With much attention being given to the passage of the 2015 USA Freedom Act, there is some odd silence about what the bill actually contains. Pundits from every corner identify the demise of section 215 of the Patriot Act (the section that permits the government to...
Yesterday, a student asked me about the recent news reports indicating that Iraq did, in fact, have "weapons of mass destruction" back in 2002 and 2003 when the U.S. was attempting to justify a...
That's essentially the question Steve Saideman asked here (and which he more explicitly asked on Twitter). His answer, which I find problematic, is But here is the big problem in all of this:...
One line of discussion this past week has been whether it makes any kind of moral sense to think that  death by chemical weapon is so much worse than death by "conventional" weapons. Video imagery...
Two kinds of military intervention are being discussed and conflated by political elites (like Nicholas Kristof) and international diplomats. The first is an enforcement operation to punish a state for violating a widespread and nearly universal global prohibition norm against the use of chemical weapons. This is what Kristof refers to in the title of his Times op-ed, "Reinforce a Norm in Syria."Â The second is a humanitarian operation to protect civilians against a predatory government. This is what Kristof means when he compares proposed military strikes in Syria to intervention that...
The news out of the Damascus suburbs this morning is highly disturbing and, if the reports are confirmed that this was a chemical attack, no doubt will mark a turning point in the conflict. Â Dan is somewhat skeptical that it will change the intervention calculus. I disagree. For the better part of the past two years, the Obama administration has pursued to a strategy of conflict management and containment. Â It doesn't look like that policy has worked. Â Today's events appear to have been a major chemical attack with a large loss of civilian life. Â The raw and devastating images will alter the...
What does the term "weapon of mass destruction" mean to you? A few years ago, I was part of a team of academics involved in a project examining the implications of the so-called "Bush Doctrine" of preventive use of force. The editors of the book we produced, William Keller and Gordon Mitchell of the University of Pittsburgh, wanted us to avoid using the phrase "WMD." In their introductory chapter, Keller and Mitchell noted that the phrase WMD misleadingly linked together chemical and biological weapons with nuclear weapons: This semantic leveling obscures the fact that each class of weapons...
Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Defense presented its latest Nuclear Posture Review Report. I haven't had a chance to read the entire document yet, but media reports have focused on a new policy declaration that is of great interest to states and scholars alike. The statement garnering the greatest attention is included in the "Executive Summary" of the NPR (p. viii): The United States will continue to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in deterring non-nuclear attacks. To that end, the United States is now prepared to strengthen its long-standing "negative security assurance" by declaring...