Photo courtesy whitehouse.govThis is just a quick followup to my post last week about the risks of escalation in the current Middle Eastern conflict.Israel is apparently ending its incursion into Gaza , but there is very little good news emerging from the region.US Secretary of State Condi Rice is...

I had lunch yesterday with two of my colleagues at the Mershon Center, John Mueller and Markus Kornprobst. The conversation inevitably turned to the Middle East and the efficacy of US and Israeli policy. As the discussion progressed, I mentioned that when we got back I would be revising my chapter...

In an attempt to lighten things up this morning I would like to try something new. Many readers are surely familiar with the practice of "Friday Cat Blogging". Well, I don't have a cat. However, I see no reason to limit this activity to felines. So in the interest of inclusiveness (and since I...

Courtesy of Marc Lynch over at Abu Aardvark (you should go there and read the whole post):Karen Hughes should quit immediately. Get somebody in as an acting public diplomacy director who is at least going to try.Not much more I can say, after Condoleeza Rice's "birth pangs of a new Middle East"...

Pardon my absence from the blog roughly since the current Mideast hostilities began; besides the fact that my blogmates here at the Duck have been doing an admirable job quacking away and trying to provide a little insight into the situation, and the fact that I've just been busy with other work,...

Thomas Ricks, the accomplished military reporter for the Washington Post, has a front page article excerpted from his upcoming book, Fiasco, yet another richly detailed account of the failures of the US in Iraq.The article is certainly worth reading.Ricks asserts that the US was in trouble from...

Two weeks ago, the NY Times reported that women are "leaving men in the dust" in colleges and universities nation-wide, with women now 58% of all undergraduates.(as a point of information, American University had a freshman class last year that was 64% female)Today, the Washington Post reports...

Secretary Rice:“What I won't do is go to some place and try to get a cease-fire that I know isn't going to last.”“A cease-fire would be a false promise if it simply returns us to the status quo, allowing terrorists to launch attacks at the time and terms of their choosing, and to threaten innocent...

I have been revisiting US policy in Iraq of late-- to the extent that you can revisit an ongoing issue. Mostly, this comes in the form of reading Cobra II, Squandered Victory, the Foreign Affairs articles and on-line debates, and of course the fine work posted here on the Duck. After all this, I'm...

They see us killing each other... over and over since time began. -- Akira Kurosawa's Ran.Malak Khaled interviews Lebanese refugees:Their grand daughter, Marwa, looks at us with sad eyes.“Why are you sad,” I ask her.“I want to go home.”“Why aren’t you home?”“Israel is bombing a lot.”“What do you...

Over recent days, however, we've seen a flurry of talk about the end of Pax Americana and the coming of multipolarity.It wasn't long ago that America was the "New Rome". In fact, only a few months ago did I finish Deepak Lal's In Praise of Empires, in which he argues that “the contemporary...

But he's not going to abandon work altogether. And what kind of work will he do?BUSH WILL MIX work with vacation time at Crawford ranch. Aides explore August swing to battleground state such as Pennsylvania, where Republicans are defending three endangered House seats and Sen. Santorum. Also...