Last August, Senator John McCain famously used the phrase "whack-a-mole" to describe and criticize the Pentagon's "old" strategy in Iraq. What I worry about is we're playing a game of whack-a-mole here. We move troops, it [insurgency] flares up, we move troops...
Over at Foreign Policy Passport, Preeti Aroon repeats--not once, but twice--the invidious comparison between contemporary Islam and pre-Reformation Latin Christiandom. Now, I've written on the...
Part 17 of Why its so damn difficult to have any sort of meaningful debate about the future of US policy in Iraq, and part 34 of why the Bush Administration has a serious credibility problem when it...
Via John Holbo.Image from https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v602/bensanaz/All-Star%2024/AllStarComics24-01.jpg.
Is it the James-Bond resume? The oh-so-sexy firm hand of quasi-autocratic leadership? The way his soul shines through his eyes? Vlad's allure will forever remain a mystery to me.President Vladimir Putin may be in the newspapers every day and on the television every evening, but for some that is just not enough. Portraits of the president are not uncommon in homes and offices alike."He is our president, and I like having him in our office," said Svetlana Osuva, an accountant in Moscow. "I think he is quite handsome," she added. The portrait at her work is a photo of a stern-faced Putin...
I am currently watching an hour-long PBS documentary called "The Case for War: In Defense of Freedom". I assume this is the "balance" episode of the eleven-part series "America at a Crossroads", since Richard Perle narrates, debates people, then explains in the voice over why he's right. Perle's arguments range from the sensible to the cynically dishonest. But the amazing thing is that Perle's losing to his interlocutors in his own documentary. Perle gets served on jus ad bellum and jus in bello issues by a t-shirt clad anti-war protester. He lamely attempts to caricature his opponent's...
I don't have anything that intelligent or insightful to say about the shootings at Virginia Tech yesterday. I was teaching when it happened, and one of my students with a laptop was checking the news and reported the still breaking story to the class.As this is an international relations blog, I thought that this story in today's Washington Post (which, for those of you not from the area, is treating this as a local story-- VA Tech is 4 hours from here but still seen as one of the "local" state schools) was somewhat interesting. It discusses the international reaction to the shooting, and...
Two lead articles in today's news reveal severe trouble for the Administration with respect to Iraq policy. Both are "inside-baseball" type of articles, but they are indicative of real problems with the overall direction of the course of the war.The first was the Washington Post's front page story:The White House wants to appoint a high-powered czar to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies, but it has had trouble finding anyone able and willing to take the job, according to people close to the...
National Security is all about prioritizing tough decisions. Often, an administration can get away with avoiding the really tough calls, but from time to time, issues arise that force policy makers into pragmatic trade-offs between vital values and interests. Those choices are very instructive and insightful as to how a President sees the world. The NY Times reports that the Bush Administration faced just such a choice between its key goals of counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation:Three months after the United States successfully pressed the United Nations to impose strict sanctions on...
What do other states think of America's nuclear arsenal and strategic posture? Defense analyst Lewis Dunn, with coauthors Gregory Giles, Jeffrey Larsen, and Thomas Skypek, recently completed a project sponsored by the Advanced Systems and Concepts Office (ASCO) of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency that looked at this and related questions. Their report is available on the web: Foreign Perspectives on U.S. Nuclear Policy and Posture (warning: long pdf).On March 20, Dunn presented the findings at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Through his interviews with foreign individuals,...