Note: This is a guest post by Ty Solomon, Lecturer at the University of Glasgow Even though the war in Syria has been raging for the past two years, much of the global outrage that we now see has only erupted with the recent reports about Bashar al Assad’s government...
Herbert Marcuse had some interesting things to say about certain political acronyms. Â The meaning is fixed, doctored, loaded. Once it has become an official vocable, constantly repeated in general...
This morning, the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville hosted CIA Director David H. Petraeus. The event was not publicized and required a ticket for admission. As chair of the Political...
Antoine Bousquet has a fascinating post at Disorder of Things on developments in neuroscience and how they are being used by militaries to 1) enhance their own soldiers and 2) degrade the abilities...
What does the term "weapon of mass destruction" mean to you? A few years ago, I was part of a team of academics involved in a project examining the implications of the so-called "Bush Doctrine" of preventive use of force. The editors of the book we produced, William Keller and Gordon Mitchell of the University of Pittsburgh, wanted us to avoid using the phrase "WMD." In their introductory chapter, Keller and Mitchell noted that the phrase WMD misleadingly linked together chemical and biological weapons with nuclear weapons: This semantic leveling obscures the fact that each class of weapons...
Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Defense presented its latest Nuclear Posture Review Report. I haven't had a chance to read the entire document yet, but media reports have focused on a new policy declaration that is of great interest to states and scholars alike. The statement garnering the greatest attention is included in the "Executive Summary" of the NPR (p. viii): The United States will continue to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in deterring non-nuclear attacks. To that end, the United States is now prepared to strengthen its long-standing "negative security assurance" by declaring...
Jacob Weisberg reminds us that conventional wisdom is often wrong, and then isolates seven instances of "received wisdom" that might prove wrong.A lot of our premises have turned out to be wrong lately. I'm talking not about evanescent bits of conventional wisdom that have shifted but about overarching assumptions that were widely shared across the political spectrum—big things that experts and nonexperts agreed about—until they were proved false.For instance, before 1989, virtually all Sovietologists agreed that the USSR was highly stable. Before 2001, few Middle East scholars worried that...
Yesterday I was watching Colbert and former Sen. Bob Graham was on, discussing the recently released World At Risk, the report of the WMD commission he co-chaired. The headline of the report (which Graham reiterated in the interview) is to expect an attack using a WMD attack within 5 years, most likely a biological attack.In Zimbabwe, there is a massive Cholera epidemic, over 60,000 are reported to have come down with the disease, and hundreds have already died, with several thousand potential deaths expected.To discuss: How is what's happening in Zimbabwe any different from a WMD attack?If...
I commented on this point more than three years ago, but since President Bush said something dubious again today, it seemed worth repeating. First, here's what Bush said at his news conference, with the egregious part in red: Over the past three years I have often addressed the American people to explain developments in Iraq. Some of these developments were encouraging, such as the capture of Saddam Hussein, the elections in which 12 million Iraqis defied the terrorists and voted for a free future, and the demise of the brutal terrorist Zarqawi. Other developments were not encouraging, such...