from Vietnam? We learned that we shouldn�t have been there in the first place. Obama and everybody else seem to want to be in Afghanistan, but not I.�


Derrick writes: "Here�s a tip for policymakers: if you�re in a situation that�s requiring you to look to the American experience in VIetnam for guidance, you should start looking for the door."


No comment as yet on this news from neoliberal interventionist Peter Bergen, who took to the pages of the Washington Monthly recently to argue that Afghanistan wasn't anything like Vietnam. The folk at the White House made him look a fool inside a month.


(Guy Saperstein's answer to Bergen's op-ed is here.)



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2 comments:

  1. distributorcapAugust 8, 2009 at 12:05 PM

    it took the russians what 10 years to get out of an unwinnable situation. we are going 8 years....

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ron BeasleyAugust 9, 2009 at 4:40 AM

    With 54% already opposing the war the Democrats won't put up with Obama's folly much longer.

    ReplyDelete

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