Uncle Jefe:

“Coyotl quoting the Atlantic, the magazine of Andrew Sullivan and Jill Greenberg??
Why am I not surprised…”

Now this is just the sort of ignorance and anti-intellectualism conservatism doesn’t need. It reads like the sort of knee-jerk Leftists that fear any viewpoint other than their own.

1.The Atlantic offfers a broad spectrum of contributors, including Bing West (Assistant SoD under Reagan, Lt. Col. (ret.) Andrew Bacevich, P.J. O’Rourke, Reuel Marc Gerecnt, David Brooks, Reihan Salam, Megan McArdle, Ross Douthat and Robert Kaplan. I suppose these are all hysterical Leftist who should be ignored for you Jefe, which is too bad ’cause there’s two articles on counter-insurgency and military doctrine in the current issue that are worth reading.

2. If you actually read the Belmont Club, you know of Wretchard’s fondness for Philip Bobbit (quoted in the Atlantic blurb you objected to) and his worth as a thinker. Check out the Old BC location (5/22/06, 4/06/08) or the current location 8/15/08. But if Bobbit’s quoted in the same magazine that runs Sullivan’s rants then his words must ignored, eh?

3. Oh yeah, you did ignore Bobbit’s point, didn’t ya Jefe? Is it above your intellectual “pay grade”? Are Kissinger and Bobbit correct that democracy promotion and the methods used to fight the War on Terror (pre-emption, counter-terrorism, etc.) are incompatible, or have you learned nothing from Pakistan and Hamas?

Martin McPhillips:

“Enter in Roosevelt and Stalin and see what you get.”

Roosevelt and Stalin? Roosevelt and Stalin. Yes, exactly, Roosevelt and Stalin! I could work with the soft surrendering of Central Europe to Soviet tyranny, but the metaphor becomes a bit strained. How about Honecker and Brezhnev? Was Honecker not a German? Was Jaruzelski not a Pole?

Here’s the expanded question that a little bit of research can easily answer: are Dawa and SCII (SCIRI) ISLAMIST parties? Do they support Hezbollah? Did Nouri al-Maliki run Dawa’s Jihad Office out of Damascus in the 80s?