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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Monday, September 14, 2009

"A war that will require great effort with prospects that are uncertain at best"

By Steve Hynd


Prof Robert Jervis examines the arguments against withdrawal from Afghanistan and concludes:



once we move beyond the alluring but unsustainable claim that our inability to exclude the possibility that withdrawing would be very harmful means that we must fight, it becomes clear that we are building a large and risky war on predictions that call for closer examination.


It's one of those "read the whole thing" pieces. (h/t Marc Lynch)



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1 comment:

  1. Dave SchulerSeptember 14, 2009 at 8:49 AM

    I think that Jervis's article was weak, not the least in that it depends on the binary victory/withdraw logic or at least tantalizes us with it.
    There's a range of alternatives between Jeffersonian democracy in central Asia and a return to the status quo ante. In my view the question is one of means and ends. We've got to tailor our means very carefully to the ends we want to achieve, limiting ourselves to ends that are actually achievable.
    As you know, I don't think that COIN as a means can accomplish an Afghanistan capable of preventing a re-establishment of the Taliban and, subsequently, the return of Al Qaeda bases to Afghanistan. However, I do think that worst case scenario can be accomplished by significantly more limited alternatives than full bore COIN would represent.

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