Iraq

Max Boot reviews Little America by Rajiv Chandrasekaran in the Wall Street Journal:

Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon reports: 

A striking chart showing that, over the last decade, 65 percent of federal expenditures went to pay for entitlement commitments, not wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, defense, or national security: 

Photo Credit: Foreign Policy

State Department officials have announced that Hillary Clinton is moving toward taking the Mujahedin e-Khalq, or MEK, off the list of foreign terrorist organizations. The secretary of state has already delayed her decision to review the MEK's status for almost two years, even though congressional rules maintain the process should take 180 days.

Writing at BuzzFeed, my colleague James Kirchick informs readers that famed New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh once opined that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy “might have been some justice.” Kennedy had plotted to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. So, in Hersh’s view, it is “right” to believe there may have been some “rough justice,” as one of Hersh’s readers put it, in Kennedy’s “terrible death by assassination.”

In a statement released this evening, Buck McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, blasts the Obama administration's decision to drawdown combat forces in Afghanistan early. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced the new plan earlier today.

Buzzfeed flags this passage from Michael Hastings new book The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan. It seems that as a Presidential candidate visiting Iraq, Obama didn't exactly make enough time to welcome and thank the troops:

In the latest issue, Kim and Fred Kagan ask, "Is Iraq Lost?"

Steve Hayes, with A. B. Stoddard and Charles Krauthammer, last night on Fox News:

In one of my few real conversations with President George W. Bush, I was struck by the degree to which he seemed always to have given thought to this question: How would what he said, and what his subordinates said, affect the morale of those fighting for our nation, and their families? Bush was willing to say something that wasn’t politically advantageous—and not to say something that might have been—if he thought this would adversely affect the spirit of those he had the honor to command.

In an interview with Leslie Gelb in Newsweek, Vice President Joe Biden says: