IRANIAN NUKES. I was all ready to write a long post on Noah Feldman’s article about the Iranian nuclear program, but that determination foundered upon my inability to figure out what Feldman was actually arguing. Feldman included a long, interesting, and rather pointless discussion of the Islamic position on suicide bombing, danced around a realist […]
Robert Farley
Robert Farley is an assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce, University of Kentucky. He contributes to the blogs Lawyers, Guns, and Money and TAPPED.
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JONAH GOLDBERG, WHAT IS YOUR MAJOR MALFUNCTION?
JONAH GOLDBERG, WHAT IS YOUR MAJOR MALFUNCTION? Brad’s Battlestar Galactica article reminded me of this gem (discovered by Scott) from Jonah Goldberg, written in response to episode 2-17: In a society scientifically so much more advanced, it seems to me that the issue would no longer be controversial one way or the other. Either contraceptive […]
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Still the Right War
Last week, journalist and blogger Brad Plumer asked an intriguing and important question: “What about Afghanistan?” If we’ve come to the conclusion now that the Iraq invasion was a mistake, then how do we evaluate the disaster on the other side of Iran? The Afghan question is critical to devising criteria for military intervention, because […]
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A SLIP?
A SLIP? Which of these are actually bad, and which are bad merely for the Republican Party? Other developments were not encouraging, such as the bombing of the U.N. Headquarters in Baghdad, the fact that we did not find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and the continued loss of some of America’s finest sons […]
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EVERYBODY’S A MCCAINIAC.
EVERYBODY’S A MCCAINIAC. Yglesias relates this little gem: He has a long time proclivity for suggesting that someone like James Baker or Brent Scowcroft might make a good envoy to try to re-start negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Later, McCain qualifies that to say he “would appoint someone to go to the region who […]
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CENTER OF GRAVITY.
CENTER OF GRAVITY. The consensus is that Baghdad is the center of gravity for the conflict in Iraq. The military has tried to spin this in a positive way; the battle of Baghdad is where the insurgency can be defeated. But this isn’t really what’s going on. Baghdad is a center of gravity, but not […]
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LANCET AND FACE VALIDITY.
LANCET AND FACE VALIDITY. In a conversation yesterday, a friend told me that he just couldn’t accept the Lancet numbers on Iraqi deaths because they seem too high. The study, he felt, had to have cooked the books in some way, even if the method wasn’t immediately apparent. My friend’s comments echoed those of Fred […]
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BRAZILIAN ELECTIONS.
BRAZILIAN ELECTIONS. The elections in Brazil — where Lula is headed for a run-off on October 29, have received some attention in the U.S. news media, but of course that coverage fails to make much of the context clear. Fortunately, we have a resource in an American academic blogger who goes by the handle Mr. […]
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IRAQI AIR FORCE.
IRAQI AIR FORCE. Speaking of the air force, it’s important to remember that air power, while hardly a panacea, certainly plays an important role in modern military operations. Although air power is less important to counter-insurgency conflicts than high-intensity wars, having control of the air and being able to deliver ordinance to targets never hurts. […]
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PLUTONIUM.
PLUTONIUM. The fuel that the North Koreans used for their bomb was plutonium. This is utterly unsurprising; the parallel uranium program that North Korea had developed in the 1990s was never capable of producing much in the way of bomb material. This reinforces the conclusion that the key diplomatic moments came in 1994, when the […]
