War

Phony military promises.

"Washington and Kabul have, for endless months, been performing a strange pas de deux over the issue of American withdrawal. Initially, the Obama administration insisted that if, by December 31, 2013, Afghan President Hamid Karzai didn’t sign a bilateral security agreement the two sides had negotiated, the U.S. would have to commit to “the zero option”; that is, a total withdrawal from his country – not just of American and NATO “combat troops” but of the works by the end of 2014. Getting out completely was too complicated a process, so the story went, for such a decision to wait any longer than that."

That didn't happen.

"At stake has been leaving a residual force of U.S. and NATO trainers, advisors, and special operations types behind for years to come, perhaps (the figures varied with the moment) 3,000-12,000 of them."

I prefer zero.

"With time, things only got curiouser and curiouser. The less Karzai complied, the more Obama administration and Pentagon officials betrayed an overwhelming need to stay. In the 13th year of a war that just wouldn’t go right, this strange dance between the most powerful state on the planet and one of the least powerful heads of state anywhere, to say the least, puzzling."

I'm not puzzled.

"Mattea Kramer provides a third potential reason in her striking explanation of just how the Pentagon has been managing to avoid serious sequestration cuts. It turns out that billions of dollars in extra funding are being salted away in a supplementary war-fighting budget that Congress grants the U.S. military, which is subject to neither cuts nor caps. But here’s a potential problem: that budget relies on the existence of an Afghan War. What if, after 2014, there isn’t even a residual American component to that war? Not that the Pentagon wouldn’t try to keep “war budget” funding alive, but it’s clearly a harder, more embarrassing task without a war to fund."

Of course.

The daily massacres in Iraq continue with 82 killed and 176 wounded.

Recent legal history of Crimea.

Conservatives like to talk about Reagan winning the Cold War, but they support starting a new one.

We're supposed to be very afraid of Putin's war machine.

"Under Mr. Putin, Russia has developed the world’s third-largest defense budget, at $70 billion. The underpaid army of post-Cold War conscripts has given way to special operations troops and experienced guns for hire, some of whom showed up in Crimea in not readily identifiable uniforms. Overall, headquarters have been consolidated and soldiers fight out of brigades, not large divisions." 

That budget is less than a tenth of the US military/war budget, and it shows Putin is smarter about organizing his military than the US is.

Cyberweapon Snake attacks Ukrainian computers.

The western countries that created chaos in Libya express concern about chaos in Libya.