The Duck of Minerva

These are the opening paragraphs of today's BBC story about the IAEA's reaction to a much-discussed August 23 congressional report, which played up Iran's alleged nuclear "threat": The UN nuclear watchdog has protested to the US government over a report on Iran's nuclear programme, calling it "erroneous" and "misleading".In a leaked letter, the IAEA said a congressional report contained serious distortions of the agency's own findings on Iran's nuclear activity. The letter called one part of the report "outrageous and dishonest." The House Intelligence Committee report made this false...

I took this excerpt about the new Pentagon Iraq report from the LA Times, September 2, but the news was widely circulated. However, you might have missed it because not only did the administration wait until a Friday to release bad news -- it was a Friday before a three day weekend in the midst of an east coast tropical storm!Attacks and civilian deaths in Iraq have risen sharply in recent months, with casualties increasing by 1,000 a month, and sectarian violence has engulfed larger areas of the country, the Pentagon said Friday in a strikingly dismal report to Congress.The quarterly...

It's Saturday afternoon and I have strep throat. I'm not at the APSA convention for the Labor Day weekend, but I can still be a geek: I just watched a large portion of a panel on C-SPAN 2 featuring Peter Beinart of The New Republic, paleo-con Reaganite Lawrence Korb, Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker, and neocon William Kristol of The Weekly Standard.Towards the very end, Kristol made a point about how Democrats and Republicans see America's foreign policy priorities -- and security threats -- differently. He cited a public opinion poll finding that Republicans focused on the traditional...

This must be a joke, albeit one that requires the audience to provide the punchline. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to the American Legion, August 29, 2006: "Any kind of moral and intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong can severely weaken the ability of free societies to persevere."Surely Rummy was counting on his audience to remember the backstory. His famous leaked memo from October 2003 was full of potential zingers. Here's a good one: Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and...

Turkey has long been viewed as one of a number a "pivotal states" for US foreign policy. According to scholars, These are countries whose fate determines the survival and success of the surrounding region and ultimately the stability of the international system.Turkey is additionally Samuel Huntington's prototypical "torn country;" one of several states having "a fair degree of cultural homogeneity but...divided over whether their society belongs to one civilization or another." Whatever one thinks of these characterizations, it is clear that Turkey's political, cultural and geographic...

I'm on an academic IR theory mailing list that frequently receives email about possible 9/11 conspiracies. Most of the time, I just delete these posts, but every now and then I click a link just to find out what the writers are claiming. One recent link led me to an August 2 Washington Post story that certainly raises interesting questions: Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a...