Photo courtesy whitehouse.govThis is just a quick followup to my post last week about the risks of escalation in the current Middle Eastern conflict.Israel is apparently ending its incursion into Gaza , but there is very little good news emerging from the region.US Secretary of State Condi Rice is on the case, but she is employing an odd diplomatic style to say the least. News agencies pessimistically report "no sign of a cease-fire."So, is the...

I had lunch yesterday with two of my colleagues at the Mershon Center, John Mueller and Markus Kornprobst. The conversation inevitably turned to the Middle East and the efficacy of US and Israeli policy. As the discussion progressed, I mentioned that when we got back I would be revising my chapter on the French Wars of Religion--a case of trans-national and trans-regional religious movements prompting decades of violent conflict. I said,...

In an attempt to lighten things up this morning I would like to try something new. Many readers are surely familiar with the practice of "Friday Cat Blogging". Well, I don't have a cat. However, I see no reason to limit this activity to felines. So in the interest of inclusiveness (and since I don't have the time or the strength for a substantive post at the moment) I present to you--Quint:My wife and I adopted him last year from a shelter near...

Courtesy of Marc Lynch over at Abu Aardvark (you should go there and read the whole post):Karen Hughes should quit immediately. Get somebody in as an acting public diplomacy director who is at least going to try.Not much more I can say, after Condoleeza Rice's "birth pangs of a new Middle East" comment. It makes me wonder: what in the hell is the Administration up to? Makes me wonder whether Digby is on to something by linking that kind of...

Pardon my absence from the blog roughly since the current Mideast hostilities began; besides the fact that my blogmates here at the Duck have been doing an admirable job quacking away and trying to provide a little insight into the situation, and the fact that I've just been busy with other work, I haven't felt like I had a lot to say about the situation that hadn't been said already.That changed this morning, when I read in the Washington Post...

Thomas Ricks, the accomplished military reporter for the Washington Post, has a front page article excerpted from his upcoming book, Fiasco, yet another richly detailed account of the failures of the US in Iraq.The article is certainly worth reading.Ricks asserts that the US was in trouble from the beginning:The very setup of the U.S. presence in Iraq undercut the mission.Echoing my earlier post, top administration officials were blinded by...

Two weeks ago, the NY Times reported that women are "leaving men in the dust" in colleges and universities nation-wide, with women now 58% of all undergraduates.(as a point of information, American University had a freshman class last year that was 64% female)Today, the Washington Post reports that women are also taking over TV news:The number of female anchors reached a record high last year, accounting for 57 percent of the positions in a...

Secretary Rice:“What I won't do is go to some place and try to get a cease-fire that I know isn't going to last.”“A cease-fire would be a false promise if it simply returns us to the status quo, allowing terrorists to launch attacks at the time and terms of their choosing, and to threaten innocent people, Arab and Israeli, throughout the region.”“That would be a guarantee of future violence.”I actually think Rice is right here. Thinking beyond...

I have been revisiting US policy in Iraq of late-- to the extent that you can revisit an ongoing issue. Mostly, this comes in the form of reading Cobra II, Squandered Victory, the Foreign Affairs articles and on-line debates, and of course the fine work posted here on the Duck. After all this, I'm not sure I have an opinion or even a learned analysis on the issue (even given my previous postings on the topic). Quite frankly, I'm not sure what...

They see us killing each other... over and over since time began. -- Akira Kurosawa's Ran.Malak Khaled interviews Lebanese refugees:Their grand daughter, Marwa, looks at us with sad eyes.“Why are you sad,” I ask her.“I want to go home.”“Why aren’t you home?”“Israel is bombing a lot.”“What do you feel when you hear the bombing,” I ask her.“I feel so afraid. The sound is very very very loud.”“And what do you do when you feel afraid?“I cry, and I...

Over recent days, however, we've seen a flurry of talk about the end of Pax Americana and the coming of multipolarity.It wasn't long ago that America was the "New Rome". In fact, only a few months ago did I finish Deepak Lal's In Praise of Empires, in which he argues that “the contemporary academic theory” that “Ph.D. practitioners have learned has by and large been devised for the anarchical European state system which developed with the fall...

But he's not going to abandon work altogether. And what kind of work will he do?BUSH WILL MIX work with vacation time at Crawford ranch. Aides explore August swing to battleground state such as Pennsylvania, where Republicans are defending three endangered House seats and Sen. Santorum. Also planned: one-year commemoration of Hurricane Katrina, viewed by Republican strategists as biggest second-term setback.The Duck really isn't supposed to be...