This is a guest post by Peter S. Henne. Peter is a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University. He formerly worked as a national security consultant. His research focuses on terrorism and religious conflict; he has also written on the role of faith in US foreign...
Anyone who did not see "Zero Dark Thirty" on its opening night was smart, as it was mayhem in theaters everywhere. The film shot to #1 at the box office overnight and is there still, for the plain...
Image from: https://hub.pastbook.com/en/book/instagram/earth/tag/september11Our memories of "big events" are generally collective in character. Their status as such manifests in a number of ways,...
This is an open thread to discuss what the world of 2012 would look like absent the 9/11 attacks. The counterfactual proposes that they never happened, not that the US government thwarted them. In...
Not long ago, Robert Elias, a Professor of Politics at University of San Francisco (and editor of Peace Review), published The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy & Promoted the American Way Abroad (The New Press, 2010). Unfortunately, I have not yet had a chance to obtain a copy of the book -- or read it. However, thanks to my SABR membership, I learned this week of his related article "Baseball and American Foreign Policy," which came out in Transatlantica in 2011 (but was just published on-line this month).As both a baseball fan and an academic who has taught a...
Counterfactual theses:Absent 9/11 or a 9/11-style attack, the US would not have invaded Afghanistan but might very well have used force against Iraq. Rationale: despite the Bush campaign's repeated condemnation of "nation-building" and calls for a more "humble" foreign policy (remember that?), Cheney and others were already singling out Iraq as a policy failure of the Clinton administration.Absent 9/11 Bush would not have been a one-term president, but the 2002 midterm results would have been much more favorable to the Democrats. Rationale: the 2001 slump would largely have been over; I...
I wasn't going to post this (again), but the thread below is starting to turn toward reminiscence; a cut-and-paste job seems easier than rewriting. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I drove my wife to the Nanuet train station. We said goodbye and she got on the train to begin her commute into Manhattan. I went home and took a shower.Sometime later that morning I went downstairs to the basement of our townhouse, which doubled as my office. I started working on one of my projects. I can't recall whether I was revising chapters of my dissertation or working on an article-length project....
I know it is a little late, but having looked at some other bloggers' "September 11" posts, I thought I should repost the one I wrote two years ago.September 11 - a blogging personal historyOn the morning of September 11, 2001, I drove my wife to the Nanuet train station. We said goodbye and she got on the train to begin her commute into Manhattan. I went home and took a shower.Sometime later that morning I went downstairs to the basement of our townhouse, which doubled as my office. I started working on one of my projects. I can't recall whether I was revising chapters of my dissertation or...