By the second sentence of a pitch, the entirety of the story should be explained.

I made this bad joke on Twitter saying, "I want to put in my first no-bid contract to train the Libyan army and police force." These counter-insurgency guys like to say, "We don't do the big F-16 or big boondoggle projects, we're not pulling this stuff because it's good business." But in fact it turns out there are tons of business opportunities involving counter-insurgency operations - and it's not like we're getting rid of the boondoggle programs either, we're just doing more of everything.

But the frightening aspect is that it's part of a larger effort from the Pentagon to tear down the wall between public affairs and propaganda, and essentially say there is no difference between information operations, public affairs and psychological operations. It's all one and the same. They have a new name for that too, it's called Information Engagement.

Look, I went into journalism to do journalism, not advertising.

As the wealthiest country with all the blessings that we have, do we have an obligation to help the outside world? I think we do, as we have an obligation to help everyone within our own borders. The problem is that this automatically gets translated into: "What's the point of having a huge military if we can't bomb people?" That's the problem that I have. Our foreign policy is essentially our defense policy.

When you go into a country like Libya where a large chunk of the population wants the old regime back you could end up with a protracted civil war. That we're now in a stalemate was both entirely predictable, and predicted. That we're now relying on drones is disturbing. How vital can a cause be if we're not willing to risk American lives to defend it, and instead use robots and remote control operators? It gets me back to the larger feeling about the intervention - there's just not a compelling reason for us to be involved.

Afghanistan would have been difficult enough without Iraq. Iraq made it impossible. The argument that had we just focused on Afghanistan we'd now be okay is persuasive, but it omits the fact that we weren't supposed to get involved in nation-building in Afghanistan.In my new book, I open with a quote from Donald Rumsfeld. In October 2001, he said of Afghanistan: "It's not a quagmire." Ten years later there are 150,000 Western troops there.