Robert Farley doesn't think much of Wretchard's (of the Belmont Club) take on the Battle of Guadalcanal. Here's what Rob has to say:So much is wrong with this; Wolcott does an effective job of demolishing the hyper-masculinity of Wretchard's argument. Let's be frank, if Al Qaeda were given the...

A number of weblogs have linked to Elliot Cohen's Sunday Op-Ed in the Washington Post, "A Hawk Questions Himself." Cohen defends the basic rationale for the war, but slams the administration for its poor implementation of the Iraq occupation. Key quotation:But a pundit should not recommend a...

Over the past decade, I've written a couple of book chapters about the use of the internet by transnational political activists. Environment, human rights, and peace organizations, for example, utilize the internet to communicate instantly with thousands of like-minded people around the world....

As I've discussed before, the current incarnation of "al-Qaeda" appears - at least based upon public documents - to be more of a diverse movement than a single organization. Indeed, "al-Qaeda" is, in some respects, linked together by the claims of particular groups to represent "al-Qaeda" and by...

Writing in Slate, William Saletan argues that Al-Queda's strategy is to "destroy democracy from within."Bin Laden's whole game plan is to turn the people of the democratic world against their governments. He thinks democracies are weak because their people, who are more easily frightened than...

Can someone give me a good reason why Michael Totten's latest essay is any better than his first published piece? Because, for the life of me, I can't understand what the point of the thing is.Totten argues that Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon is a good precedent for a future US withdrawal from...

Like Rodger, I've been reluctant to write anything substantive about the London bombings until we have better information about precisely what happened, and who was involved. Nevertheless, I think some conditional comments are probably in order.For those of you who haven't seen it, John Ikenberry...

The academic wing of the blogsphere has seen a fair amount of angst, anger, and hand-wringing over the article in the Chronicle for Higher Education, "Bloggers Need not Apply". The anonymous rant, written under the pseudonym "Ivan Tribble" (ah, the irony!), is chock full of stupidiousness...

Prisons are schools of crime. Put a lot of socially deviant people together and they teach each other new tricks. Social scientists studying prisons have been making this argument for decades. I state this from memory: the high school debate topic in 1976-77 (the year I began debating) was on...

While we're all digesting the barbaric bombings in London, and waiting for more information on which to base analysis, I thought I'd share one of the stranger spam emails I've received lately.dhn2，您好！ Honorable American friends,How do you do?I am a Chinese students of Moslem people university .I...

Patrick Jackson and Peter Mandaville co-authored a terrific chapter for Iver Neumann's and my edited book on "Harry Potter and International Relations."Okay, you can stop laughing at us now. We all had fun writing the volume and it does, actually, have some academic merit.Anyway, the point I was...

I've already made myself look stupid once today, so I figure: why not have another go?When I was a PhD student at Columbia, I taught in the Contemporary Civilization program. Teaching in CC was, without a doubt, the best experience of my educational career. Not only was it just generally a good...