The FPA’s Must-Reads (2/8-15)

A paramilitary police officer lines up a row of newly-polished soldiers’ boots during the week-long Chinese New Year holiday at the Forbidden City compound in Beijing February 14, 2013.
[REUTERS/Petar Kujundzic]Also check out Foreign Policy Blogs’ Maxime Larive (“Great Decisions 2013: Imperfect Union. From Survival to Existentialism”) and Alex Corbeil’s (“Morsi, the military and the Egyptian Youth”) reviews of “Great Decisions in Foreign Policy” 2013 season.

The Man Who Killed Osama bin Laden…Is Screwed
By Phil Bronstein
Esquire

For the first time, the Navy SEAL (“the Shooter”) who fired the three fateful shots that killed Osama bin Laden sits down — anonymously, of course — with journalist Phil Bronstein to discuss not just the raid that changed U.S. history, but also the astonishing failure of the U.S. government to help soldiers transition from the battlefield to civilian life.

Did the CIA Betray Syria’s Rebels?
by Mike Giglio
Newsweek

Activists in Aleppo are claiming to have participated in numerous meetings with American intelligence officers, offering armed support for the rebels so long as they stay out of the grasps of extremists. And despite the U.S. pledging its intention to help bring down Assad, there’s growing concern that this promise may have been an empty one.

How the 1980s Explains Vladimir Putin
By Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy
The Atlantic

Putin, then a young KGB agent, faced the decline and collapse of the Soviet Union stuck in an isolated region of East Germany, an outsider to Gorbachev’s perestroika. In this post adapted from Hill and Gaddy’s “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin,” it’s this time spent in the so-called “valley of the clueless” that’s identified as shaping Putin’s political career, particularly his push against what could be a new reformation for the Russian people.

The Most Expensive Weapon Ever Built
By Mark Thompson
Time

Now the poster child for reckless spending in the Pentagon, the F-35 has moved from being a promising, adaptable tool for the U.S. military to a target for budget cuts. And despite the $396 billion dollar price tag, things may not be looking too bad for the plane of the “iPad generation” after all.

Warrior Petraeus
By Thomas Powers
The New York Review of Books

Like American presidents, Powers notes, American generals are fated to be remember for their wars — that is, for how they chose to fight them. In Petraeus’ case, the constant theme of his thirty-year career as a professional soldier has been these “open-ended” wars, and how to fight them.

Blogs:

Architects Without Umbrellas by Tom Squitieri
Benghazi, Adequate Security, and Reporting What You Know before You Know It by Scott Monje
Iran’s March toward Presidential Elections: New Priorities, New Strategies by Jamshid Barzegar
What Role for Europe in Asia? by Damien Tomkins
North Korea, Iran and Obama’s Big Bluff by David J. Karl