Josh Marshall asks if Abu Musab Zarqawi is really the mastermind behind Mesopotamian jihadism.It it is hard not to see this information in the light of the fairly constant tendency through the War on Terror to build up varous Terrorist Masterminds, who become the focus of most or all news reportage, then trail off into nothing. Not infrequently, they have an uncanny resemblance to characters out of 1984. And with Zarqawi particularly there is a welter of contradictory and often difficult-to-credit information about him that invites further suspicion.This isn't a tinfoil-hat concern, but gets...

My 18-month old daughter is in a binge-reading phase. She hunts for a book, carries it over to any adult who happens to be in the vicinity, and presents it while exclaiming "Enh! Ehn! Booshk! Enh! Enh!" Sometimes she will jab one finger while insisting "Sit! Sit! Sit!" In either case, her appetite for being read to is boundless. Which means my wife and I read the same books. Over and over and over and over. Between the three of us, we make a lot of animal sounds over the course of the day.All of this goes along way towards explaining why Terry Pratchett's Where's My Cow? is the funniest...

Just wanted to wish my fellow members of the Duck as well as our readership a Happy Thanksgiving.

Journalist James Bamford has a tremendously explosive story about the Rendon Group in Rolling Stone magazine (posted November 17, 2005). The story mentions some of the Rendon group's activites over much of the past twenty years, "selling" virtually every war and military intervention the US has fought since Panama.Most of the article is about Iraq's non-existent WMD.For some years, the Rendon Group has been a Defense Department contractor, after years of working with CIA. The contracts have apparently been worth between $50-100 million between 2000 and 2004. The story credits Rendon with...

An update to my earlier post on Congresswoman Jean Schmidt of Ohio.From the Washington Post: "Schmidt doesn't understand what the fuss is about, and sees herself more as victim than villain." Read on.Filed as: Jean Schmidt

The Washington Post has an interesting story regardingt the LDP, Japan's ruling party, and their formal plans to revise the Consitution. These revisions would allow the country to posses a "formal military" for the first time since the end of the second world war. Up till now, Japan has been limited to fielding a "self-defense force" (SDF), an organization that was operationally limited to defending Japan's home islands as well as taking part in some limited multilateral peacekeeping operations.So does this portend a more assertive Japan? Will the region become more or less tense?My own view...

Over at Abu Aardvark, Marc Lynch provides some empirical evidence for the fact that major IR journals have had very little to say about al-Qaeda over the past few years:All told, these seven journals published 796 articles between 2002-2005. I found a total of 25 articles dealing even loosely with al-Qaeda, Islamism, or terrorism. That's just over 3% of the articles. Now, there's lots of important stuff out there in the world, and there's no reason for the whole field to be following the headlines, but still... 3%?Marc doesn't provide much speculation in his post on why this absence exists...

Those doors are tricky in China. Damn commies will do anything to make you look bad.And yes, I am a streak-poster.Filed as: President Bush