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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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Somalia

By Matthew Yglesias

Mar 28 2008, 5:43 PM ET Comment

It seems that the situation in Somalia has completely collapsed. The Washington Post sees insurgents on the march and notes that "on Tuesday, 40 aid groups delivered a statement to the U.N. Security Council, which is discussing Somalia this week, warning of an "impending humanitarian catastrophe." Too bad the United States decided to help provoke this latest round of fighting and anarchy by supporting an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia.

About half of what I know about the Horn of Africa I learned from reading Jeffrey Gettleman articles so I shouldn't be too hard on him, but it was a little odd to read that when the TFG "came here to the capital 15 months ago, backed by thousands of Ethiopian troops, it was widely hailed as the best chance in years to end Somalia’s ceaseless cycles of war, chaos and suffering." Certainly, to me it looked like the best chance to restart Somalia's ceaseless cycles of war, chaos, and suffering and I recall it looked the same to John Judis, to the International Crisis Group, and many others. Meanwhile, in addition to contributing to massive suffering in Somalia we've for no real reason picked a fight with a local Islamist movement that showed no particular sign of wanting to fight the United States.

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