The Duck of Minerva

Robert Kelly

Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science and Diplomacy, Pusan National University, Korea Home Website: https://AsianSecurityBlog.wordpress.com/ Twitter: @Robert_E_Kelly

Recent Posts

Guest Post by Tom Nichols — Iraq War Debate too Driven by Bush Resentment: A Response to Bob Kelly’s Iraq Posts”

by Robert Kelly | 28 March, 2013 |

I am happy to invite my friend Tom Nichols to guest-post about the continuing Iraq War debate. Tom responded so substantially to my original post series on the war (one, two, three), that I invited him to provide a longer write-up. Tom is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct professor in the Harvard Extension School. His blog can be found here, his twitter here. His opinions of course are his own, so whenever he says I’m wrong, you probably shouldn’t listen… REK I’ve been reading Bob’s thoughts – cogent as always – on the tenth anniversary of...

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Iraq 10 Years Later (3): Why the Neocon Theory behind the War Failed

by Robert Kelly | 23 March, 2013 |

My first post on the Iraq War asked if academic IR had any responsibility to slow the march to war. The second tried to formulate what the   neoconservative theory of the war was, because many of us, in retrospect of a conflict gone so badly, desperately want to un-remember that there really was a logic to the war, that it was at least somewhat intellectually defensible, and that a lot of us believed it. We may want to retroactively exculpate ourselves by suggesting it was just W the cowboy acting ridiculous, or a neocon hijacking of the policy process, or Halliburton oil...

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Iraq 10 Years Later (2): What was the Neocon Theory behind the War?

by Robert Kelly | 19 March, 2013 |

My first thoughts on the war’s ten year anniversary are here. There I asked if there was any defensible theory behind the war, anything that might explain why we launched it, because weapons of mass destruction were not really the reason. Paul Wolfowitz notoriously admitted they were just a pretext to rally the country behind the invasion. And it’s hard to argue it was about pre-emption either; Iraq was hardly a looming military threat in 2003. So here’s my guess about the real neoconservative logic. I should say up front, I do not endorse this rationale. I’m just trying to lay it out what I...

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Iraq 10 Years Later (1): How Culpable is Academic International Relations?

by Robert Kelly | 12 March, 2013 |

I’ve been thinking a lot about the war this month. I’ll be teaching it in the next few weeks at school because of the decade anniversary (March 20). My quick sense is that any defensible theory behind the war was simply buried by an execution so awful, disorganized, mismanaged, and incompetent that it invalidated the whole premise. The whole episode became just shameful, and regularly teaching and conferencing with non-Americans these last few years has made this so painfully clear. My students particularly are just bewildered to the point of incredulity. Again and again, the basic...

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‘Rodman-gate’: Can ‘Useful Idiots’ please Stop Shilling for North Korea?

by Robert Kelly | 4 March, 2013 |

Studying North Korea inevitably means people ask me pretty outlandish stuff. People have asked, if the North really believes long hair is bad for socialism, if that goiter on Kim Il Sung’s neck made him crazy, if Kim Jong Il’s platform shoes meant that he liked disco, and if North Korean women are good looking because a food shortage would mean everyone is slim. (I presume that last one is a reaction to the obesity epidemic in the US.) So I tried to avoid this latest outbreak of Norko bizarreness with Rodman. But people keep asking me, so here a few thoughts to the effect that no one should...

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5 Biggest Strategic Errors of the Emperor: a Contribution to the ‘Battle of Hoth’ Debate

by Robert Kelly | 14 February, 2013 |

You can’t win a counter-insurgency with a military like this   The Duck has gotten into an excellent debate with Ackerman on the Empire’s blown opportunity to stamp out the Space Vietcong Rebellion at Hoth. Westmoreland spent 5 years trying to nail down the VC in set-piece battles where US firepower could be brought decisively to bear and end the war. Here was the Emperor’s similar chance, but Vader and Admiral Ozzel blew it (mostly because the Empire’s officer corps was filled with grandstanding self-promoters, as Ackerman rightly points out). But as the respondents noted, the larger...

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USC-CSIS Conference on Korean Unification (3): DPRK ‘Sovereignty’ is a Sino-Russian Fig-Leaf to Slow Unification and Check US power

by Robert Kelly | 26 January, 2013 |

Here are part one and part two of this post. I spoke last Tuesday at a USC-CSIS conference on Korean unification. I learned a lot, and it was very good. If you’re interested in unification, start here with the primary report on which the conference was based. The principal investigators said a final wrap-up report will come at some point, and I’ll put up that link when it arrives. My comments below are on the papers presented on Tuesday about neighboring states’ reactions to Korean unification. These papers aren’t publicly posted yet, so all the comments might not make sense. But in the...

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USC-CSIS Conference on Korean Unification (2): ‘One Country, Two Systems’ will not happen

by Robert Kelly | 21 January, 2013 |

Here is part one of this post. The following will make more sense if you start there. I noted that I am participating, today in Seoul (attend if you can), in a USC-CSIS project on Korean unification. This is the final ‘phase’ of their Korea Project on unification. I thought I would post my thoughts on the previous USC-CSIS Korea report (available here) which provided all sorts of suggestions for reconstruction. It’s useful reading if your area is East Asia or Korea, but I actually disagree with a fair number of the analogies of NK to Iraq and Afghanistan. I think Germany is a better model...

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USC/CSIS Conference on Korean Unification (1): it will cost WAY more than people think

by Robert Kelly | 19 January, 2013 |

The University of Southern California Korean Studies Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies are running a joint Korea Project: Planning for the Long Term (pic to the left). CSIS will hold the last of three conferences in this project at the Asan Institute on January 21st next week. If you are in Seoul, you should go. The agenda looks pretty good. (Contact the Asan Institute.) I’d like to thank USC and CSIS for soliciting my participation.. The January 21 conference is actually the last meeting of the Project. The first meeting asked Korea area experts to look at...

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