Late Edition

1. Full Troop Withdrawal From Iraq
All politics aside, this is great news, so long as our contractors continue to train Iraqi military and police forces and the copious intelligence assets that we have undoubtedly put into play at all levels of the Iraqi government and military keep feeding us everything they have on Iran. The question is, will these troops come home only to find themselves refitted for Afghan deployment in another six months?

2. Ripple Effect of Gaddafi’s Death
For the most part I’m as cynical as they come. The jury is still out on whether the Arab Spring’s democratic ideal will or even can be realized in a region with little democratic tradition and sharp tribal and sectarian divides. It’s not looking good in Egypt where, rather than tearing out a regime root and branch, the opposition chased Mubarak from power while his military bureacracy was allowed to remain in control of the state. Tunisia looks more promising, though until the results of their elections it’s difficult to say if anything resembling a functioning government has been established to ratify a constitution. Now Libya, with the death of Gaddafi and the fall of Sirte, is under the total control of the disparate opposition groups that compose the NTC. Disarming the militias, locking up weapons and forming a national army and police force will be the first keys to ensuring a democratic process free of political violence can even take place. Until those things are undertaken, however, much is up in the air. But occasionally the cynic in me is overtaken by the Jeffersonian revolutionary, and I can’t help but cheer when a dictator is pulled out of a sewer drain and brought to rough justice by the people he oppressed with impunity for nearly half a century. I become even more thrilled when I hear the opposition movements in Syria and Yemen warning their authoritarian regimes to take a good long look: they’re next. Sic semper tyrannus, indeed. No longer just the motto of the State of Virginia, but the impetus of a broad democratic movement in a land with a history that ought to make such a phenomenon impossible. While it’s entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that all of these movements may wind up more closely resembling the French and Iranian Revolutions than the American, for the time being I continue to quietly root for these democratic opposition movements, tempering my enthusiasm with the healthy and cynical axiom that liberty is not, in fact, inevitable, and that its birth is one of arduous labor, frequent violence, and chaos.

3. “Life After Debt”
This is so depressing to read given our current state of decrepitude. It’s also disturbing and horrific how reliant our country is upon debt.