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, July 14, 2010

Grand Strategy FAIL!

By Dave Anderson



Tom Toles captures the strategic idiocy of the current COIN mania in American military thinking:




COIN

 



Remember what the pre-9-11 Al Quaeda grand strategic diagnosis of their 'problem set' was:  Corrupt, and un-Islamic enough regimes in the Sunni Arab Muslim core, notably Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council were being propped up by the 'Far Enemy" of the United States and its allies. The far enemy's support allowed the near enemies, to hold onto power by backing them to the hilt with security assistance, economic integration and diplomatic cover.  Fighting the near enemy without severing the critical far enemy support was counter-productive and suicidal as the experience of Egyptian Islamist groups demonstrated numerous times.  Therefore the goal of AQ was to bleed the far enemy so that the far enemy could no longer prop up the near enemies.  

We've wasted trillions in Iraq, wasting a trillion in Afghanistan, fractured the only group, the ICU, that has had any success in exercising a limited monopoly of force in Somalia, thereby necessitating increased naval patrols instead of cutting deals to solve piracy from the land, destabilizing Pakistan and pissing off a lot of people who normally would be quite inhospitable to AQ's core message and vision.  

COIN is an excellent application of leeches to a hemophiliac.  



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1 comment:

  1. Ian WelshJuly 15, 2010 at 7:39 PM

    Yup. Alive or dead, Osama bin Laden is winning.
    I should write that article again.

    ReplyDelete

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