An Indecent Proposal: Tom Ricks Calls for the Return of Conscription

By Matt Fay, on July 13th, 2012

Tom Ricks has an op-ed this week in the New York Times proposing that America reinstitute the draft to alleviate its military, economic, and societal ills. And why not? Apparently retired General Stanley McChrystal thinks it’s a good idea. Of course, Ricks’s entire case for returning to the military draft is not built on the former Afghan commander’s opinion, but it doesn’t get much better from there.

The proposal is to conscript both men and women who could choose different lengths of service. Option Ricks specifies is an 18-month stint that would provide “low pay but excellent post-service benefits, . . .
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What an Irrelevant Speech says about Republican Foreign Policy

By Matt Fay, on October 6th, 2011

Now that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has reaffirmed that he will not seek the Republican nomination for president in 2012 his recent speech at the Reagan Library on American exceptionalism—which, last week, had pushed the fervor for Christie to enter the race to ever-higher levels—may seem irrelevant now.  But there was an important foreign policy element to his speech that has caused some disagreement, and may get to the heart of the forces that will shape American foreign policy in the next Republican administration—whenever that may come to be.

In the speech, when discussing foreign policy, Christie said,

. . .
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Does Obama Hate American Hegemony?

By Matt Fay, on May 6th, 2011

Does President Obama believe American hegemony is a bad thing for the United States and the world?  Reuel Marc Gerecht thinks he does.  Writing at the Weekly Standard about the various goings-on in the Arab world, Gerecht asserts,

We may never know whether the conjecture of the historian Fouad Ajami is correct: that President Barack Obama sought the approval of the Arab League for the air war against Muammar Qaddafi because he thought the league—an organization that has always shown greater sympathy for the region’s rulers than for its citizenry—would turn down the French-led request to unleash Western airpower . . .
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