I've been teaching Af-Pak in my security class these past few weeks. The war has been going on for so long that many "highlights" now seem like distant history.For instance, everyone remembers the farce that was George W. Bush's May 1, 2003, celebration of the end of...
Mark Blyth waxing enthusiastic about why "austerity" is not commonsensical economic policy at all. Food for thought.WatsonMedia presents Mark Blyth on Austerity from The Global Conversation on Vimeo.
Stephen Biddle has a spot-on piece over at Foreign Policy on how Presidents, and Obama in particular, must take into account domestic politics when setting national security strategy. With the...
Every night, about 15 minutes or so after we've put my 3-year old daughter to bed, we inevitably hear a knock at the door. She's typically knocking because she needs to go the bathroom. She's also...
My (first) book, Prisoners of America’s Wars: From the Early Republic to Guantanamo is now shipping on Amazon.com (or Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, etc.). Considering that this would be the closest thing to offspring that I have ever produced, I thought that I would post it in the hope that it may be of some interest to some Duck readers. I've pasted the abstract below for that very reason:Prisoners of war have been a significant feature of virtually every conflict that the United States has engaged in since its revolutionary beginnings. Today visitors to Washington DC will frequently see a black...
I often find myself in disagreement with Amitai Etzioni, but he does makes some sense in his recent Politico op-ed on Petraeus' "metrics" for progress in Afghanistan: The newest way General Petraeus plans to measure success in the war in Afghanistan reminded me of what the government did when its campaign to persuade the public to stop smoking did not make much headway. It stopped counting how many people had had their last cigarette - and started counting how many anti-smoking pamphlets it mailed....Gen. Petraeus has outlined five metrics of military success, including: 'the elimination of...
Did anyone else know about this additional outrageous consequence of the "war on terror"? You may have to be a subscriber to see this note from The Nation, September 20? Deborah Amos's Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East (PublicAffairs; $25.95) is a harrowing account of the pain and anguish suffered by the Iraqi Sunni diaspora in the Middle East. Especially perverse is a legal hurdle faced by exiles seeking asylum in the United States. Amos reports that Iraqis who have "paid ransom for the release of a loved one who had been kidnapped by a militia or criminal...
I attended the Harvard Social Studies concentration’s 50th anniversary celebration on September 25, well aware of the controversy over the University's naming an undergraduate research scholarship in honor of New Republic editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz. Generating the conflict were Peretz’s long history of contemptuous writings about Muslims and other groups and especially his recent, disgraceful statement: “I wonder whether I need . . . pretend that [Muslims] are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.” Peretz later retracted...
For my first Duck post to be so parochial is a shame, but I can’t resist commenting on the result of Labour’s leadership election, declared a couple of hours ago. For someone such as myself who was once, briefly, one of Ralph Miliband’s students at LSE in the 1960s, the idea that the son of the author of Parliamentary Socialism should now be the leader of the British Labour Party is weird. That he should have obtained that post by beating his elder brother is positively surreal. Brothers have quite often competed for the top job in old-style monarchies – indeed, in the Ottoman Empire it was...
Via Marginal Revolution, an interesting new paper that explores what happens to an ex-staffer's lobbying revenue when the politician they worked for leaves office.Our main finding is that lobbyists connected to US Senators suff er an average 24% drop in generated revenue when their previous employer leaves the Senate. The decrease in revenue is out of line with pre-existing trends, it is discontinuous around the period in which the connected Senator exits Congress and it persists in the long-term. The sharp decrease in revenue is also present when we study separately a small subsample of...
Former President Clinton jumped into the Mideast Peace process earlier this week. According to Josh Rogin's reporting at The Cable, Clinton met with a group of reporters and, when asked to comment about the current negotiations, began by saying:"I wouldn't say too much about this if Hillary weren't Secretary of State and in charge of these negotiations, so I'm darned sure not going to say too much now."Ah, but that's not like Mr. Clinton.And it wasn't.According to Rogin, Clinton then proceeded "to go in depth on the issue for more than ten minutes." In case you missed it, he suggested that...
I've just started reading Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist. So far, it is an excellent, through-provoking read. A key to Ridley's argument is that the innovation of exchange--the trading between two parties of separate items or services that both parties value--that led to mankind's dominance of the planet and the explosion of knowledge and technology.Ridley explains how exchange--or barter--is qualitatively different from reciprocity (an activity that can be found in other species):at some point, after millions of years of indulging in reciprocal back-scratching of gradually increasing...