It’s been said that it’s lonely at the top. It should now be said of the first 100 days of the Second Season of the Trump Show that, after all the drama, what’s left is a series of hollow and pyrrhic victories. Where others have built, this administration has torn down.
thank you for your articles. I look forward to them and use them as ballast for much of the other more bombastic and sensationalized material out there!
Good sensible analysis in general, but I disagree on the Iraq War. The US did help the Iraqis to stand up a democratic constitution. Things got chaotic and bloody because al-Qaeda felt compelled to fight us there, but the result of that was they lost, and the Global War on Terror was largely won in Iraq since al-Qaeda's prestige was broken there. And Iraqis were better off in bloody chaos mixed with freedom than in Saddam's totalitarian prison-state.
American leftists were opportunistically blind to all the good that the liberation of Iraq did, since they wanted to undermine Bush. This opportunistic cynicism sank deep roots in public opinion, strengthened paleoconservatism, and fed into MAGA. To get back on track, it would be helpful if liberals apologized to the neocons, walked back a lot of what they said in the 2000s, and admitted that it's actually good to spread democracy and freedom abroad.
You could argue that today, nearly 23 years after the war, Iraq is finally a better place than it was under Saddam, but you cannot credibly argue that it was a better place under Saddam over the decade after the invasion, and while various documents were written by American advisors, the infrastructure of the state was dismantled with no plan or money to build a new state.
When the state is a hellish totalitarian tyranny, dismantling the infrastructure of the state is a good thing. People used to understand that. People used to believe in freedom. People used to read 1984, and take it as a cautionary tale about the horrors of totalitarianism. People used to remember that Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty or give me death."
You write that "you cannot credibly argue that it was a better place under Saddam over the decade after the invasion." Logically, doesn't that mean that it's impossible to argue that the Iraqis were better off under Saddam than they were during the decade after Saddam was overthrown? In other words, that Iraqis were clearly better off as a result of being liberated from Iraq? So far, I'm just trying to parse your own words.
I think you meant to say the opposite of what your words logically appear to mean. But the funny thing is it seems like a Freudian slip. I think you intended to say something along the lines of that Iraqis were clearly better off under Saddam than after the liberation, which would be kind of monstrous, since you would be willing the subjugation of millions of your fellow men to a brutal, totalitarian tyranny where to say the truth would mean death to you and your family. But conscience tripped you up and made you say the opposite of your intention. Is that what happened?
The truth is that many, many Iraqis felt that they were better off as a result of the invasion, not that they liked bloody chaos, but that even bloody chaos is better than subjugation to totalitarianism, as they had learned firsthand by bitter experience. They had lived under Saddam. As one man said in a video taken in Iraq in 2004: "This is better than Saddam, even if we die of hunger." Freedom is that important.
I recommend the movie "Voices of Iraq," which was filmed shortly after the liberation by simply distributing cameras to be passed from hand to hand among the Iraqi people, for them to tell their point of view, and then compiled into a movie. It does give you a glimpse of some of the horrors of the civil war. But in general, it's inspiring. Freedom really is worth dying for.
And here's the thing. It never made a whole lot of sense to denigrate freedom in Iraq ad nauseam and yet expect Americans to continue valuing it highly at home. How can freedom in America be so good if freedom in Iraq is so bad? If we're on the brink of losing our democracy here in America, doesn't it seem likely that a big part of the reason why is that the anti-war movement vigorously, intensely, insistently propagandized against the Bush doctrine with its elevation of freedom? If it was such a terrible thing for Iraq to lose Saddam, don't we just possibly need our own Saddam here in America?
Liberals should have known better than to adopt such stupid, unnuanced dogmatic opposition to the Iraq War. People seek reflective equilibrium, and the attack on freedom abroad created ripple effects that ultimately undermined faith in freedom at home
WW2 had very little relevance to the Iraq analogy, the entire premise of the Iraq war was weapons of mass destruction which was a complete and total lie concocted by BUSH 2 after DAddy Bush failed to remove Saddam after the Kuwait invasion in Gulf war I. The real reason was oil. US didn't liberate Iraq for Freedom, US wanted oil. The WMD was a fraud perpetrated on the world and paid for in US treasure and Iraqi and US lives. It is easy to consider human collateral damage in the pursuit of some grander vison that never existed. There was no threat to the free world or certainly the USA from Saddam Hussein he was a tinpot dictator. What certainly did happen is an alliance between Iran and Iraq. Any basic reading of history tells you that not a fantasy of freedom for Iraq that was generated by the Bush regime after the whole escapade ended in disaster. American public are right to be suspicious of disastrous foreign adventures from Vietnam to Iraq and beyond. Money wasted, lives lost, and countries shattered.
Oh my goodness. "Saddam was a tinpot dictator." He was a totalitarian oppressor, mass murderer, and serial aggressor. "... fantasy of freedom..." Nope, there was a real constitution, real political parties, real elections, real freedom of speech. Not a fantasy. And Iraqis fought for it, risked their lives for it. In one election, voters actually had to mark their fingers with purple ink to prevent double voting, and terrorists threatened to kill those with purple ink. They came anyway, risking their lives for their country's young democracy. The "purple finger revolution."
WMDs weren't a fraud: there's every reason to believe that the Bush administration thought they were really there. But there may have been another kind of deceit. WMDs were the legal reason for the war; liberation would not have been legitimate under international law. But immediately as the invasion began, long before it turned out there were no WMDs (unless you count ricin gas), the Bush changed its focus to "the Iraqi people will soon be free." That's what he was in it for. He couldn't tell that to the world beforehand because he wanted UN authorization, and many UN members are themselves unfree. But Bush knew democracy and freedom are desired all over the world, and that democracy promotes peace.
When you consider the ignorance embodied in the above comment, it helps to understand where the lie about the stolen 2020 election and the rest of it comes from. The unjust slanders against the Bush administration got people used to the ideas that elites are a permanent lying conspiracy. It made them cynical and credulous of evil. Now liberals are reaping the whirlwind.
The Iraq war cost at least $3 trillion, resulted in numerous American casualties and 32,000 wounded and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths. It was replaced with a Shia regime sympathetic to Iran. Today the country is not a thriving, well governed democracy. This is success?
Yes, it was success, first and foremost because Saddam's regime fell, along with larger strategic benefits. But to your point, you could give the same negative assessment of World War II. Huge costs, huge casualties, and at the end of it half of Europe ended up under communist rule while the rest of it also had strong communist parties and became dependent on America for economic aid at first, and security protection for generations. And we didn't gain a single square inch of territory. And we hardly saved any of the Jews. War is messy, and its conclusions are hardly ever satisfactory, but sometimes it's still worth it all the same.
Of course, the difference is that we didn't choose to get into World War II. The Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor, albeit after considerable provocation, and Hitler declared war on us. World War II wasn't a war of choice, so we don't assess it in the same way. But it's unfortunate that it wasn't a war of choice! If we had intervened against Hitler before he got so out of hand, the war would have been far less lethal and destructive. That's not to say that Saddam was on the verge of a war of conquest like Hitler's -- the risks and the stakes were a lot different -- but it's a kind of proof of concept that sometimes it's better to fight when we want to than when we have to.
By the way, one of the criticisms of the war is that we "destabilized the region." Again, that's a feature, not a bug. The previous "stability" was a rotten system of tyrannies that gave Al Qaeda legitimacy by their oppressiveness. That was a good thing to destabilize.
Nathan Smith, here’s how Perplexity responds to your strange analysis of the invasion of Iraq:
“## Analysis of the US-Led Invasion of Iraq: Success or Failure
**Initial Military Success**
- The US-led coalition quickly defeated Saddam Hussein’s regime in a matter of weeks, toppling the government and capturing Baghdad by April 2003[3][4][6].
- Saddam Hussein was captured, tried, and executed, and democratic elections were held in the years that followed[6].
**Long-Term Outcomes and Failures**
- The justification for the invasion-eliminating weapons of mass destruction-proved false, undermining the legitimacy of the war[5][6].
- Post-invasion planning was deeply flawed. The disbanding of the Iraqi Army and de-Baathification created chaos, unemployment, and fueled a violent insurgency[5][6][7].
- Iraq descended into cycles of sectarian violence, civil war, and the rise of terrorist groups like al-Qaeda in Iraq and later ISIS[2][7].
- The war caused massive human suffering: estimates range from 150,000 to over a million deaths, with hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, millions displaced, and infrastructure devastated[2][3][7][8].
- The economic cost to the US exceeded $2 trillion, with over 4,600 US soldiers killed[4][6].
- The war destabilized the region, increasing Iran’s influence in Iraq and the broader Middle East[4][7].
**Consensus Assessment**
- While Saddam Hussein’s removal ended a brutal dictatorship, most analyses-across academic, policy, and public opinion-conclude the invasion was a strategic failure[5][7][8].
- The war failed to achieve its stated goals, created long-term instability, and resulted in enormous human and economic costs[2][4][8].
The US-led invasion of Iraq is widely regarded as a failure due to its false premises, poor postwar planning, humanitarian catastrophe, and destabilizing effects on Iraq and the region[5][7][8].
You probably intended to refute me, but you're actually proving my point. The groupthink-channeling AI is indeed producing the kind of argumentation that bigwigs have been vaguely blathering for 20 years, and in the process making public opinion on foreign policy much stupider. At the heart of its assessment is the statement that:
"The war failed to achieve its stated goals."
It doesn't say what those were. Smart! I've run this kind of query on AI before and it blundered by saying that we failed to remove Saddam from power. Perplexity avoided that trap. But you can see why an AI would fall into that trap, since people are constantly describing the Iraq war as a failure, and yet the key objective of the war, removing Saddam from power, succeeded. Poor innocent little robots, trying to understand the weird mental gymnastics of perverse mankind!
Our success in removing Saddam contrast with our failure to prevent the Viet Cong from seizing South Vietnam, and our failure to remove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. In a word: we lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan; but we won in Iraq. That matters.
Now, of course, there were other stretch goals involved, which were imperfectly achieved. And elites who didn't want to approve of the Iraq War have been continually laboring to move the goal posts in order to call the war a failure when prima facie it was a success. Obviously a war can be won and still not have been worth it. But the general discourse has not been "we won, but it still wasn't worth fighting." It just gets called a blunder or a disaster, because people really don't want to call it a victory, yet they can't simply call it a defeat. Sophistries.
Now, concerning the cost: yes, it cost a good deal. We spent hundreds of billions on defense every year. So it's not a huge spend relative to what the US military costs decade after decade. Why do we spend so much on the military? Because we want to have fighting capability. So let me ask: will we maintain fighting capability better if we never actually give our soldiers any fighting experience, or if we do sometimes fight substantial wars? The question answers itself.
That's not to say that we can go out and fight wars just to give our soldiers experience. You need a just cause, of course. But the fact that we incurred considerable costs in actual fighting, rather than in simply leaving soldiers sitting peacefully in their bunkers as usual, is a feature, not a bug. We got some combat experience for once, and showed the world that we aren't just a paper tiger.
There are various court cases challenging whether the executive branch can cancel funding allocated by Congress, so that is some hope that some or all funding that is being withheld or cancelled will be restored sometime this year....
a balanced non-hysterical analysis of the first 100 days of Trump
thank you for your articles. I look forward to them and use them as ballast for much of the other more bombastic and sensationalized material out there!
Good sensible analysis in general, but I disagree on the Iraq War. The US did help the Iraqis to stand up a democratic constitution. Things got chaotic and bloody because al-Qaeda felt compelled to fight us there, but the result of that was they lost, and the Global War on Terror was largely won in Iraq since al-Qaeda's prestige was broken there. And Iraqis were better off in bloody chaos mixed with freedom than in Saddam's totalitarian prison-state.
American leftists were opportunistically blind to all the good that the liberation of Iraq did, since they wanted to undermine Bush. This opportunistic cynicism sank deep roots in public opinion, strengthened paleoconservatism, and fed into MAGA. To get back on track, it would be helpful if liberals apologized to the neocons, walked back a lot of what they said in the 2000s, and admitted that it's actually good to spread democracy and freedom abroad.
You could argue that today, nearly 23 years after the war, Iraq is finally a better place than it was under Saddam, but you cannot credibly argue that it was a better place under Saddam over the decade after the invasion, and while various documents were written by American advisors, the infrastructure of the state was dismantled with no plan or money to build a new state.
"The infrastructure of the state was dismantled."
When the state is a hellish totalitarian tyranny, dismantling the infrastructure of the state is a good thing. People used to understand that. People used to believe in freedom. People used to read 1984, and take it as a cautionary tale about the horrors of totalitarianism. People used to remember that Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty or give me death."
You write that "you cannot credibly argue that it was a better place under Saddam over the decade after the invasion." Logically, doesn't that mean that it's impossible to argue that the Iraqis were better off under Saddam than they were during the decade after Saddam was overthrown? In other words, that Iraqis were clearly better off as a result of being liberated from Iraq? So far, I'm just trying to parse your own words.
I think you meant to say the opposite of what your words logically appear to mean. But the funny thing is it seems like a Freudian slip. I think you intended to say something along the lines of that Iraqis were clearly better off under Saddam than after the liberation, which would be kind of monstrous, since you would be willing the subjugation of millions of your fellow men to a brutal, totalitarian tyranny where to say the truth would mean death to you and your family. But conscience tripped you up and made you say the opposite of your intention. Is that what happened?
The truth is that many, many Iraqis felt that they were better off as a result of the invasion, not that they liked bloody chaos, but that even bloody chaos is better than subjugation to totalitarianism, as they had learned firsthand by bitter experience. They had lived under Saddam. As one man said in a video taken in Iraq in 2004: "This is better than Saddam, even if we die of hunger." Freedom is that important.
I recommend the movie "Voices of Iraq," which was filmed shortly after the liberation by simply distributing cameras to be passed from hand to hand among the Iraqi people, for them to tell their point of view, and then compiled into a movie. It does give you a glimpse of some of the horrors of the civil war. But in general, it's inspiring. Freedom really is worth dying for.
And here's the thing. It never made a whole lot of sense to denigrate freedom in Iraq ad nauseam and yet expect Americans to continue valuing it highly at home. How can freedom in America be so good if freedom in Iraq is so bad? If we're on the brink of losing our democracy here in America, doesn't it seem likely that a big part of the reason why is that the anti-war movement vigorously, intensely, insistently propagandized against the Bush doctrine with its elevation of freedom? If it was such a terrible thing for Iraq to lose Saddam, don't we just possibly need our own Saddam here in America?
Liberals should have known better than to adopt such stupid, unnuanced dogmatic opposition to the Iraq War. People seek reflective equilibrium, and the attack on freedom abroad created ripple effects that ultimately undermined faith in freedom at home
WW2 had very little relevance to the Iraq analogy, the entire premise of the Iraq war was weapons of mass destruction which was a complete and total lie concocted by BUSH 2 after DAddy Bush failed to remove Saddam after the Kuwait invasion in Gulf war I. The real reason was oil. US didn't liberate Iraq for Freedom, US wanted oil. The WMD was a fraud perpetrated on the world and paid for in US treasure and Iraqi and US lives. It is easy to consider human collateral damage in the pursuit of some grander vison that never existed. There was no threat to the free world or certainly the USA from Saddam Hussein he was a tinpot dictator. What certainly did happen is an alliance between Iran and Iraq. Any basic reading of history tells you that not a fantasy of freedom for Iraq that was generated by the Bush regime after the whole escapade ended in disaster. American public are right to be suspicious of disastrous foreign adventures from Vietnam to Iraq and beyond. Money wasted, lives lost, and countries shattered.
Oh my goodness. "Saddam was a tinpot dictator." He was a totalitarian oppressor, mass murderer, and serial aggressor. "... fantasy of freedom..." Nope, there was a real constitution, real political parties, real elections, real freedom of speech. Not a fantasy. And Iraqis fought for it, risked their lives for it. In one election, voters actually had to mark their fingers with purple ink to prevent double voting, and terrorists threatened to kill those with purple ink. They came anyway, risking their lives for their country's young democracy. The "purple finger revolution."
WMDs weren't a fraud: there's every reason to believe that the Bush administration thought they were really there. But there may have been another kind of deceit. WMDs were the legal reason for the war; liberation would not have been legitimate under international law. But immediately as the invasion began, long before it turned out there were no WMDs (unless you count ricin gas), the Bush changed its focus to "the Iraqi people will soon be free." That's what he was in it for. He couldn't tell that to the world beforehand because he wanted UN authorization, and many UN members are themselves unfree. But Bush knew democracy and freedom are desired all over the world, and that democracy promotes peace.
When you consider the ignorance embodied in the above comment, it helps to understand where the lie about the stolen 2020 election and the rest of it comes from. The unjust slanders against the Bush administration got people used to the ideas that elites are a permanent lying conspiracy. It made them cynical and credulous of evil. Now liberals are reaping the whirlwind.
The Iraq war cost at least $3 trillion, resulted in numerous American casualties and 32,000 wounded and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths. It was replaced with a Shia regime sympathetic to Iran. Today the country is not a thriving, well governed democracy. This is success?
Yes, it was success, first and foremost because Saddam's regime fell, along with larger strategic benefits. But to your point, you could give the same negative assessment of World War II. Huge costs, huge casualties, and at the end of it half of Europe ended up under communist rule while the rest of it also had strong communist parties and became dependent on America for economic aid at first, and security protection for generations. And we didn't gain a single square inch of territory. And we hardly saved any of the Jews. War is messy, and its conclusions are hardly ever satisfactory, but sometimes it's still worth it all the same.
Of course, the difference is that we didn't choose to get into World War II. The Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor, albeit after considerable provocation, and Hitler declared war on us. World War II wasn't a war of choice, so we don't assess it in the same way. But it's unfortunate that it wasn't a war of choice! If we had intervened against Hitler before he got so out of hand, the war would have been far less lethal and destructive. That's not to say that Saddam was on the verge of a war of conquest like Hitler's -- the risks and the stakes were a lot different -- but it's a kind of proof of concept that sometimes it's better to fight when we want to than when we have to.
By the way, one of the criticisms of the war is that we "destabilized the region." Again, that's a feature, not a bug. The previous "stability" was a rotten system of tyrannies that gave Al Qaeda legitimacy by their oppressiveness. That was a good thing to destabilize.
Nathan Smith, here’s how Perplexity responds to your strange analysis of the invasion of Iraq:
“## Analysis of the US-Led Invasion of Iraq: Success or Failure
**Initial Military Success**
- The US-led coalition quickly defeated Saddam Hussein’s regime in a matter of weeks, toppling the government and capturing Baghdad by April 2003[3][4][6].
- Saddam Hussein was captured, tried, and executed, and democratic elections were held in the years that followed[6].
**Long-Term Outcomes and Failures**
- The justification for the invasion-eliminating weapons of mass destruction-proved false, undermining the legitimacy of the war[5][6].
- Post-invasion planning was deeply flawed. The disbanding of the Iraqi Army and de-Baathification created chaos, unemployment, and fueled a violent insurgency[5][6][7].
- Iraq descended into cycles of sectarian violence, civil war, and the rise of terrorist groups like al-Qaeda in Iraq and later ISIS[2][7].
- The war caused massive human suffering: estimates range from 150,000 to over a million deaths, with hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, millions displaced, and infrastructure devastated[2][3][7][8].
- The economic cost to the US exceeded $2 trillion, with over 4,600 US soldiers killed[4][6].
- The war destabilized the region, increasing Iran’s influence in Iraq and the broader Middle East[4][7].
**Consensus Assessment**
- While Saddam Hussein’s removal ended a brutal dictatorship, most analyses-across academic, policy, and public opinion-conclude the invasion was a strategic failure[5][7][8].
- The war failed to achieve its stated goals, created long-term instability, and resulted in enormous human and economic costs[2][4][8].
The US-led invasion of Iraq is widely regarded as a failure due to its false premises, poor postwar planning, humanitarian catastrophe, and destabilizing effects on Iraq and the region[5][7][8].
Sources
[1] 20 Years After Iraq War Began, a Look Back at U.S. Public Opinion https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/03/14/a-look-back-at-how-fear-and-false-beliefs-bolstered-u-s-public-support-for-war-in-iraq/
[2] Costs of the U.S.-Led War in Iraq Since 2003 - Watson Institute https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/2022/IraqWarCosts
[3] Iraq War - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War
[4] Bad decision, badly executed: America's war of choice in Iraq https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/bad-decision-badly-executed-americas-war-of-choice-in-iraq/
[5] Twenty Years after “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq: A Critical ... https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/twenty-years-after-mission-accomplished-in-iraq-a-critical-assessment/
[6] Timeline: The Iraq War - Council on Foreign Relations https://www.cfr.org/timeline/iraq-war
[7] The Descent into Chaos: A Theoretical Analysis of the Iraq War https://grimshawreview.lse.ac.uk/articles/6
[8] Shock and Awe: Life in Iraq Twenty Years after the US-led Invasion https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/shock-and-awe-life-in-iraq-twenty-years-after-the-us-led-invasion/
[9] Iraq War | Summary, Causes, Dates, Combatants, Casualties, & Facts https://www.britannica.com/event/Iraq-War
[10] Twenty years since the US-led coalition invaded Iraq, impunity ... https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/03/iraq-20-years-since-the-us-led-coalition-invaded-iraq-impunity-reigns-supreme/
[11] Shock and Awe: Life in Iraq Twenty Years after the US-led Invasion https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/shock-and-awe-life-in-iraq-twenty-years-after-the-us-led-invasion/
[12] How the war in Iraq changed the world—and what change could ... https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/how-the-war-in-iraq-changed-the-world-and-what-change-could-come-next/
[13] 3 takeaways 20 years after the invasion of Iraq - NPR https://www.npr.org/2023/03/19/1164253438/iraq-war-anniversary-american-invasion-takeaways
[14] More Now See Failure than Success in Iraq, Afghanistan https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/01/30/more-now-see-failure-than-success-in-iraq-afghanistan/
[15] The Seven Deadly Sins of Failure in Iraq: A Retrospective Analysis ... https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-failure-in-iraq-a-retrospective-analysis-of-the-reconstruction/
[16] Why Did the United States Invade Iraq? The Debate at 20 Years https://tnsr.org/2023/06/why-did-the-united-states-invade-iraq-the-debate-at-20-years/
[17] The Iraq War | George W. Bush Library https://www.georgewbushlibrary.gov/research/topic-guides/the-iraq-war
[18] President George W. Bush and the Decision to Invad - Air University https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Wild-Blue-Yonder/Articles/Article-Display/Article/3534259/poliheuristic-decision-making-analysis-president-george-w-bush-and-the-decision/“
You probably intended to refute me, but you're actually proving my point. The groupthink-channeling AI is indeed producing the kind of argumentation that bigwigs have been vaguely blathering for 20 years, and in the process making public opinion on foreign policy much stupider. At the heart of its assessment is the statement that:
"The war failed to achieve its stated goals."
It doesn't say what those were. Smart! I've run this kind of query on AI before and it blundered by saying that we failed to remove Saddam from power. Perplexity avoided that trap. But you can see why an AI would fall into that trap, since people are constantly describing the Iraq war as a failure, and yet the key objective of the war, removing Saddam from power, succeeded. Poor innocent little robots, trying to understand the weird mental gymnastics of perverse mankind!
Our success in removing Saddam contrast with our failure to prevent the Viet Cong from seizing South Vietnam, and our failure to remove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. In a word: we lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan; but we won in Iraq. That matters.
Now, of course, there were other stretch goals involved, which were imperfectly achieved. And elites who didn't want to approve of the Iraq War have been continually laboring to move the goal posts in order to call the war a failure when prima facie it was a success. Obviously a war can be won and still not have been worth it. But the general discourse has not been "we won, but it still wasn't worth fighting." It just gets called a blunder or a disaster, because people really don't want to call it a victory, yet they can't simply call it a defeat. Sophistries.
Now, concerning the cost: yes, it cost a good deal. We spent hundreds of billions on defense every year. So it's not a huge spend relative to what the US military costs decade after decade. Why do we spend so much on the military? Because we want to have fighting capability. So let me ask: will we maintain fighting capability better if we never actually give our soldiers any fighting experience, or if we do sometimes fight substantial wars? The question answers itself.
That's not to say that we can go out and fight wars just to give our soldiers experience. You need a just cause, of course. But the fact that we incurred considerable costs in actual fighting, rather than in simply leaving soldiers sitting peacefully in their bunkers as usual, is a feature, not a bug. We got some combat experience for once, and showed the world that we aren't just a paper tiger.
Good rational analysis
Is there any hope that funding to NIH and CDC could be restored?
There are various court cases challenging whether the executive branch can cancel funding allocated by Congress, so that is some hope that some or all funding that is being withheld or cancelled will be restored sometime this year....
It's all so depend on courts now. And for FY26, Congress (right?). Thanks!