As a callow undergraduate, I kind of supported the Iraq War for all of the normal reasons; see The Republic of Fear and The Threatening Storm. (I say "kind of" because I was in college and, frankly, tuned out in favor of studying.) A little while ago, it struck me in...
It now looks almost certain that we will see a US military strike of some sort in Syria. There is a lot of angst out there about such a strike -- what are its goals? What will it accomplish? and,...
This is a guest post by Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, Professor and Department Chair of Political Science at the University of Iowa. In my previous post, I discussed some problems women face when...
Justice in Syria? The Maritime Labor Convention and the United States. This really isn't a matter of the United States, per se, but the unrelenting hostility of the bulk of the Senate GOP...
The US and UK are apparently preparing for air strikes against the Syrian Assad regime, claiming there is little doubt that it is responsible for horrific chemical weapons attacks. Syria has allegedly crossed President Obama's 'red line.' Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague claims that "We can not in the twenty first century allow the idea that chemical weapons can be used with impunity, that people can be killed in this way and that there are no consequences for it." Several problems here: This rush to judgment is happening before the UN has established beyond reasonable doubt who is...
Daniel Drezner writes that Meghan McCain's proposition that attention paid to Miley Cyrus can crowd out attention paid to Syria is bunk. With all due regard to Drezner, let me debunk the bunk claim---or, at least, show that the "Twerking Kills" hypothesis is plausible: This paper studies the influence of mass media on U. S. government response to approximately 5,000 natural disasters occurring between 1968 and 2002. These disasters took nearly 63,000 lives and affected 125 million people per year. We show that U. S. relief depends on whether the disaster occurs at the same time as other...