highlight of the week

the George Packer article "The Lesson of Tal Afar" in this week's New Yorker is the most insightful and lucid look at the Iraq war I have ever read. It deals with failures in the Rumsfeld doctrine for a new type of war, it predicts there will be a quiet drawdown of American troops this summer, and it shows how some U.S. military officers have succeed in Iraq by not listening to the Rumsfeld led Pentagon. Despite all this my favorite line in the whole 11 pages article (it took me three train rides to read - Addison to Washington Red Line) is this:

"In Southeast Asia, the domino theory turned out to be false, but Iraq in the hands of militias and terrorists, manipulated by neighboring states, would threaten the Middle East and the U.S. for many years. The truth is no one in Washington knows what to do."

crap