Excellent in-depth discussion of the Stryker Brigade in the New York Times. What's great about this piece is that the author goes into considerable depth to understand the structural context behind the so-called "Kill Team"'s campaign of recreational murder against civilians, and resist the seductive and typical "bad apple" story.That said, I think this piece over-determines the impact of simply being in a conflict zone and under-emphasizes the...
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Shabby Sheik: Gaddafi’s ‘fashion’ and cultural property
As much as the proposal to put Mummar Gaddafi’s outfits up for display at the Costume Institute of New York should be true in a fully just world, I would imagine that it isn’t.Alas, the West shall be deprived of “four decades of Colonel Gaddafi’s superior dress sense”. And we are weaker for it.However, this did get me thinking. Could Libya make a plausible case that Gaddafi’s outfits (which have been out-Gaga-ing Lady Gaga since well before she...
A puzzle in promotion: Petraeus at the CIA
This is a guest blog by Jarrod Hayes, who is is an assistant professor of International Relations at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research broadly focuses on the social construction of foreign and security policy.The New York Times is reporting that President Obama plans on moving Leon Panetta to the position of Secretary of Defense and David Petraeus to the position of CIA director. While the Panetta move is interesting in its own...
My challenge to the Drezner challenge: who would bother with us?
Stephanie has seconded below Drezner's challenge to name three books most useful for a President-in-waiting. Please obey her.These should not be academic in nature because, Dan implies, politicians are not up to it intellectually. It is true. Politicians are not a smart lot. Often when I hear a "strategic logic of..." talk, I use the same tried-and-true joke: have you ever met a Congressman? It always gets a laugh because it 1) is probably...
Presidential Reading List: (After you probably get through the ones with ‘Bacevich’ on the cover)
Dan Drezner has issued a call to arms!... or to your library card:"I therefore call upon the readers of this blog to proffer up their suggestions -- if you had to pick three books for an ambitious U.S. politician to read in order to bone up on foreign affairs, what would they be?"I have a gut feeling that all of the answers are going to be grand strategy, grand strategy and some war on terror/Afghanistan. (Although, maybe I’m not being generous...
Fool Me Once, Fool Me Twice
I would like to be as snarky as Brian, but paying attention to Afghanistan is pretty darned depressing. In the aftermath of the second (yes, second) prison break at the Saraposa prison, what hope is there for the counter-insurgency effort? I posted initially on my blog about what the breakdown at the prison says about the effort: the feeble Afghan government, the limited ability of the international community to make progress, and the...
Terrorism: A Problem for Realists
Whatever version of political realism you are dealing with, the sovereign state is still central to its universe. Which is one reason realists are uncomfortable with any world view that accords 'non-state actors' a pivotal or even significant role.I'm a huge fan of the work of political realists such as John Mearsheimer, Robert Pape or Christopher Layne, especially of their warnings against our own self-defeating behaviour. But there is a...
Quick Gitmo Post
Regarding the revelations in the latest diplo-document-dump, there are some good questions to be asked. Charli is wondering who actually did the leaking and Ben Wittes is concerned about the effect that this will have on not only the government, but the detainees themselves:Should it most upset the government, for whom the story represents yet another devastating failure to keep important secrets? Or should it most upset detainee counsel, for...
Early Questions About the Guantanamo Leak
... which hit the stands this evening via NYT, WAPO, the Telegraph and numerous other media outlets; courtesy of Wikileaks, many say.Interestingly, NYT reports Wikileaks was not responsible for this release, claiming the documents were originally leaked to Wikileaks but were released to the media by "another party":These articles are based on a huge trove of secret documents leaked last year to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks and made...
Stuff Political Scientists Like #3, the European edition: Post-Something-or-other
I have the suspicion that my fan base might be the choir, and I want to be sure I play it down the middle. I am sure that Duck readers are the kind of folks who can laugh at themselves.European political scientists like post-positivism, also known as post-structuralism or post-modernism. Or at least non-European political scientists think those things are all the same. No one really knows. No North American political scientist has ever met a...
Will the IRA blow up Will and Kate?
Unidentified ‘British security officials’ are telling journalists there is a possibility that sections of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) could attack next Friday’s royal wedding in London. At an event I attended this week, Patrick Mercer OBE, Conservative MP for Newark and member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Transatlantic and International Security, warned that the three security threats facing Britain are Al-Qaeda inspired...
Does the Arab Spring show how strategic narratives work?
Nobody has come close to explaining how strategic narratives work in international relations, despite the term being banded about. Monroe Price wrote a great article in the Huffington Post yesterday that moves the debate forward. As I have already written, strategic narratives are state-led projections of a sequence of events and identities, a tool through which political leaders try to give meaning to past, present and future in a way that...