Forgot to pass this along earlier. More good news.The Turkish army may move into northern Iraq if violence by Turkish-Kurdish guerrillas continues, officials said yesterday.Such a move could put Turkey on a collision course with the United States, which has repeatedly warned against unilateral action in Iraq.Actually, it isn't as grim as it seems.But the Turkish government is facing increasing domestic pressure to act after 15 soldiers, police...

The subject is strategic bombing, the backdrop the unfolding crisis in the Middle East.I am reminded that the spirit of Athens lives on. Melians of the world, beware.To be fair, not everyone there advocates "the strong do what they will and the weak do what they must." Some merely believe that if you fight on the side of providence, any action becomes legitimate. Nevertheless, as articulate a set of comments as I've ever seen.Filed as: just in...

It appears George Will has joined the dark side with his WaPo column this morning. Welcome to the world of sane policy analysis George.Filed as: George Will

[UPDATED]Laura Rozen points to a Ha'aretz story that Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni indicates a willingness to accept a UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon:peaking after a meeting with a United Nations delegation headed by special envoy Vijay Nambiar, Livni said that while Israel would prefer the deployment of the Lebanese army in the south of the country, "we will consider other solutions put forward." "If there is a need to strengthen the...

In grad school, Herman Kahn was my second favorite strategic theorist (after Thomas Schelling). I still have an original edition of On Thermonuclear War with the dust jacket -- restrain your envy, my copy was marked up as I read it. In any case, Kahn is known for a number of interesting ideas, including the so-called "ladder of escalation." Essentially, Kahn's term explains gradations of conflict, from "ostensible crisis" up 40+ rungs to...

It has been a bloody week in Iraq. Today saw a particularly vicious attack in the action-reaction cycle that marks Iraq's increasingly dangerous communal violence.Masked attackers with heavy machine guns mounted on pickup trucks slaughtered at least 40 people in a crowded market area south of Baghdad on Monday, hurling grenades to blow up merchants at their counters and shooting down mothers as they fled with their children, witnesses and...

Foreign Affairs continues its roundtable on US policy towards Iraq. Today I take aim at Christopher Hitchens' contribution.Hitchens open his response by excoriating his fellow panelists for the "absence of historical dimensions" or "by its appearance only in the form of false analogy" in their contributions. What does he mean by this rather clumsy phrase?There is nothing remotely comparable here with the experience of the French in Algeria and...

Like all other frustrated scholars out there, I wanted to publish an Op-Ed, thinking I have something interesting to say about what's going on between Israel and Lebanon. I thought that I might have something to contribute-- my dissertation had a looooong chapter on the Israel - Lebanon Monitoring Group, a small organizaton set up after Israel's 1996 Operation Grapes of Wrath in Lebanon. There's not a lot written about the ILMG, so I figured I...

Wretched argues the following:If Sheehan is right [that we will date WW3 to the bombing of the USS Cole] , then the Global War on Terror would have failed. A focused attack on extremism will have been supplanted by an uncontrolled clash between peoples, religions and cultures. But we are not there yet. There's still a chance, and the rulers of the Middle East are hoping that this thing can be pulled back from the brink and the fires focused on...

What Greg said. The pearls of wisdom just keep on coming this morning.Lack of intellect+misplaced faith in easy to understand analogies=advocacy of diasterous foreign policy.Filed as: Appeasement

Why do people pay this man for his commentary?Dan’s favorite commentator is back again, this time with an op/ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Hanson essentially lays out what he sees as the talking points the Bush administration should be using in an effort to deflate criticism of the handling of the War on Terror. What follows is a long, snarky discussion of Hanson's latest drivel.VDH’s first problem lies with questions regarding how to deal...

[UPDATED]I've been critical of the strategic wisdom of the IDF attacks in Lebanon, but some new developments suggest that it might work after all. Haagi at American Footprints:The Lebanese government appears to be throwing in its lot against Hezbollah, appealing for international help to change the dynamic in the south of the country:Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora called Saturday for an immediate cease-fire with Israel, and asked for...