Tom, an often-funny blogger at at Functional Ambivalent, today criticizes "liberals" among Kevin Drum's commenters for failing to respond to a direct question Kevin asked concerning the US attack in Pakistan last week. Here's the question from the popular blog: For the sake of argument, let's assume that we had pretty good intelligence telling us that a bunch of al-Qaeda leaders were in the house we bombed. And let's also assume that we did indeed kill al-Masri and several other major al-Qaeda leaders. Finally, let's assume that the 18 civilians killed in the attack were genuinely innocent...

Many critics of the Bush administration -- including those on the left -- have often over the past three years complained that the U.S. was focusing on the wrong state in the war on terrorism. Iran sponsors terrorists (especially Hamas) and pursues WMD. The evidence is arguably much, much clearer than it was with Iraq. Setting aside the question of sanctions for a moment, which are quite problematic given the west's great need for imported oil, just what would critics have the US and its coalition partners do about the problem of Iran?Personally, I'm trying to figure out why a nuclear-armed...

Over at my blog, I've written a lengthy post on "'Pro-war' Democrats and the 2006 Elections." Since it is about the likely role of Iraq in the congressional midterm elections, it is probably suitable for the Duck. However, I'm resolved in 2006 to generate unique content for each space and to avoid excessive duplication by cross-posting.Click the post title, read, and comment.I'll have something for this space soon.Put "after the fold" in hereFiled as: Iraq and the 2006 elections

Rob over at LGM has a great post in which he cogently makes the case for why the Iraq War is now screwing up our ability to effectively deal with Tehran. Besides removing an obvious security concern from Iran's western front and providing Iran with 110,000 "hostages" in the form of US troops right next store (not to mention the ability to threaten to or actually destablize Iraq domestically), Rob touches on one issue that I find particularly interesting and have mentioned before: the effect of the Iraq War on the US ability to credibly threaten adversaries.Information is critical to any...

[Updated at 2:09pm]One of the biggest stories of late is the escalating nuclear standoff between Iran and the West. There is great speculation that many of the most important parties (e.g. Russia and the EU3) are now ready to refer the matter to the UN Security Council (UNSC). Other parties, such as China, may not be ready to sign on to sanctions but are becoming increasingly aware that this problem is not going away. The five permanent members of the UNSC are meeting today to try and hammer out a consesus on the issue. What are the odds that Iran will be reported to the UNSC and have...

A great many right-wing blogs advance a strange interpretation of the latest developments in Iran's apparent quest for nuclear weapons: the current failures of European-Iranian negotiations provide more evidence that Europeans are soft, ineffectual, and otherwise feminized.What are the problems with the argument?1. It ignores the obvious comparison between Iran and North Korea. The Europeans haven't convinced Iran to drop its nuclear program, but the United States, for its part, hasn't exactly had much success with the North Koreans either.2. The failure of the talks is also a failure of US...

After I posted "Isn't this what friends are for?" Wednesday, I received an email from Kevin Anderson of the BBC News radio program, "World Have Your Say." Kevin wanted me to partake in a discussion about Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster's critique of the US army in Iraq -- live Thursday (about 1:30 pm ET, early evening in the UK). Unfortunately, he wrote only a few hours before the broadcast and I read it only half an hour or so in advance.I emailed him (he quickly replied) and asked if he wanted to talk to me about the war. I've done many radio interviews and thought this was more of the same....

A few preliminary thoughts on Rodger's discussion of the "communicative turn" in international-relations theory.The "communicative" and "linguistic" turns both occupy a great deal of attention in contemporary constructivist scholarship. One question that immediately arises is whether these are different words for the same underlying sets of arguments. The answer? It depends.Advocates of the communicative turn share a belief that "words matter" in international politics: that "rhetoric, argument, and debate" profoundly shape international-political processes. Proponents of the linguistic turn...