The Foreign Standard

The now defunct Weekly Standard was the right's flagship publication for an interventionist foreign policy.

In other places it has been argued that the Standard is most responsible for drumming up 'war fever' against Saddam.

They certainly had a lot of influence in Washington. The Neo-Cons in the White House had the president's ear becuase after 9/11 they were the only one's with a coherent plan. The old foreign policy pros, Baker, Scowcroft, etc etc, argued for containment and maintaining stability in the Middle East.

The Neo-Cons argued the opposite, calling for the destabilization of the Middle East. Why not destabilize a region full of secular dictators, kleptocrats, and religious whack-jobs?  Recall that after the liberation of Iraq a civilian defense policy review board chaired by Neocon extraordinaire Richard Pearl called for the seizure of Saudi Arabia's oil fields.

While the liberation of Iraq was certainly a Neoconservative project they were not the only one's calling for it. We're thinking of centrist 'new age' squishes like Tom Freidman here in the US and Michael Ignatief, the Canadian version of Tom Freidman.

We agreed and agree with all of the above.

We're trying to remember our mindset in the days after 9/11. We recall a vague sense that the Middle East had to be changed through war. In the spring of 2003 it seemed that was happening, no? Saddam had been toppled. Bush and Blair had just sidelined Yasser Arafat. It seemed to us that the next target was the Iranian Mullahs, who could be removed through some sort of internal revolution, dare we call it a 'Persian Spring'?

We thought that by liberating Iraq, the United States could wage cultural and ideological war from the heart of the Middle East. Heh, in the days following the 'Arab Spring' Kristol and company tried to take credit for the movement. In 2011 we understood that was Beltway crap. They didn't.

Which is one of the reasons why the Weekly Standard is no more.

Kristol Killed the Magazine Star

We saw the other day that Google determined the dread Russians* spent less than $5000 in ads trying to influence the 2016 election.

In case you're wondering, Millennial readers (you poor bastards), the Dems never feared Russia when it was Soviet Union and had five thousand nuclear missiles pointed at United States. In fact party of Democrats actively encourage, rooted for, and supported Kremlin during Cold War. See for example the letter of America's own Senator Edward M Kennedy to Brezhnev asking him to take it easy on Ronald Reagan. On side note, easiest way for mad-man Reagan to kill communists would have been, and still is, nuclear strike on San Francisco, UC Berkley, The New York Times...*

Anyway the 4700 or so rubles the Soviets, I mean Russians, spent on Election 2016 is less then we've spent to advertise some of our books, both successfully and unsuccessfully.

We don't need to advertise anymore. Through the magic of the internet when we publish a book the damn thing sells itself.

Selling books is easy. We've been talking about it here for a bit now, as alert reader(s) may have noticed: write what the audience wants. You people want more World War 1990, you get more World War 1990.

Which brings us to the now defunct Weekly Standard. William Kristol's magazine started as a policy and idea journal, the banner of Newt Gingrich's 104th Congress. I was a charter subscriber. Now The Standard is a Never Trump embarrassment with a shrinking subscriber base who's lost its sugar daddy. You see, these political magazines never make money and need a rich guy who doesn't mind losing a couple of million a year as a write-off.**

Someone will make excuses for The Standard- well in this day and age....digital media...since the Great Recession...Bullshit.

Write what readers what to read. Civil War Quarterly asked us tow write a piece about Sherman's March, to which we replied, 'Hasn't that already been done?' Maybe so, but voila! All of the military history magazines have expanded since the Great Recession. When one writes what readers want to read one can do that.

*We say nuke them from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.

**We don't even know what a write-off is, but they do, and they're the ones writing it off.

Whither the Weekly Standard

Via Hotair, we learn that the once venerable Weekly Standard is about to get the axe, though pieces of the body may still run around like a chicken with its head cut off.

In recent years the standard, or its publisher, William Kristol- has gone insane. Trump has had that effect on lots of people.

The Weekly Standard got its start in the summer of 1995, the summer of Newt Gingrich. This was the high tide of post-Reagan conservatism, of Gingrichian policy ideas, wonkism, and dare we say neo-conservatism. I was there:

The Weekly Standard was linked to Newt, it even featured him on its inaugural cover. But Newt imploded, as is his want, in 1998 and we don't think the magazine ever really found its form again, at least not until the Iraq Campaign. Ever since the Weekly Standard has been in intellectual tatters, as was much of the right, a piece of the smoldering wreckage of Election 2008.

Oh well. The right has moved on from Neo-conservatism to Trumpism.

Alert reader(s) will recall that Kristol was Dan Quayle's chief of staff. He was the one standing in the classroom next to the veep saying, 'There's definitely an e at the end of Potato.'

Those same alert reader(s) will notice that Kristol has been getting more and more diabolical in the WW1990 series.