In early September, the circulation of the now iconic picture of Alan Kurdi, the little Syrian Kurdish boy who drowned along with his mother and brother in the attempt to cross the Aegean Sea, prompted me to write a post reflecting on what 'we' as academics might do....
My first post on the Duck focused on the emergence of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag and campaign, pointing also to the ease with which hashtags can get appropriated and campaigns derailed....
Timing is everything; I'm not sure its good to be publishing a paper about strategic narratives just as the US cuts its Advisory Commission on Public Dipomacy, although RAND have begun exploring...
You have devoted your life to creating a great empire, one that stretches around the world and wields influence over politics and culture in a number of countries. Decades of criticism and...
Back in 2003, the name Ricardo Sanchez appeared in several posts on my personal blog. At the time, the now-retired General was "the top U.S. military official in Iraq." Over the years, Sanchez provided honest and forthright assessments of the Iraq war. Even though I didn't always agree with his analysis of what should be done, I respected his contributions to the political debate. Lately, he's been pushing a "truth commission" for Iraq and I think that the U.S. should pursue something like that to document the course of the Iraq war. Sanchez's evolving views of the Iraq war are worth...
Many of the Journolist critics have expressed concerns that the listserv's membership -- you had to be political "center to left" to join -- fomented groupthink. Andrew Sullivan's critique is succinct, but he's hardly alone in leveling the charge: "It is this tendency to groupthink and exclusivity that concerns me."Reihan Salam, who was generally sympathetic to Journolist in an on-line piece he wrote last week, has recalibrated his argument to criticize J-list about the alleged groupthink problem: What I meant to say, and evidently didn’t say very effectively, is that JList is inevitable. So...
Rachel Maddow just asked perhaps the most insightful question of this bailout to date: Is this economic crisis global warming or the Iraq War? Is it a real crisis that builds slowly that people fail to acknowledge, or is it a bunch of hype and hysteria over what is, in the end, nothing.Laura D'Andrea Tyson says that this credit crunch is real and real bad, and your job is at risk. Its not a bail-out, but a rescue of a broken market.Therein lies the rub. I think there are two fundamental issues that have doomed the bailout bill earlier today.First, this is a really complicated mess, and no...
Over at Early Warning, William Arkin has generated incredible traffic to his site--over 1500 comments on one post--over his recent posts on the Iraq war. Arkin took on a very central issue in our debate over the war, and in doing so, exposed the continued difficulty we as a nation have in developing a language to debate the war.Arkin's initial column noted how "the troops" in Iraq--the enlisted soldiers who bear the brunt of the fighting in this war--are reacting to the rising criticism of the war:Friday's NBC Nightly News included a story from my colleague and friend Richard Engel, who was...