To be clear, the latest news is "intra-civilian" but is likely to cross over given the stakes. Remember the old days where the "smart" Bolsheviks left the personnel and other boring issues to Stalin? Yeah, so Stalin staffed the new Soviet government with his guys,...
The effort to develop a single 5th generation fighter plane has been a challenge for the US and its allies. The F-35 is very expensive and may underperform. The quality of debate about this plane...
With the assumption of an ongoing global cyber arms race, Western governments signed an agreement to limit the sharing and selling of dangerous cyber technologies. David Livingstone notes, “[Cyber...
In 1987, I was a high school sophomore and somehow, no doubt through rock music, became aware of the anti-apartheid struggle. As it was for President Obama, the movement to end apartheid was my...
A few days ago, Charli pondered "whether or not the Internet and social media empowers civil society or instead simply offers states new tools of repression and governance." And she provided a link to an excellent video about Iranian bloggers. I haven't been able to get the question or the video out of my head. This is not my topic/area of research, but I will offer a few tentative thoughts to see if it will spark some discussion...What color is your burqa?If we were to visualize the Internet, would we not see a vast social space populated by individuals (men and women) wearing burqas,...
Just a shout-out to NPR Planet Money for sharing the rock 'n roll reference in the Dodd financial reform proposal, or at least, Dodd's summary of it. A "no escape" clause for companies seeking to evade supervision is called the Hotel California Provison. Yup, it's right there in the text. We assume it's referring to the line about how "you can check out any time you want...but you can never leave." (although "we are all just prisoners here...of our own device" could also work).Glad to know the people fighting the good fight for financial regulatory reform are totally cool folks. Now, whether...
[I don't mean to rail on the Washington Post's coverage of the war in Afghanistan two posts in a row, but the coverage is honestly a bit dismal this week. In my last post, I showed why Rajiv Chandrasekaran's article "At Afghan outpost, Marines gone rogue or leading the fight against counterinsurgency?" completely misunderstood the strategic importance of the town of Delaram from which the report was written.]An Op-ed article in yesterday's WaPo by Michael O'Hanlon and Hassina Sherjan, "Five Myths About the War in Afghanistan" poorly argues the case for "toughing it out" in Afghanistan. Since...
Are we doing better or worse than in the Great Depression? Are we coming out of it, or still sinking... or, is there worse to come? Should I be frightened?? Recent reports of millions more foreclosures made me wonder what direction we are going in. A couple of things I've been reading recently:Over at Vox, Eichengreen and O'Rourke answer the question on a lot of minds: is this crisis as bad as the Crash and Great Depression of the 1930s? They provide nice graphs of output, trade, and stock markets for both periods. Two things stand out to me: the collapse in trade and stock markets in the...
Rajiv Chandrasekaran's article in today's Washington Post, "At Afghan outpost, Marines gone rogue or leading the fight against counterinsurgency?" paints a picture of Marines grudgingly guarding a town in no man's land on the edge of the desert:"DELARAM, AFGHANISTAN -- Home to a dozen truck stops and a few hundred family farms bounded by miles of foreboding desert, this hamlet in southwestern Afghanistan is far from a strategic priority for senior officers at the international military headquarters in Kabul. One calls Delaram, a day's drive from the nearest city, "the end of the Earth."...
Now that the fighting is over in the town of Marjah, how did the Afghan media perceive Operation Moshtarak? Here is a cursory round up of opinions from some of the newspapers in Afghanistan.(Unfortunately, I am dependent on reading translations of the local newspapers from thousands of miles away, but I still think it is fruitful to try to see events through the eyes of local elites rather than relying on military propaganda.)1. Weesa (government owned newspaper published in Pashto from Kabul) ran an interesting editorial on 7 March 2010 titled, "People Want an End to Terror." The "terror"...
I’m finding it difficult to usefully add to the debate over the “Guantanamo Lawyers”/"al-Qaida Seven" that has emerged over the last week or so. Basically, the fundamental issue is that people “we” dislike or who have (allegedly) done horrible things are actually entitled to certain fundamental rights under both American and international law – including international law signed and ratified by the US Senate. That this law applies to terrorists has been the subject of several now high profile Supreme Court decisions (notably Hamdan).So the legal issues here, the right to a fair trial (or, in...
At the "Theory Talks" Blog, there is an excellent interview with Michael J. Shapiro on "Pictures, Paintings, Power and the Political Philosophy of International Relations." Shapiro argues for the need to awaken the discipline from its pre-Kantian slumber and to move beyond the "anemic, empiricist philosophy of social science which treats mere appearances" as well as the "security-minded and war strategy focused" versions of international relations. Instead of working within the established techniques of the discipline, Shapiro embraces alternative genres (e.g. film, architecture, poetry,...