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.

A state department official once told me this about the role of the president. He said: "We wage war for realist reasons, we justify wars for idealist reasons, and it's the president's job to balance the two." I agree.

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

Look at the violence in Pakistan and the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan: the more troops we put in the more violent Pakistan becomes.

The State Department is essentially... I was going to use the word useless. But I don't know if that's correct.

Whether or not Afghanistan would be a peaceful nation-state had we not gone into Iraq I doubt. Afghanistan is going to be Afghanistan, no matter how hard we try to make it something else.

Gore Vidal, Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, all these guys talk about how the United States became a national security state after World War II. I agree with that thesis. 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 or stupid they demonstrate themselves to be. There's no shaking their orthodoxy.