[Updated 1/23]George H.W. Bush, "Global Message", March 19, 2003:In a free Iraq, there will be no more wars of aggression against neighbors...no more poison factories...no more executions of dissidents...no more torture chambers and rape rooms.Nicholas D. Kristoff, The New York Review of Books, "Genocide in Slow Motion," February 9, 2006:On one of the first of my five visits to Darfur, I came across an oasis along the Chad border where several...

Spread the quacky goodness and vote Duck for "Best New Blog" in the 2005 Koufax Awards [Voting isn't open yet, so check out our competition and be ready to cast your ballot].Patrick and I just wrapped the Mershon leg of the "realism and constructivism" conference. We'll be back to blogging soon. Heck, I'm even thinking of completing my long overdue final installment on balance-of-power theory soon. Please remind me in the future never to...

The United Nations has cancelled the speaking engagement of Pakistani human rights activist Mukhtaran Mai (a.k.a. Mukhtaran Bibi). For those that don't remember, Ms. Mai was sentenced to be gang-raped by a tribal court as punishment for misconduct by her brother. She fought her rapists in court and won, giving the compensation she received to schools in her district. Apparently, the Pakistani government blocked the appearance. The appearance...

This headline today on Yahoo (from AP) made me laugh out loud: "U.S.: Venezuela Overspending on Military."And we were just discussing this kind of American hypocrisy. Venezuela is planning a "buying spree" for military equipment that goes beyond the country's legitimate needs, the State Department said Friday.In recent days, the United States has sought to block proposed sales of military planes and other equipment to Venezuela by Spain and...

Tom, an often-funny blogger at at Functional Ambivalent, today criticizes "liberals" among Kevin Drum's commenters for failing to respond to a direct question Kevin asked concerning the US attack in Pakistan last week. Here's the question from the popular blog: For the sake of argument, let's assume that we had pretty good intelligence telling us that a bunch of al-Qaeda leaders were in the house we bombed. And let's also assume that we did...

Many critics of the Bush administration -- including those on the left -- have often over the past three years complained that the U.S. was focusing on the wrong state in the war on terrorism. Iran sponsors terrorists (especially Hamas) and pursues WMD. The evidence is arguably much, much clearer than it was with Iraq. Setting aside the question of sanctions for a moment, which are quite problematic given the west's great need for imported oil,...

Over at my blog, I've written a lengthy post on "'Pro-war' Democrats and the 2006 Elections." Since it is about the likely role of Iraq in the congressional midterm elections, it is probably suitable for the Duck. However, I'm resolved in 2006 to generate unique content for each space and to avoid excessive duplication by cross-posting.Click the post title, read, and comment.I'll have something for this space soon.Put "after the fold" in...

Rob over at LGM has a great post in which he cogently makes the case for why the Iraq War is now screwing up our ability to effectively deal with Tehran. Besides removing an obvious security concern from Iran's western front and providing Iran with 110,000 "hostages" in the form of US troops right next store (not to mention the ability to threaten to or actually destablize Iraq domestically), Rob touches on one issue that I find particularly...

[Updated at 2:09pm]One of the biggest stories of late is the escalating nuclear standoff between Iran and the West. There is great speculation that many of the most important parties (e.g. Russia and the EU3) are now ready to refer the matter to the UN Security Council (UNSC). Other parties, such as China, may not be ready to sign on to sanctions but are becoming increasingly aware that this problem is not going away. The five permanent members...

A great many right-wing blogs advance a strange interpretation of the latest developments in Iran's apparent quest for nuclear weapons: the current failures of European-Iranian negotiations provide more evidence that Europeans are soft, ineffectual, and otherwise feminized.What are the problems with the argument?1. It ignores the obvious comparison between Iran and North Korea. The Europeans haven't convinced Iran to drop its nuclear program,...

After I posted "Isn't this what friends are for?" Wednesday, I received an email from Kevin Anderson of the BBC News radio program, "World Have Your Say." Kevin wanted me to partake in a discussion about Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster's critique of the US army in Iraq -- live Thursday (about 1:30 pm ET, early evening in the UK). Unfortunately, he wrote only a few hours before the broadcast and I read it only half an hour or so in advance.I...

A few preliminary thoughts on Rodger's discussion of the "communicative turn" in international-relations theory.The "communicative" and "linguistic" turns both occupy a great deal of attention in contemporary constructivist scholarship. One question that immediately arises is whether these are different words for the same underlying sets of arguments. The answer? It depends.Advocates of the communicative turn share a belief that "words matter"...