Blake Hounshell

ARCTIC NOT SO HOT AFTER ALL? Joshua Kurlantzick’s story in this month’s Prospect was a fascinating look at how huge energy companies (including some that have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to undermine the global scientific consensus that the Earth is warming and that we are responsible) are rushing to lock up oil […]

THE COLOR REVOLUTION WE DON’T WANT. We all got excited when the Ukrainians and Georgians kicked out Russian stooge governments in mass “color revolutions” backed by American dollars and encouragement. Now it looks as if Hezbollah, fresh from its relative success in holding out against the might of the Israeli military, may attempt to stage […]

ARABIC: DIFFICULT. Long-time readers of my other blog, American Footprints, may know that I spent the last year and some change in Cairo, Egypt, learning Arabic. So it is with some first-hand experience that I approach Matt Yglesias’ observation that “the severe paucity of people who speak Arabic (to say nothing of Farsi, Pashto, etc.) […]

TO WREAK HAVOC, KIDNAP. As Spencer notes below, for the past five days, U.S. troops had been encircling Sadr City in order to find a missing soldier they believed was kidnapped by the Mahdi Army, the militia of fiercely anti-American Shi’ite cleric Muqtada Sadr. Sadr denies involvement, but the brother-in-law of the kidnapped soldier says […]

GOLD IN THEM THAR CREDITS. Last week the investment bank Morgan Stanley announced it was investing almost $3 billion in emissions credits made possible by the much-vilified Kyoto protocol. The announcement happened to coincide with the release of the World Bank’s annual “State of the Carbon Market” report, at Carbon Expo Asia, trumpeting the news […]

GET OUT OF AL-ANBAR, AND GET OSAMA. I’ll take a stab at Ezra’s call for reactions to this op-ed by Peter Bergen. Bergen writes: Instead, we should focus on a minimalist definition of our interests in Iraq, which is to prevent a militant Sunni jihadist mini-state from emerging and allowing al-Qaeda to regroup. While withdrawing […]

WHAT ZALMAY FORGOT. While checking in on Steve Clemons’ Washington Note, I came across this list from 2005 entitled “Ten Lessons for Nation-Building.” I have a lot of respect for its author, Zalmay Khalilzad, as I think he’s a pragmatic and able diplomat in a tough job (though he should have stayed in Afghanistan, where […]

PILING ON KAPLAN. As Spencer notes below, Larry Kaplan apparently fears that Americans will not want to invade other countries in order to install democracy after recoiling in horror from what’s happening in Iraq. Kaplan writes as if there isn’t a robust democratization literature that, although it hasn’t definitively settled every question, has at least […]

SACRE BLEU! Found on a job search board: Immediate need for project-based native speaking linguists in Afghan Pashto, Farsi, Dari, and in Canadian French. No translation involved. Project involves creating phonetic pronunciations of translated phrases for militiary/intelligence use. Pashto, Dari and Farsi linguists selected must have current, colloquial, Afghan “street language” knowledge of their respective […]

TALKING TO IRAN AND SYRIA. The momentum is building for the U.S. to start talking to Iran and Syria over the fate of Iraq. The latest: apparently the British Foreign Office backs the Baker–Hamilton Commission (a.k.a. the Iraq Study Group) in talking to the Iranians and Syrians. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is also on board. […]