[UPDATED]Laura Rozen points to a Ha'aretz story that Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni indicates a willingness to accept a UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon:peaking after a meeting with a United Nations delegation headed by special envoy Vijay Nambiar, Livni said that while Israel would prefer...

In grad school, Herman Kahn was my second favorite strategic theorist (after Thomas Schelling). I still have an original edition of On Thermonuclear War with the dust jacket -- restrain your envy, my copy was marked up as I read it. In any case, Kahn is known for a number of interesting ideas,...

It has been a bloody week in Iraq. Today saw a particularly vicious attack in the action-reaction cycle that marks Iraq's increasingly dangerous communal violence.Masked attackers with heavy machine guns mounted on pickup trucks slaughtered at least 40 people in a crowded market area south of...

Foreign Affairs continues its roundtable on US policy towards Iraq. Today I take aim at Christopher Hitchens' contribution.Hitchens open his response by excoriating his fellow panelists for the "absence of historical dimensions" or "by its appearance only in the form of false analogy" in their...

Like all other frustrated scholars out there, I wanted to publish an Op-Ed, thinking I have something interesting to say about what's going on between Israel and Lebanon. I thought that I might have something to contribute-- my dissertation had a looooong chapter on the Israel - Lebanon Monitoring...

Wretched argues the following:If Sheehan is right [that we will date WW3 to the bombing of the USS Cole] , then the Global War on Terror would have failed. A focused attack on extremism will have been supplanted by an uncontrolled clash between peoples, religions and cultures. But we are not there...

What Greg said. The pearls of wisdom just keep on coming this morning.Lack of intellect+misplaced faith in easy to understand analogies=advocacy of diasterous foreign policy.Filed as: Appeasement

Why do people pay this man for his commentary?Dan’s favorite commentator is back again, this time with an op/ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Hanson essentially lays out what he sees as the talking points the Bush administration should be using in an effort to deflate criticism of the handling of...

[UPDATED]I've been critical of the strategic wisdom of the IDF attacks in Lebanon, but some new developments suggest that it might work after all. Haagi at American Footprints:The Lebanese government appears to be throwing in its lot against Hezbollah, appealing for international help to change...

Courtesy of Coming Anarchy's Curzon. Someday we'll get around to implementing a nice design for the Duck.

My daughter's sick and I'm pretty tired - from writing and reading - so here's what's catching my eye...In the "Crisis in the Middle East" department, things seem to be getting worse with the death of eight Israeli civilians in Haifa. The IDF is also resuming strikes in Gaza. Mubarak claims he...

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Hizbollah's chief pledged open war on Israel on Friday after it bombed his home, saying "look at it burn" when an Israeli warship that had earlier rocketed Lebanon was attacked and set ablaze."You wanted open war. We are going to (wage) open war," Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in...