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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.

National Review Signs Up for War

By Matthew Yglesias
Aug 20 2007, 11:32 AM ET Comment

How else to read these passages from their new editorial?

To designate the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist entity, then, is to acknowledge reality. Yet there is something decidedly unrealistic in the idea that the Revolutionary Guard can be separated from the Iranian government as a whole. [...] For a variety of reasons — economic interest, anti-Americanism, and reflexive pacifism chief among them — it would prefer to avoid any bad blood with the Islamic Republic. Most of the U.S. State Department feels likewise. But the simple truth is that, unless Iran’s regime gives up both its terrorist ideology and its weapons, we will never be safe. The president has taken an important — albeit partial and overdue — step toward facing that unpleasant reality.


I doubt Iran's regime is going to just abandon it's ideology if George Bush asks them too, so I guess this counts as a call for us to invade Iran, overthrow its regime, and install in its place one that's both more ideological acceptable and also prone to abandon the nuclear program that the Shah started and the Ayatollahs have continued. Strangely, though, the editorial doesn't actually say any of those things, continuing the weird pattern of dissembling and doublespeak that's characterized the Iran debate for years now. But if we can't be safe without regime change, then surely we should invade and change the regime, right?

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