Andrew Cockburn — Vladimir Putin: Computer Genius?

The title is snark. The post is actually about modeling behavior and its pitfalls and shortcomings. Short and worthwhile.

Truthdig
Vladimir Putin: Computer Genius?

Andrew Cockburn

China Hand — How Fidel Castro Almost Made Cuba the World's 5th Nuclear Power

Have a good laugh.

Recently, the tape recordings of the Oval Office discussions during the crisis were declassified and, according to Benjamin Schwartz in The Atlantic, yielded this priceless nugget:

On the first day of the crisis, October 16, when pondering Khrushchev’s motives for sending the missiles to Cuba, Kennedy made what must be one of the most staggeringly absentminded (or sarcastic) observations in the annals of American national-security policy: “Why does he put these in there, though? … It’s just as if we suddenly began to put a majornumber of MRBMs [medium-range ballistic missiles] in Turkey. Now that’d be goddamned dangerous, I would think.” McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, immediately pointed out: “Well we did it, Mr. President.”

This post is longish but worth the read if you are into history. It would be almost unbelievable if it weren't for the release of the transcripts.

China Matters
How Fidel Castro Almost Made Cuba the World's 5th Nuclear Power
China Hand

Gareth Porter — The Real Tonkin Gulf Deception Wasn't by Lyndon Johnson [It was McNamara]

For most of the last five decades, it has been assumed that the Tonkin Gulf incident was a deception by Lyndon Johnson to justify war in Vietnam. But the US bombing of North Vietnam on August 4, 1964, in retaliation for an alleged naval attack that never happened, was not a move by LBJ to pave the way for war in Vietnam. 

The real deception on that day was that Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara's misled LBJ by withholding from him the information that the US commander in the Gulf who had initially reported an attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on US warships had now expressed serious doubts about the initial report and was calling for a full investigation by daylight. That withholding of information from LBJ represented a brazen move to usurp the president's constitutional power of decision on the use of military force.

McNamara's deception is documented in the declassified files on the Tonkin Gulf episode in the Lyndon Johnson library, which this writer used to piece together the untold story of the Tonkin Gulf episode in a 2005 book on the US entry into war in Vietnam. It is a key element of a wider story of how the national security state, including both military and civilian officials, tried repeatedly to pressure LBJ to commit the United States to a wider war in Vietnam.…

Truthout
The Real Tonkin Gulf Deception Wasn't by Lyndon JohnsonGareth Porter