Robert Farley

As planned, the sale of 18 new F-16s to Pakistan is proceeding, in spite of the Bhutto assassination, the instability of the Musharraf government, and the manifest inability of the F-16 to contribute to any goal of Pakistani statecraft worth pursuing. Biden says the right things: On Jan. 2, U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., publicly […]

Mike Desch, a rightish faculty member with isolationist tendencies who works at the Bush School at Texas A&M (and was once Director of the Patterson School) has a fine article in the new American Conservative about Rudy Giuliani’s visit to Texas A&M: I was so appalled by the mayor’s simplistic message that terrorists were attacking […]

Via Gary Farber, the disability-support infrastructure of the United States government seems to be breaking down: More and more people have lost their homes, declared bankruptcy or even died while awaiting an appeals hearing, say lawyers representing claimants and officials of the Social Security Administration, which administers disability benefits for those judged unable to work […]

Kasia Bzdak at Strategic Security Blog on the politics of missile defense in Poland: In the weeks following the election… press reports in the Polish media indicated that Prime Minister Tusk and his party began to lose enthusiasm for the deployment. The Civic Platform’s public overtures to Russia are indicative of this shift. The new […]

Ezra, Eric Martin, and Rodger Payne provide good commentary on Ned Parker’s LA Times article about the fragmentation of Iraq. As we’ve discussed before, the tribal alliances strategy (if not the Surge itself) has left Iraq without a central government capable of keeping order or executing policy. “Low level reconciliation” is all fine and well, […]

Just about any nuclear program can be negotiated away. Iraq gave up its nuclear program (as well as its other WMD programs) years before the U.S. invasion of 2003. Libya began steps to give up its nascent program as early as 2001, and completed them in 2003. Iran suspended its program in 2003, and North […]

Michael Goldfarb dissents from my conclusions on the implications of the NIE on missile defense, and further asserts that liberals should love missile defense: And finally, liberals fundamentally misunderstand the effect of deploying a missile defense system–it would decrease the likelihood of conflict, not increase it. Missile defense would provide decision makers with one more […]

There was a good WaPo article yesterday on considerations within the Bush administration to abandon the transitional Somali government (the one we backed Ethiopian efforts to reinstall last year) and back a separatist movement in Somaliland. To give a brief and crude account, Somaliland is the part of the Somalia that was a British colonial […]

For the last two years, we have justified putting a missile defense system in Eastern Europe explicitly around the threat of Iranian ballistic missiles. In addition to the extraordinary financial costs, this project has resulted in increased Russian hostility to the United States and to Russia’s neighbors. And are we now to believe that this […]

The inimitable Victor Davis Hanson: Are they now to suggest that Republicans have been warmongering over a nonexistent threat for partisan purposes? But to advance that belief is also to concede that, Iran, like Libya, likely came to a conjecture around (say early spring 2003?) that it was not wise for regimes to conceal WMD […]