Michael Hastings or Mike Hastings may refer to:
The fact that our largest presence in the world is our massive military is going to dictate how we engage with the world.
A $200 million contract just got awarded to develop software to provide the Department of Defense with all these sock puppets who have fake Twitter and Facebook accounts. Why not create ten fake Libyan Twitter users and then get one journalist to follow them. But the problem is, of course, it corrupts the entire process. One of the caveats is that anything they write is going to be in a foreign language so it won't affect Americans. But that doesn't make any sense because: A) it can be translated pretty easily, and B) Americans also speak other languages.
I want to be the greatest investigative reporter of my generation.
Afghanistan would have been difficult enough without Iraq. Iraq made it impossible. The argument that had we just focused on Afghanistan we'd now be okay is persuasive, but it omits the fact that we weren't supposed to get involved in nation-building in Afghanistan.
An information operations team was sent to Afghanistan to conduct various psychological operations on the Afghans and Taliban. The team was then asked not to focus on the Taliban but on manipulating senators into giving more funds and troops [to the war].
I love living in Vermont and I love living in New York. Does my love for Vermont give us the right to rain bombs down on Tripoli? Of course not. There are exceptional qualities about the United States. But it doesn't give us the right to impose our will on other cultures when they often don't want it.
Inside the White House there were always extreme amounts of doubt about whether they should be escalating in Afghanistan. In fact, most of the president's advisers said, "This is probably not going to work. " A lot of people in the military said, "This is probably not going to work. " If the thumbnail version of the Iraq war was that George W. Bush lied about mass destruction weapons, the thumbnail version of Barack Obama's war in Afghanistan is that the generals pushed him into a war he didn't want to fight.
The State Department is essentially. . . I was going to use the word useless. But I don't know if that's correct.
A soldier in Iraq said that he wanted to "punch Donald Rumsfeld in the gut, then in the face" or something like that. He wanted me to use his name, but I knew he'd get in trouble, so I didn't. However, I felt it was a great quote because it summed up the frustration of those guys at that moment.
I've always said that if you want to find out what's going on in Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya, I'll give you a choice. You can either read The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, or you can go to the NATO, ISAF, multi-national force websites where they have their own news releases. Who will give you a more accurate picture? I'll take the mainstream media.
Look at the violence in Pakistan and the presence of U. S. troops in Afghanistan: the more troops we put in the more violent Pakistan becomes.
By the time of Andi Parhamovich death, I had already grown skeptical of the Iraq war. What her death made me realize was what the actual price was. Going through that kind of loss and seeing how devastating it was on her family and friends made me decide that I was only going to write about things that I really believed in. I'm not going to compromise on that.
The way the Pentagon and its defenders have pushed back against this story is to say: "They weren't doing psychological operations, they were doing information operations and public affairs. They were just helping us spin senators like we normally do. "
I think when war becomes your life, I think its very difficult to have the proper perspective to be able to create a fully balanced policy.
We also need to look at precedent before making these decisions. Instead of listening to Muammar Qaddafi's rhetoric, we should look at how he's behaved. The fact is he's been making concessions recently. He gave up his nuclear weapons. He allowed hundreds of Americans to evacuate Tripoli. Did he crack down on his people who revolted? Yes, but that's not so unusual. For me, it's always a failure of diplomacy. Our willingness to immediately turn to a military solution is disturbing.
When writing for a mass audience, put a fact in every sentence.
If you polled the military in Afghanistan as to how many think we should be there or not, the numbers would probably be similar to what the U. S. population believes. That's not because they're watching the news. But, hey, they are out there risking their lives. No one likes to be criticized and it really sucks to be criticized when you're risking your life.
Look, I went into journalism to do journalism, not advertising.
I'm talking to people all of the time. So it hasn't really had a big impact. Access is never my main concern anyway. If you keep digging and making phone calls you can get stories and not have to rely on the good graces of the Pentagon spokesperson. I am not in his good graces.
I made this bad joke on Twitter saying, "I want to put in my first no-bid contract to train the Libyan army and police force. " These counter-insurgency guys like to say, "We don't do the big F-16 or big boondoggle projects, we're not pulling this stuff because it's good business. " But in fact it turns out there are tons of business opportunities involving counter-insurgency operations - and it's not like we're getting rid of the boondoggle programs either, we're just doing more of everything.