American Conservative magazine editor Scott McConnell discusses the paleo-conservative antiwar movement, the neconservatives and the Republican Party, his own roots as a neocon before turning against interventionism at the end of the Cold War, his new article "Algeria: The Model," and the end of American empire.
Speaking of Algeria, maybe this bit from the Robert Fisk article I linked to will be comprehensible to you now? “I think of the French OAS in Algeria in 1962, setting off bombs among France’s Muslim Algerian community. I recall the desperate efforts of the French authorities to set Algerian Muslim against Algerian Muslim which led to half a million dead souls.”
I also liked the quote you read from Tenet: “My
greatest hopefear is that sectarian violence in Iraq has taken on a life of its own and that U.S. forces are becoming more and more irrelevant to the management of that violence.”Was this an admission that the “sectarian violence” has required a helping hand?
Right, because all this time the problem has been that I’m just too stupid to understand.
…Well, I wouldn’t go that far