Inside the White House there were always extreme amounts of doubt about whether they should be escalating in … - Michael Hastings

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And despite the fact that the basis of this mathematical way of thinking in art is in reason, its dynamic content is able to launch us on astral flights which soar into unknown and still uncharted regions of the imagination.

Michael Hastings

Inside the White House there were always extreme amounts of doubt about whether they should be escalating in Afghanistan. In fact, most of the president's advisers said, "This is probably not going to work. " A lot of people in the military said, "This is probably not going to work. " If the thumbnail version of the Iraq war was that George W. Bush lied about mass destruction weapons, the thumbnail version of Barack Obama's war in Afghanistan is that the generals pushed him into a war he didn't want to fight.

Military, War, Fighting, Iraq, Pushed

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The simple and terrifying reality, forbidden from discussion in America, was that despite spending $600 billion a year on the military, despite having the best fighting force the world had ever known, they were getting their asses kicked by illiterate peasants who made bombs out of manure and wood.

Fighting, Known, Military, Peasants, Simple, Spending

A woman I loved [Andi Parhamovich] was killed in Baghdad in January 2007 – al-Qaeda in Iraq took credit for it … The memorial service with me crying over an empty coffin.

Baghdad, Credit, Iraq, January, Memorial

The idea of aerial military surveillance dates back to the Civil War, when both the Union and the Confederacy used hot-air balloons to spy on the other side, tracking troop movements and helping to direct artillery fire.

Balloons, Ideas, Military, Spy, Used, War

Gore Vidal, Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, talk about how the U. S. became a national security state after World War II. Essentially there's this bipartisan foreign policy elite who've been calling the shots for the last few decades and they're clearly still in control regardless of how clownish or absurd they demonstrate themselves to be. There's no shaking their orthodoxy. To me it was the most depressing thing, these full-scale military interventions firsthand for a number of years, seeing how quickly we can get involved in another war with very little debate.

Debate, Depressing, Gore, Military, Seeing, War

General McChrystal wanted to be on the cover of Rolling Stone.

General, Mcchrystal, Rolling, Rolling Stones, Stones