The McCain opposition-research file circulating on the internet (if genuine) is just devastating in its picture of a man without any convictions whatsoever. It makes one thing crystal clear: Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee, and quite possibly our next President, because he faced a GOP field made up of incompetent, unserious, and underfunded rivals. A serious contender would have eviscerated him.Many of the positions that should have...
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Colin Kahl responds to Matt Kroenig
Foreign Affairs has gone live with Colin Kahl's explanation of why we shouldn't commence bombing in five minutes. A sample:In arguing for a six-month horizon, Kroenig also misleadingly conflates hypothetical timelines to produce weapons-grade uranium with the time actually required to construct a bomb. According to 2010 Senate testimony by James Cartwright, then vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and recent statements by the...
Strategic narratives: An uncertain science
Timing is everything; I'm not sure its good to be publishing a paper about strategic narratives just as the US cuts its Advisory Commission on Public Dipomacy, although RAND have begun exploring this field. National-level policymakers still try to tell stories about where their state and the international system are heading and should head. To the extent these narratives create expectations, shore up identities, create buy-in from partners, or...
Learning from Histories of the AIDS Crisis
What can we learn from histories of the AIDS crisis? Jacques Pépin's The Origins of AIDS and Nathan Geffen's Debunking Delusions: The Inside Story of the Treatment Action Campaign are two important contributions to our understanding of a disease that has now claimed nearly thirty million lives.In different ways, both books raise interesting questions about what we can learn from history about causal mechanisms and wider sets of issues. In this...
Visas and scholarship
Sarah Duff (who has contributed to this blog before) had a very interesting piece in the UK Guardian this week on the hurdles scholars in developing countries have to face in order to engage with scholars in the developed world. Rather than focusing on whether or not the visa system is fair, she describes exactly what she must do in order to present a paper in “the West” how this impacts on the development of her research:I describe the...
“I am not a Chicken!”: Social Mobilization at Its Best
I can't resist sharing this wonderful news clip from Malawi. I challenge Duck readers to have fun with this: What might the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street movements learn from Malawi?Malawi protests scheduled for January 15, Chilembwe Day12 January 2012tags: chilembwe day, malawi, protestby dadakimThe following call to protest in Malawi on January 15 (Chilembwe Day) was sent as an email, and has been reported on by opposition online news...
Information wants to be free. Congress wants it to be held for ransom.
It's bad form to criticize otherdisciplines' journals based solelyon titles, but Annals of Tourism Research? This is the sort of thing libraries spend their budgets on?Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) is trying to end taxpayer access to publicly-funded research. The article is worth reading, not least because it is the only time that you'll ever see the term "powerful publishing cartels" in this age of disruptive new-media innovation.And...
Politics, Intelligence, and Academic Analysis
Writing in Foreign Policy, Paul Pillar makes the case that most so-called "intelligence failures" stem from bad leadership rather than problems with the US intelligence community. He touches upon a number of cases, but Iraq looms large:Had Bush read the intelligence community's report, he would have seen his administration's case for invasion stood on its head. The intelligence officials concluded that Saddam was unlikely to use any weapons of...
Blondie
If you are running for the nomination of the Republican Party for President, there are a fewindispensables – you have to hate welfare recipients, oppose gay marriage, and have fired a gun at an animal at some point. (But apparently you no longer have to support a robust military presence overseas. Or have fired a gun against another person in a foreign war. That has not been a requirement since Eisenhower.) But it seems there is another sine...
Pentagon as Economic Dynamo: Not
The Pentagon is remarkable for its ability to contrive reasons to justify its bloated budgets. In recent years, it and the gaggle of contractors, analysts, and journalists that support it have found military-security risks in everything from “hot zone" diseases to global warming. But with looming budget cuts, the defense establishment is being forced to downsize, albeit modestly. To protect itself, it has now taken to fear-mongering. Some of...
The DC Government’s Priorities
Last year I mentioned an editorial in the Washington Post decrying the District's decision--prodded by a small number of wealthy Georgetown residents--to force the University to meet unrealistic targets. A refresher:A recommendation by the city’s office of planning would require the university to provide housing for 100 percent of its undergraduate students by 2016; failure to do so would force cuts in enrollment starting in 2015. Georgetown...
Grand Strategy or Glossing Over Budget Cuts: Q&A
The twitter-verse, or at least, one of the corners I follow, had heaps of tweets dedicated to the rollout of the US defense review, with Obama playing a starring role. Apparently, Obama briefing at the Pentagon is a new thing. Anyhow, it raised all kinds of questions, so I thought I would answer them all here. Yes, all of them. Ok, some of them.Q: Is the review really a review of what the US wants to do, or is it a gloss over the...