Some interesting Sunday morning reading:The Washington Post today reprints a rather lengthy cable from the US Embassy in Iraq to Main State. Its worth a read.The Post introduces the Cable: Hours before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there, the U.S. Embassy in Iraq painted a starkly different portrait of increasing danger and hardship faced by its Iraqi employees. This cable, marked "sensitive" and obtained by The Washington Post, outlines in spare prose the daily-worsening conditions for those who live...

Not long after I started the Duck of Minerva I began a series called "Wednesday's Maxim". Like a number of my series, I let it fall by the wayside. Witness the revival of "Wednesday's maxim," but on Friday!Considering its origin carefully, all political power is rooted in violence. There is no legitimate power, except that of republics within their own territories but not beyond. Not even the power of the emperor is an exception, for it is founded on the authority of the Romans, which was a greater usurpation than any other. Nor do I except the priests from this rule--indeed, their violence...

A couple of weeks ago the Cunning Realist wrote:This has probably been discussed at great length elsewhere, and undoubtedly will strike some as a dumb question. But before tonight was anyone besides me unaware that U.S. citizenship is not a requirement for military service?Which reminded me of a very painful academic smackdown in Tarak Barkawi's Globalization and War:Thompson... argues that over the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sates slowly gained a monopoly on the authoritative use of external violence from non-state actors.... The long-term and widespread practice...

President Bush made a surprise visit to Baghdad today.For several days, the Administration had been promoting a "major" cabinet meeting to "hone" its post-Zarqawi Iraq strategy. Up at Camp David, Bush had all of his Cabinet and senior advisors either in attendence or hooked in via teleconference.Well, lo and behold, on day 2, instead of having a teleconfrence with the new PM of the Iraqi Government, he drops into Baghdad (litterally, drops from the sky for 6 hours and then left) and meets with PM Maliki, Gen. Casey and Amb. Khalilzad and has the rest of his Cabinet, still back at Camp David...

As the Czech Republic leads the United States 2-0 at the half in the first World Cup match for both teams, it occurs to me how odd it is to be able to watch the game live on ESPN2 (which I am in fact doing at the moment). Last World Cup, it was much harder to get live coverage, even of the US team's matches, to say nothing of the matches of other and better teams. I was able to catch a fair bit of the tournament since I was in Germany for half of that summer, but the stateside coverage was, as I remember, quite pathetic -- especially given that the World Cup is the biggest sporting event in...

A mutual friend sent my wife an email about EssayFraud.org. The site claims to protect students against "fraudulent" mail-order foreign-operated academic paper services. These scam artists, claim the staff at essayfraud.org, will either steal unsuspecting students' money or send them papers "riddled with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes." They note that:Foreign sites like [omitted] hire poor, ESL writers in Pakistan for as little as .70¢ per page, which is how they can offer the low prices of $6.95–$15.00/pg that lure students into their traps. Qualified writers in America will not...

Victor Davis Hanson reviews Cobra II. Some of the highlights: Gordon and Trainor do not even inquire whether the ties between al Qaeda and Saddam’s intelligence agencies, which had prompted formal condemnation from both the Clinton administration and the Senate, might not have been a worthy casus belli in a post-September 11 world.Put "after the fold" in hereNor do Gordon and Trainor credit the still more telling fact that, following the Afghanistan campaign in the fall of 2001, some fifteen months of national and worldwide discussion ensued concerning Iraq, including the excruciatingly...

Many prominent bloggers on the left side of the blogosphere are meeting this weekend in Las Vegas for the first annual "YearlyKos" convention. There are certainly multiple panels that sound interesting, though I have no idea how meaningful this convention will prove to be. From a social science point of view, it clearly seems like a political blog-related event worth watching.A few hours ago, for example, the convention featured a panel on the "CIA Leak Investigation," which included these participants: former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Washington Post columnist-blogger Dan Froomkin,...