Senan Murray of the BBC reports the gory details.There are no Christmas decorations, the radio stations are still playing hip-hop and rap and some children recoil at an image of Santa decrying it as evil."His costume looks phoney and his face is strange," says...
Are you desperate for some Duck of Minerva action?Well, I've been engaged in an exchange with someone named "Red Stater" (or perhaps "Red's Tater") on his/her blog. It's mostly been in the comments...
Former President Gerald Ford died yesterday.I'm sure that there will be much discussion of Ford's legacy as the only non-elected President in US history, following the resignation of Nixon, and the...
Ethiopia launched an invasion of Somalia yesterday:Ethiopia officially plunged into war with Somalia’s Islamist forces on Sunday, bombing targets inside Somalia and pushing ground troops deep into...
Where to start? About 2 years ago, Patrick and I did an event with the campus Debate Club, where he and I each teamed up with a student and debated "US Foreign Policy: Going to Hell in a Hand Basket." It was great fun. I was on the side of hell in a hand basket (and won), though it helped to have reality on my side. Reality is back in force, and its not good for the Bush Administration and its not is it good for US foreign policy.The Washington Post has a solid overview in today's paper.On three key flash points -- North Korea, Iran and Sudan -- the Bush administration confronts the...
At an October 25 news conference, not long before the midterm elections, President Bush was asked a fairly simple question about Iraq: "Do you think we're winning, and why?"The reporter asking the question pointed out that the Iraq war had lasted nearly as long as World War II, at least for the US, and that October had been the deadliest month of the war in quite some time.The President offered a fairly long answer that was not directly on point to the reporter's query. Here's an excerpt: This is a war against extremists and radicals who kill innocent people to achieve political objectives....
Nirmala George of the Associated Press writes: Lawmakers and women's rights activists raised an alarm Monday over new evidence indicating about 7,000 fewer girls than expected are born each day in India, where women routinely suffer discrimination and parents often abort female fetuses.The spread of ultrasound technology allowing parents to find out the gender of their unborn children has resulted in the large-scale "disappearance" of girls here. One study released earlier this year estimated that 10 million fewer girls were born here than expected in the past 20 years.The government must...
David Brooks, in his Sunday NYT column (requires Times Select to read), gives out awards for great magazine articles of the year. He recognizes two outstanding articles on how the Pentagon is fighting in Iraq and terrorism. In his article, Brooks makes a fundamental and vital insight that needs to become part of the emerging Grand Strategy Debate.*Brooks writes:There was also a sense that we were losing ground in Iraq. One of the best magazine writers on that story, George Packer of The New Yorker, tended to profile American dissidents who were trying to change the way we fight that war.In...
With your indulgence I would like to spend a few minutes engaging in a favorite academic pastime. [No, not "blogging when I have grading to do," although I am also doing that.] The pastime in question is "nit-picking," in which one academic takes an argument by another academic -- an argument the broad outlines of which one basically agrees with -- and focuses on some relatively minor point of differentiation. Hopefully, the point is not altogether banal; in my case it's usually because I like some author's conclusion but not all of the stages of the case that they've built to support it,...
Over the past few months, more and more analysts have noticed that Afghanistan is looking more and more like Iraq. That's not good. Talk has turned from how best to build a nation to how to counter insurgency and stop suicide bombings.Earlier this week, Afghan leader Hamid Karzai reacted in this way to a suicide bombing in a governor's compound: "The problem is not Taliban. We don't see it that way. The problem is with Pakistan," Karzai told foreign journalists.He said the Taliban took power with support from Pakistan, calling it "more than a boss.""The state of Pakistan was supporting the...
Kofi Annan gave his "farewell speech" yesterday, choosing a very interesting and symbolic location for the address--the Truman Library in Missouri. As a good farewell speech should, it crystallizes the wisdom of a career of international civil service and provides a call to action to those who will carry on in his stead. What I found most interesting, though, was the location and theme of the speech and how it took a very nuanced approach to the United States. (full text of speech here).To really get where I'm going with this, my reaction to the speech was shaped by my one of my current...
If you had Milton Friedman in the dead pool, then his passing last month may have put you in position to win this macabre game.But Friedman and Augusto Pinochet? That shows some foresight.Did anyone have Friedman, Pinochet and Jeane Kirkpatrick?For those interested, I wrote a bit Saturday about Kirkpatrick on my blog.Dead pool-related questions: In the future, will anyone remember that Salvador Allende was killed on September 11? Does ESPN provide the on-line software to monitor a dead pool? Will Saddam Hussein be sort of the like the bingo free space in 2007 dead pools? Filed as: dead...