Instahoglets Wednesday

By Steve Hynd

Some hump-day links for your reading pleasure.

-- Our offtimes colleague Eric Martin continues his takeover of Ezra Klien's internet with a new foreign policy aggregator called The Progressive Realist. Eric's the editor but the guiding light behind it all is Robert Wright, who wrote the original seminal article I said so many nice things about back in 2006.

-- The Armchair Generalist pours scorn on the British governments terrorism fearmongering: "Hey, UK Home Office? The year 2001 called, it wants its threat assessment back."

- Jeff Huber at Scholars & Rogues on the "long war" con game: "Our generals are forcing a self-defeating security policy on us for the sake of preserving their institution."

-- The Anonymous Liberal gets it exactly right on AIG executive Jake DeSantis' resignation letter. "Had the government allowed AIG to fail last fall, DeSantis wouldn't have received anything...The fact that the plight of a millionaire executive (one who actually received his promised bonus) elicits such sympathy from the Right, but the plight of blue collar assembly line workers doesn't says a lot about the ideological prism through which many conservatives view the world."

-- Fred Kaplan at Slate: CT or COIN? Obama must choose this week between two radically different Afghanistan policies. Ilan Goldenberg at Democracy Arsenal: let's do a half-arsed try at COIN for two or three Friedmans worth and then if it doesn't look like it will work go for a minimalist CT and then withdraw approach.