I've been skimming the Washington State Supreme Court decision (PDF) on gay marriage (via Andrew Sullivan), and I'm pretty appalled. My jaw started to drop when I read this line:Finally, DOMA does not violate the state constitution’s equal rights amendment because...
Pardon my absence from the blog roughly since the current Mideast hostilities began; besides the fact that my blogmates here at the Duck have been doing an admirable job quacking away and trying to...
Thomas Ricks, the accomplished military reporter for the Washington Post, has a front page article excerpted from his upcoming book, Fiasco, yet another richly detailed account of the failures of...
Two weeks ago, the NY Times reported that women are "leaving men in the dust" in colleges and universities nation-wide, with women now 58% of all undergraduates.(as a point of information, American...
The subject is strategic bombing, the backdrop the unfolding crisis in the Middle East.I am reminded that the spirit of Athens lives on. Melians of the world, beware.To be fair, not everyone there advocates "the strong do what they will and the weak do what they must." Some merely believe that if you fight on the side of providence, any action becomes legitimate. Nevertheless, as articulate a set of comments as I've ever seen.Filed as: just in bello, Melian Dialogue and proportionality
It appears George Will has joined the dark side with his WaPo column this morning. Welcome to the world of sane policy analysis George.Filed as: George Will
[UPDATED]Laura Rozen points to a Ha'aretz story that Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni indicates a willingness to accept a UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon:peaking after a meeting with a United Nations delegation headed by special envoy Vijay Nambiar, Livni said that while Israel would prefer the deployment of the Lebanese army in the south of the country, "we will consider other solutions put forward." "If there is a need to strengthen the Lebanese army somehow, so that the military in south Lebanon is effective, and prevents Hezbollah from returning, we will consider ways to do achieve...
In grad school, Herman Kahn was my second favorite strategic theorist (after Thomas Schelling). I still have an original edition of On Thermonuclear War with the dust jacket -- restrain your envy, my copy was marked up as I read it. In any case, Kahn is known for a number of interesting ideas, including the so-called "ladder of escalation." Essentially, Kahn's term explains gradations of conflict, from "ostensible crisis" up 40+ rungs to "spasm" thermonuclear war. Such a spasm is to be avoided, obviously.While Kahn developed the ladder as part of his critique of the "massive retaliation"...
It has been a bloody week in Iraq. Today saw a particularly vicious attack in the action-reaction cycle that marks Iraq's increasingly dangerous communal violence.Masked attackers with heavy machine guns mounted on pickup trucks slaughtered at least 40 people in a crowded market area south of Baghdad on Monday, hurling grenades to blow up merchants at their counters and shooting down mothers as they fled with their children, witnesses and authorities said.The military-style assault on unarmed civilians in the mostly Shiite city of Mahmudiyah lasted 30 minutes and was vicious even for a...
Foreign Affairs continues its roundtable on US policy towards Iraq. Today I take aim at Christopher Hitchens' contribution.Hitchens open his response by excoriating his fellow panelists for the "absence of historical dimensions" or "by its appearance only in the form of false analogy" in their contributions. What does he mean by this rather clumsy phrase?There is nothing remotely comparable here with the experience of the French in Algeria and Indochina, or with the experience of the United States in Indochina, let alone that of the Israelis in Lebanon. The United States has not claimed...
Like all other frustrated scholars out there, I wanted to publish an Op-Ed, thinking I have something interesting to say about what's going on between Israel and Lebanon. I thought that I might have something to contribute-- my dissertation had a looooong chapter on the Israel - Lebanon Monitoring Group, a small organizaton set up after Israel's 1996 Operation Grapes of Wrath in Lebanon. There's not a lot written about the ILMG, so I figured I might have some unique insights.But, of course, no one picked up the piece, so dear readers, here it is for your consideration:Ten years ago, Israel...
Wretched argues the following:If Sheehan is right [that we will date WW3 to the bombing of the USS Cole] , then the Global War on Terror would have failed. A focused attack on extremism will have been supplanted by an uncontrolled clash between peoples, religions and cultures. But we are not there yet. There's still a chance, and the rulers of the Middle East are hoping that this thing can be pulled back from the brink and the fires focused on Hezbollah, then possibly on a narrow coterie in Teheran.And if that does come to pass, whom should we blame? Liberals of course. Why? But if that way...