The Duck of Minerva

Cliff Bob

Bob is a political science professor at Duquesne University who studies global norms, advocacy campaigns, and related subjects.

Recent Posts

Fortune-Tellers of Foreign Policy

by Cliff Bob | 12 February, 2011 |

 Congressional hand-wringing over America’s inability to forecast the Egyptian and Tunisian revolts is unsurprising given the foreign policy hubris that dominates in Washington today.  How can it be, the cry goes out, that America, was blindsided by these earthshaking events?  Doesn’t “exceptional” America see further and act more wisely than other nations?  Sadly, that arrogant and delusional mindset is unlikely to be changed even by this latest “intelligence” failure.  Rather than questioning whether anyone could have predicted this kind of event—let alone whether we should be trying to...

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Egyptian “People Power,” Civil Society, and the U.S.

by Cliff Bob | 30 January, 2011 |

 The prospect of a new government in Egypt opens huge uncertainties for the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East.  At this point, no one can predict what that new government will be.  But it is clear that there will be substantial change, even if Mubarak hangs on.  A military regime is possible.  A transition government, perhaps led by Mohamed ElBaradei, leading to democratic elections also seems possible--and would be the best outcome. Notwithstanding the uncertainties, it is worthwhile to think more about the implications.  In the long term, the events of last week would seem to mean more...

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Wikileaks “Document Dumps” vs. Government Secrecy Dumps

by Cliff Bob | 5 December, 2010 |

The Wikileaks releases are political dynamite not just because of the specific issues they discuss.  Also, and more importantly, they challenge a dominant mode of foreign policymaking in the U.S. and many other countries:  government secrecy dumps—routinely stamping vast amounts of information “top secret,” thereby placing it beyond the eyes of all us "untrustworthy" citizens.  For this reason alone, the Wikileaks releases are important—and important for us to continue discussing on this blog. To take a minor issue first, pooh-poohing the releases as “nothing new” is misplaced.  This is...

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Pork Barrel Nation: From Prisons to Pentagon

by Cliff Bob | 29 October, 2010 |

Here is a fascinating story detailing how a network of legislators and corporations works together on bills such as Arizona’s recent and controversial immigration bill.  The two-part report shows corporations and trade groups writing laws, encouraging “lawmakers” to promote and pass them, then using the legislation to expand their businesses.  In this case, prison companies--one of the few bright spots in our woeful economy--were involved in writing the Arizona bill.  Now they stand to make millions from new jails for illegal aliens, especially women and children, awaiting deportation.  All...

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Three Cheers for Wikileaks

by Cliff Bob | 26 October, 2010 |

The last few days have seen a fury of debate about Wikileaks’ latest disclosures.   To my mind, Wikileaks’ release of the Iraq and earlier Afghanistan documents is a public service—throwing critical light on the way in which America has pursued its wars at ground level.  Some have dismissed the documents as nothing “new.”    Of course, it is true that we have had information about the wars, human rights violations, and civilian casualties in everyday stories by the media.  But much of that, among reporters “embedded” by the military, has been carefully screened.  Moreover, what has been...

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When Myths Meet Reality in Iraq and Afghanistan

by Cliff Bob | 17 October, 2010 |

What are America’s prospects in Afghanistan?  Two articles from The New York Times today throw light on the question. In Afghanistan, the Exit Plan Starts With ‘If’:[America’s Afghanistan] strategy looks a lot like the one that brought General Petraeus success in Iraq in 2007 and 2008. With Iraq engulfed in apocalyptic violence, American field commanders reached out to nationalist-minded guerrilla leaders and found many of them exhausted by war and willing to make peace. About 100,000 Iraqis, many of them insurgents, came on the American payroll. The Americans were working both ends of the...

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Kandahar and My Lai; Drone Strikes and Carpet Bombing

by Cliff Bob | 4 October, 2010 |

 The New York Times recently posted reports about the U.S. military's trial of soldiers accused of randomly killing civilians in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province, “for sport.”  Apart from the horrors of the alleged crimes, there is a terrible irony in the stories.  This goes beyond the fact that these kinds of incidents are hardly news.  They are completely predictable in any war, even among the best-trained and most disciplined armies—let alone those in which governmental and military leaders provide signals that make incidents like Abu Ghraib possible.   The irony also goes beyond the...

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Homeland Security Heads Roll in Pennsylvania—But the GWOT Keeps on Rolling

by Cliff Bob | 4 October, 2010 |

 Two weeks ago, I wrote about Pennsylvania’s Perverted War on Terror.   This week the state’s Homeland Security Director James Powers, Jr. resigned.  Governor Ed Rendell had refused to fire him, saying Powers was not the only one responsible for hiring the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR).  True, enough:  Rendell had command responsibility, and Robert French, director of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, apparently had oversight too (neither has resigned).  But it appears that Powers was the person who okayed the $103,000 contract that resulted in numerous...

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Marty Peretz, Harvard, and the First Amendment

by Cliff Bob | 28 September, 2010 |

 I attended the Harvard Social Studies concentration’s 50th anniversary celebration on September 25, well aware of the controversy over the University's naming an undergraduate research scholarship in honor of New Republic editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz.  Generating the conflict were Peretz’s long history of contemptuous writings about Muslims and other groups and especially his recent, disgraceful statement: “I wonder whether I need . . . pretend that [Muslims] are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.” Peretz later retracted...

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Pennsylvania’s Perverted “War on Terror”

by Cliff Bob | 21 September, 2010 |

How does America's bloated anti-terror bureaucracy spend its time and our money? A story out of Pennsylvania last week throws light on the earth-shakingly important work these saviors of our soil perform, defending us all from the scary monsters who pose such a dire menace to America.Or rather it illustrates, yet again, the myriad ways in which our homeland security hogs work to rationalize their existence and perpetuate their wallow in the "homeland security" slops-trough—even while eroding our civil liberties. The swine this time: International Terrorism Research and Resources (ITRR), a...

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