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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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Chain of Command

By Matthew Yglesias

Apr 20 2008, 4:07 PM ET Comment

There's a small-but-interesting story in the Times about how military commanders want to conduct more strikes in Pakistan but the Bush administration is forcing them to exercise more constraint out of deference to Pakistani sentiments. I'm not sure who's right on the underlying merits here, but the fact that this situation could arise helps illustrate how fatuous the Bush/McCain "We Must Do What Petraeus Commands" theory of Iraq is.

No President -- not even the one articulating the theory -- would actually behave in the manner Bush is suggesting. When formulating policy toward military operations in Pakistan you of course need to ask the military commanders what they think, but you of course don't just follow them blindly. There are other considerations in play and it would be absurd to blindly follow any one person's advice.

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