Last week's issue of the Economist included a glowing discussion of successful nation-building in the former Yugoslavia: Almost 20 years after political bonds were severed by war, day-to-day links between companies, professions and individuals are quietly being...
World leaders who recently met with him are being notified.
I am usually a fan of Charles Blow's work, but his latest op-ed seems to me a bit sloppy.Blow claims that one reason Democrats, and President Obama in particular, may be having trouble convincing...
It is very, very significant that Lieutenant William Calley openly apologized for his behavior in the 1968 massacre of hundreds of civilians in a series of villages known as My Lai. Anyone who has...
Adam Elkus from Rethinking Security tweets about a recent critique of the current US strategy of strategic communication in the Muslim world. The critique was penned by non other than Admiral Mike Mullen, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mullen's contention is that efforts by the US to counter propaganda from Islamic militants is doomed to fail unless more attention is paid to the outcomes of US policies on the ground:“To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate,” Admiral Mullen wrote in...
Maureen Dowd's op-ed Stung by the Perfect Sting rattled some cages in the blogosphere this week. Laura McKenna calling her a whiner, implying the post was really about her own bad blogger press. Tim Burke claiming she is dissing bloggers by failing to reference our own grand debates over anonymity. Danny being Danny Drezner accusing Dowd of comparing bloggers to muggers. The column seems widely interpreted as a slam against the new media. I was sorry that none of these posts engaged the actual story in the article, which had almost nothing to do with the blogosphere per se. Part of this is...
Yesterday Channel 4 in the UK aired the above video, allegedly recorded on a mobile phone and smuggled out of the country by human rights activists, apparently of Sinhalese soldiers massacring Tamil noncombatants earlier this year. The Sri Lankan government (naturally) argues it is a fabrication. Human Rights Watch's James Ross says "there is no way to tell if the footage is genuine," but argues that the release of the film underscores the need for an "objective" inquiry into atrocities - by both sides - during the conflict. I agree with Human Rights Watch in general - that whatever the...
I only met Ted Kennedy on a handful of occasions. The last time was at a party to mark the end of my father's twenty-two year history as one of the Senator's chief health-care policy advisers. My overwhelming impression of Kennedy's vicarious presence in my life was as a disembodied voice. Whenever I answered the phone to hear "this is Senator Kennedy, may I speak to your father?" it seemed as if everything in the house froze until my dad got on the line. Sometimes such calls would amount to very little. Other times my father would soon be on his way to the Senator's house to deliver a...
Dan Drezner links to a recent article by Philip Tetlock on the difficult business of political forecasting. His evaluation of this troubled pastime is accomplished through the review of three recent books that all claim to provide a better way to see the future of politics. His own research (Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, a fantastic book that you really should read) offers solid reasons to be skeptical of any pronouncements by 'experts' that they have some kind of proprietary knowledge about the future.While I think his critique of the three books and of...
I can't stand Keith Olbermann most of the time, but this bit last night - both a spoof of the health care debate and the proliferation of zombie references in political discourse lately - was too priceless to ignore:Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Senator Kennedy is dead at 77.
Eric Randolph tells us why at Complex Terrain Lab in a post entitled "A New Kind of War Movie" : "The Hurt Locker has already garnered the epithet of ‘first great Iraq war movie’ since its US release back in June, but that might actually be an underestimation. For a start, it has an intensity that will leave your bowels twisted and your nails bleeding; and it’s made a star of a nobody in James Renner. But, more importantly, by side-stepping the question of the war’s founding morality and justification, director Kathryn Bigelow has achieved something quite new for the war genre. Her resolute...