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Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias - Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress. His first book, with the working title Heads in the Sand: Iraq and the Strange Death of Liberal Internationalism, scheduled to be published next spring by John Wiley and co., deals with the Democratic Party's struggle to find a post-9/11 foreign policy, focusing primarily on the rise and (hopefully) fall of the liberal hawk movement.

Previously, he was a staff writer at The American Prospect and an Associate Editor at TPM Media, where he contributed to the group blogs Tapped and TPMCafe. His main blog, now at The Atlantic, has existed in various forms since the dark ages of the blogosphere in January 2002.

His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Slate, The New Republic, and The Washington Monthly, and he is a regular on BloggingHeads.tv and makes the occasional radio or television appearance.

Desperately out of touch with the American mainstream, Yglesias was born and raised in Manhattan and studied philosophy at Harvard where he was editor in chief of The Harvard Independent, a campus alternative weekly.

His latest writings can be found on the Matthew Yglesias blog.

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Spy Versus Spy

By Matthew Yglesias

Apr 15 2007, 3:43 PM ET Comment

Back in the day, the US security establishment had a clever idea. Back during Iyad Allawi's administration we founded a CIA-funded "Iraqi" intelligence service under the authority of Muhammed Shahwani, a Sunni Arab ex-Baathist who, Allawi-style, had worked with the CIA in trying to foment anti-Saddam activities by members of the Iraqi security forces. After Allawi's departure, Shahwani's intelligence service marched on, in essence working for the American government rather than the Iraqi one. In response, it seems, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki founded a second intelligence service that would be loyal to him.

Spencer Ackerman remarks that the alternative intel service's rise "will further entrench Shahwani. Waili serves as the manifestation of the fears that led the U.S. to install Shahwani in the first place: the return to a mukhabarat-style security structure, this one loyal to the Shiites instead of Saddam."

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