by Rodger Payne | 28 Nov 2008 |
Last night, at a couple of gatherings with family and friends, some people were speculating that Afghanistan could become Barack Obama's Vietnam -- or Iraq. A blogger at the socialist Monthly Review made this precise charge last summer. Should we reasonably fear this possibility?First, events since election day seem to assure that Obama's campaign promise about Iraq withdrawal will be fulfilled.Since I posted about "Obama's exit strategy?" just...
by Charli Carpenter | 28 Nov 2008 |
If you're like me (or Dan) and you live in the U.S., you spent much of yesterday's holiday feeling lucky to be living in America and not in Goma (or Mumbai. Or Darfur.) Well, in the spirit of Dan's suggestion in his last post, note this appeal from Avaaz.org.The brutal war in Congo is escalating, as a terrified Congolese people plead for Europe to send peacekeepers to protect them. European leaders are wavering as their council meeting...
by Dan Nexon | 27 Nov 2008 |
Rob Farley Scott Lemieux (sorry, Scott):Somehow, this doesn't seem like the right time for a chipper Thanksgiving greeting...The terror attack on Mumbai certainly sucks the cheer out of Thanksgiving.In fact, almost every Thanksgiving something terrible is happening somewhere in the world, whether headline grabbing or not. For over ten years, to take but two examples, it has been a pretty good bet that unspeakably awful (and probably...
by Peter | 27 Nov 2008 |
Its Thanksgiving, one of my favorite holidays. I'm in Ohio, visiting family in Cleveland and Canton. Driving out here Tuesday night was quite the adventure, there's nothing like a minor snow storm on the Pennsylvania turn pike. When we finally did arrive at 1:30am, the driveway was slick and my car couldn't make it up! There's nothing like shoveling a driveway at 1:30am. There's snow on the ground here--something that is a fact of life in...
by Charli Carpenter | 27 Nov 2008 |
Daniel Sekulitch provides an update on the pirate "mothership" sunk by India last week in a much-trumpeted police action on the high seas:"It has now been confirmed by the IMB's Piracy Reporting Centre that the vessel sunk last week by an Indian warship was not a pirate mothership but, rather, a fishing boat that had been hijacked by pirates. The Thai-owned fishing boat, Ekawat Nava 5, had been commandeered early on November 18 and the crew had...
by Dan Nexon | 26 Nov 2008 |
The New York Times reports:A parliamentary hearing on the origins of the war between Georgia and Russia in August ended in a furor on Tuesday after a former Georgian diplomat testified that Georgian authorities were responsible for starting the conflict.Erosi Kitsmarishvili, Tbilisi’s former ambassador to Moscow, testified for three hours before he was shouted down by members of Parliament.A former confidant of President Mikheil Saakashvili,...
by Charli Carpenter | 22 Nov 2008 |
Picked up my copy of International Studies Perspectives yesterday to discover Abigail Ruane and Patrick James' article "The International Relations of Middle Earth: Learning from The Lord of the Rings" leading the "Pedagogy and the Discipline" Section. Just another example of why ISP is my favorite IR journal. I read the article with gusto. The piece "overviews how J.R.R. Tolkien's acclaimed triology is relevant to learing about IR and then...
by Peter | 22 Nov 2008 |
The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10cThe Buccaneer Stops HereBarack Obama InterviewJohn McCain InterviewSarah Palin VideoFunny Election VideoWhy is it so hard to deal with the Pirate problem? The Daily Show is onto something here....
by Charli Carpenter | 20 Nov 2008 |
This post began as a response to the comments on Peter's recent post on pirates, but they got to be so long, and required hyperlinks, I decided to start a new thread. In his comment to that post, T. Greer asks what the pirates who hijacked the oiltanker Sirius Star were thinking, since they can't deal with the logistics involved in selling the cargo and were certainly likely to provoke the great powers (further) by targeting such a prize....
by Rodger Payne | 18 Nov 2008 |
Today, Jesse Singal has an excellent post challenging the role of conventional wisdom in making national security policy. All-too-often, he suggests, the terms of political debate and the potential policy options are locked in by a national security elite that infrequently finds its ideas contested, however dubious they might be.For example, what are we to make of the forthcoming increased attention devoted to Afghanistan and Pakistan -- even...
by Dan Nexon | 18 Nov 2008 |
The Chinese Communist Party has sunk all of its legitimacy, understandably, into the continued growth of the Chinese economy and a steady increase in their citizens' standard of living. One of the "nightmare" scenarios for China watchers is that, faced with an inability to generate enough jobs to satisfy domestic needs, the party turns to aggressive nationalism as an alternative means of staying in power. But with thawing relations between...
by Peter | 18 Nov 2008 |
Just when you thought that the Pirates couldn't get any more ambitious than seizing a freighter full of Ukrainian weapons...Somali Pirates seized a Saudi supertanker Tuesday. The tanker, one of the largest ships on the ocean, is the size of a US Aircraft carrier and three times a heavy when full. It has a crew of 25 (by comparison, an air craft carrier has a crew of over 5000). It carries over a quarter of Saudi Arabia's daily crude output.It...