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Daniel Larison Profile picture
Daniel Larison
@DanielLarison
Contributing editor @antiwarcom, Contributor @RStatecraft, Subscribe to Eunomia: https://t.co/T9a2hQFw8S https://t.co/g56sDhjwfM
Aug 25, 2021 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
Found this old sourcebook. Should be a useful reference One of the questions in the introduction: "Why did Wilson's policy appear to be so confused and ineffectual?"

I have a few ideas about that one.
Aug 25, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Which is itself a function of the groupthink and ostracism of dissenters that the “Blob” label refers to We saw the same phenomenon in 2002-03. Not every foreign policy analyst supported the war, but a lot of the ones that didn’t kept their heads down and said nothing because they feared public opposition would be bad for their careers.
Aug 24, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
So this is the second time today I have seen Vance citing this figure about Afghans and suicide bombing. It comes from a Pew survey from 8 years ago. rferl.org/a/afghanistan-… The phrasing of the question asked if the tactic was justified "in order to defend Islam against its enemies." So this is a pretty loaded question to start with. Bear in mind that this is a survey measuring attitudes in a country that has been at war as long as I have been alive.
Aug 16, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
This is what elite impunity in action looks like. When the bad policy that “experts” (who were not really experts) supported comes crashing down in flames, they blame the people least responsible for any of it. In one sense, Afghanistan is a collective national failure. We allowed the war to continue on while almost all of us were obvious to it. It should have been ended much sooner, but political leaders realized they could keep it going if casualties were relatively low.
Aug 16, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
No doubt Republican hawks will try to weaponize it, and they will have a lot of help from FP establishment types. But I don't think it will register for the same reason that the war was allowed to continue for decades without public backlash: most Americans are unaffected. One of the talking points I keep seeing from hawks is that there was no significant antiwar movement demanding an end to our military presence in Afghanistan. That's because most people stopped paying attention to it years ago. It's not b/c they want to keep troops there forever.
Aug 14, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
These numbers are fiction. Most of these forces exist only on paper. This is a problem that has been known for quite some time. Here is a story on this from 5 years ago: santafenewmexican.com/news/afghan-ra… Task & Purpose has an article referring to this earlier this week: taskandpurpose.com/news/white-hou…
Apr 1, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
No. I have been as hard on Biden as anyone for screwing things up so far, but this is wrong. The Trump administration was openly hostile to real engagement, and it kept escalating tensions every chance it could. The problem that supporters of the agreement have with Biden is that he is so far continuing Trump's policy that all of us, Biden included, know to be a failure. Trump's talk of making deals is just that: talk. When it comes to making compromises, Trump is as hard-line as Bolton
Mar 30, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
What if I told you this was neither sound nor sustainable, and that McMaster was in charge of the process that produced it? Image Look, McMaster is going to defend the position he took when he was in government, but can we stop pretending that this is impartial analysis being offered up here?
Aug 13, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
It hardly inspires confidence when you know that they just make this up. It’s not remotely true

U.S. homeland missile defense 'very effective' against N.K. ICBM's: top general | Yonhap News Agency en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN202008… This is from @nktpnd's excellent Kim Jong Un and the Bomb: "The initial U.S. obsession with ambitious missile defense schemes began in the final years of the Cold War, but today, with $67 billion in total spending, GMD [Ground-Based Midcourse Defense] is among the..." 1/n
May 1, 2019 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Russia: What goes around comes around *U.S. spends 25 years encircling Russia with new allies and would-be clients*
U.S.: This isn’t directed at Russia
*Russia maintains limited military cooperation with one economic basket case in S. America*
U.S.: Get the hell out of our hemisphere!