The news out of the Damascus suburbs this morning is highly disturbing and, if the reports are confirmed that this was a chemical attack, no doubt will mark a turning point in the conflict. Â Dan is somewhat skeptical that it will change the intervention calculus. I...
This is a guest post by Brent Sasley. Sasley is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Texas at Arlington. He blogs at Mideast Matrix and Open Zion. Follow...
There are gruesome reports out of Syria today of a chemical weapons attack in a suburb of Damascus. If they are accurate, the chemical weapons inflicted mass civilian causalities. As David Kenner...
While the IR blogosphere navel-gazes, history marches on: Media is reporting a massive civilian casualties from a chemical weapons attack in Syria. The UN is holding an emergency meeting. More from...
I expect that our readers have seen Brian's public letter of resignation, as well as Charli's personal take on all this and Steve's  discussion of the perils and rewards of blogging. This is a choice that Brian made on his own recognizance, one that he announced to the other permanent contributors in an email exchange. Many of the emails that I've received since Thursday have expressed some combination of puzzlement, anger, dismay, and unhappiness at the absence of a collective statement from the Duck of Minerva. The general argument is that a blog of the Duck of Minerva's "stature" and...
In the past week, there has been a heap of controversy here over a post that many folks found to be offensive. In reaction, the blogger is ceasing to blog, Charli discuss the challenges of blogging, and others still are drawing lessons, such as Christopher Zorn who posted on his FB page "the vast majority of academic political scientists are just not cut out to be bloggers, and probably shouldn't do so." My reaction to this is: blogger is a label that describes a whole lot of activity, so saying people should not blog might mean that they should not write on the internet. Or it might mean...
Sometime in my first year of blogging, I read on the Internets that President Mugabe's troops had burned a six-year-old alive in front of his parents. I was horrified, it was late, I was tired and already pissed off at something completely unrelated, and I foolishly fired off a blog post provocatively entitled "Why Not Assassinate Mugabe?" The point of the post, actually, was that there are a whole bunch of really good reasons why the anti-assassination norm exists and holds in such cases. But naturally no one paid any attention to that, and by the time I woke up I had been called out for...