by Rodger Payne | 20 Dec 2006 |
At an October 25 news conference, not long before the midterm elections, President Bush was asked a fairly simple question about Iraq: "Do you think we're winning, and why?"The reporter asking the question pointed out that the Iraq war had lasted nearly as long as World War II, at least for the US, and that October had been the deadliest month of the war in quite some time.The President offered a fairly long answer that was not directly on...
by Dan Nexon | 19 Dec 2006 |
Nirmala George of the Associated Press writes: Lawmakers and women's rights activists raised an alarm Monday over new evidence indicating about 7,000 fewer girls than expected are born each day in India, where women routinely suffer discrimination and parents often abort female fetuses.The spread of ultrasound technology allowing parents to find out the gender of their unborn children has resulted in the large-scale "disappearance" of girls...
by Peter | 19 Dec 2006 |
David Brooks, in his Sunday NYT column (requires Times Select to read), gives out awards for great magazine articles of the year. He recognizes two outstanding articles on how the Pentagon is fighting in Iraq and terrorism. In his article, Brooks makes a fundamental and vital insight that needs to become part of the emerging Grand Strategy Debate.*Brooks writes:There was also a sense that we were losing ground in Iraq. One of the best magazine...
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 18 Dec 2006 |
With your indulgence I would like to spend a few minutes engaging in a favorite academic pastime. [No, not "blogging when I have grading to do," although I am also doing that.] The pastime in question is "nit-picking," in which one academic takes an argument by another academic -- an argument the broad outlines of which one basically agrees with -- and focuses on some relatively minor point of differentiation. Hopefully, the point is not...
by Rodger Payne | 15 Dec 2006 |
Over the past few months, more and more analysts have noticed that Afghanistan is looking more and more like Iraq. That's not good. Talk has turned from how best to build a nation to how to counter insurgency and stop suicide bombings.Earlier this week, Afghan leader Hamid Karzai reacted in this way to a suicide bombing in a governor's compound: "The problem is not Taliban. We don't see it that way. The problem is with Pakistan," Karzai told...
by Peter | 12 Dec 2006 |
Kofi Annan gave his "farewell speech" yesterday, choosing a very interesting and symbolic location for the address--the Truman Library in Missouri. As a good farewell speech should, it crystallizes the wisdom of a career of international civil service and provides a call to action to those who will carry on in his stead. What I found most interesting, though, was the location and theme of the speech and how it took a very nuanced approach to...
by Rodger Payne | 10 Dec 2006 |
If you had Milton Friedman in the dead pool, then his passing last month may have put you in position to win this macabre game.But Friedman and Augusto Pinochet? That shows some foresight.Did anyone have Friedman, Pinochet and Jeane Kirkpatrick?For those interested, I wrote a bit Saturday about Kirkpatrick on my blog.Dead pool-related questions: In the future, will anyone remember that Salvador Allende was killed on September 11? Does ESPN...
by Dan Nexon | 8 Dec 2006 |
I gave My final lecture for "Introduction to International Politics" today. It focused on the cultural dimension of globalization. After my daughter insisted I bring her Hello Kitty doll to work with me, I decided to use Hello Kitty as a thematic anchor for my discussion of various ways of thinking about identity, culture, and contemporary global processes.It turns out that this makes even more sense than I realized at the time. My wife pointed...
by Rodger Payne | 7 Dec 2006 |
This was the fortune cookie message from lunch yesterday: "For a good cause, wrongdoing may be virtuous."I told my assistant that it sounded like a license to steal...but many other dark ideas came to mind.In any case, since this is an IR blog, I might note that numerous scholars and diplomats would likely agree with the advice offered by that fortune cookie.Here's one.Given that I have a very large stack of papers to grade, I will put this one...
by Dan Nexon | 7 Dec 2006 |
Yes, my headline is unfair. But the phrase "national reconciliation" appears 45 times in the ISG report. It even gets its own subsection (pp. 64-69).I'm far from the only blogger to note a certain fantasy-island quality to the ISG report: it calls for lots of different actors--the Iraqi Government, Iran, and Syria--to adopt policies that they either can't or most likely won't implement. In particular, it seems to assume that the Iraqi...
by Dan Nexon | 6 Dec 2006 |
Earlier I wrote that:We're still waiting on the actual document, but if we believe preliminary reports then we shouldn't hold our collective breath.The report is now available (PDF) for experts, reporters, and bloggers to parse. Whatever else, I expect that the fact that we'll be talking about it for a while demonstrates the agenda-setting power of the ISG.I'm reading the report right now and I don't see a great many surprises. But there are...
by Dan Nexon | 6 Dec 2006 |
I'd like to call a moratorium on the genre of "Islam needs a Reformation" arguments.Contra Andrew Sullivan, the Protestant Reformation did not lead Christians to realize that "their best interests" lay "in forgoing the bromides of fundamentalist certainties for the messy, secular, banal success of liberal democracy." It left Europe filled with autocratic rulers, many of whom got to enjoy the additional benefits of controlling established...