Newshoggers Archive: Ignoring Iraq and sunk costs

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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Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Ignoring Iraq and sunk costs

By Dave Anderson:

Andrew Sullivan forgets that Americans only learn geography when there is an active war, earthquake, tsunami or a missing nubile blond. He worries that there is a large and currently unmotivated bloc of people in the US will rally behind a Stabbed in the Back or perfidious liberals who threw away a victory argument as Iraq continues to be a violent rentier society with minimal social-political cohesion or the institutions to build that cohesion:

But I'm not so sanguine about the reaction in the US if all those deaths and all that cost and all that damage ends up empowering a Shiite pseudo-strongman, with torture prisons and rigged elections. Anarchy is on the march.

An Iraq with a Shi'ite strongman who is willing to use all elements of state-power to protect himself and his coalition was a probable long term outcome of the US invasion of Iraq. It was forseeable in 2002 by the dirty fucking hippies, and extraordinarily likely by August 2003 when Sistani imposed his veto on post-invasion US plans.

The dirty fucking hippies will remember and they will be the only ones who will remember history the next time America has a collective freak-out and decides to throw some insignificant, weak country up against the wall to tell it to suck on this. Anyone who believes in Dolschtass will believe in it no matter what actually happens.

1 comment:

Ron BeasleyApril 28, 2010 at 4:36 PM
"or missing nubile blond"
So true. But you forgot blond - they are almost always blond like most of the FOX female talking heads.
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