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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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By Request: What if Bush Bombs Iran?

By Matthew Yglesias

Jul 1 2008, 9:01 AM ET Comment

ClaudeB asks: "If Dubya decides to go in Iran before Jan. 20, 2009, is there anyone in Washington who can stop him, since even the Joint Chiefs have trouble restraining him?"

I get asked this question now and again, and as best I can tell it's not a very difficult question -- if Bush orders air strikes against Iranian targets, nobody can stop him. A plain reading of the text of the US Constitution would seem to suggest that it would be unconstitutional for the military to follow any such order absent a declaration of war or some other form of congressional authorization. But the settled precedent, ratified by key Democratic Party leaders as recently as the bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo crisis, is that no such authorization is necessary. I'm not happy with this situation and think it's crazy that we as a country have moved away from the constitutional procedure, but the cat's been out of the bag for a while now and if Bush wants to bomb Iran Bush will bomb Iran.

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