Day: April 5, 2024

“By nightfall, you’ll have driven 30,000 to 50,000 Baathists underground. And in six months, you’ll really regret this.” Such a warning from a local CIA station chief would cause most policymakers to reconsider their course of action. And yet, the U.S. authorities in Iraq ignored it, pressing ahead with their plan to remove members of the Baath party from positions of power. In order to craft a de-Baathification process following the occupation of Iraq in 2003, the United States adopted policies that it claimed were based heavily on the denazification policies enacted in the American-occupied zone of West Germany to
The post “Too Soft”: America’s Failure to Learn from Germany in Iraq appeared first on War on the Rocks.

Cyber attacks have been characterized as “borderless” threats. The seeming lack of geographic constraint implies that one skilled hacker, presumably in a hoodie and Guy Fawkes mask, could take down the internet in its entirety. It even happened once, in 1988, with Robert Tappan Morris’ eponymous “Morris Worm.” But that was back when there wasn’t much internet to take down. A lot’s changed since then, but the fear persists — so much that the U.S. government is even contemplating a backstop mechanism for the economic effects of truly catastrophic cyber attacks. That might be a bit hasty, though. Despite the
The post Why Natural Catastrophes Will Always Be Worse than Cyber Catastrophes appeared first on War on the Rocks.
