The second- and third-most downloaded articles at the journal Security Studies both tackle the causes of the Iraq War. This might reflect an imbalance of supply and demand: there aren't that many articles in leading international-relations journals that focus on the...
Herbert Marcuse had some interesting things to say about certain political acronyms. The meaning is fixed, doctored, loaded. Once it has become an official vocable, constantly repeated in general...
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...
This is a guest post by Konstantinos Travlos of the University of Illinois and Brandon Valeriano of the University of Glasgow. The mark of the ten year anniversary of the beginning of the US...
So, this is it -- Tunisia is vindication of the Iraq War. Here's Jennifer Rubin's great insight: Recall when President George W. Bush talked about democracy taking hold in Iraq and then the region? Now Bush's vision seems very prescient....One question that deserves further consideration: How much did the emergence of a democratic Iraq have to do with this popular revolt in Tunisia? This is similar to a point Max Boot made recently at Amherst College in a debate with Andrew Bacevich. Boot argued that it was too early to tell if the Iraq war was a success or failure, because as he put it, the...
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...
As I've already noted, former President George W. Bush is apparently settling some scores in his new memoir. In Europe, his passages about former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder are attracting a good deal of attention.According to press reports, Bush says Schroder was for the Iraq war before it was against it. Because of his own electoral problems, Bush implies, Schroeder flip-flopped. The former president writes that when he said he was considering the use of force in Iraq, Schroder said, "'What is true of Afghanistan is true of Iraq. Nations that sponsor terror must face consequences....
In his new memoir, former President George W. Bush says that Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) let electoral politics influence his advice about the Iraq war in 2006. Cincinnati's CityBeat has the exchange from Bush's memoir: "In September 2006, with the midterm elections approaching, my friend Mitch McConnell came to the Oval Office. The senior senator from Kentucky and Republican whip had asked to see me alone. Mitch has a sharp political nose, and he smelled trouble. 'Mr. President,' he said, 'your unpopularity is going to cost us control of the Congress' ...'Well, Mitch,' I...
For many years on my personal blog, I monitored the disintegration of the "coalition of the willing" in Iraq. My last post on this topic was apparently in December 2008, when the United Kingdom announced that it was soon withdrawing its final troops from Iraq. Prior posts had documented the exits of Australia (2007), Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia (2007), Japan (2006), Italy (2006), Poland, the Netherlands, Thailand, Hungary, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, New Zealand, Norway (2005), Ukraine (2005), the Philippines, Spain, and Honduras (2004).Now, the U.S. has withdrawn its last...
Many of the Journolist critics have expressed concerns that the listserv's membership -- you had to be political "center to left" to join -- fomented groupthink. Andrew Sullivan's critique is succinct, but he's hardly alone in leveling the charge: "It is this tendency to groupthink and exclusivity that concerns me."Reihan Salam, who was generally sympathetic to Journolist in an on-line piece he wrote last week, has recalibrated his argument to criticize J-list about the alleged groupthink problem: What I meant to say, and evidently didn’t say very effectively, is that JList is inevitable. So...
Duck of Minerva bloggers have already written quite a bit about "The Hurt Locker," which won the Best Picture prize at this week's Academy Awards ceremony. I saw the movie on DVD a few weeks ago and have been digesting some of the reactions to the film. Like many critics of this film, Michael Kamber of the NY Times offers a list of serious errors in "The Hurt Locker." Viewers see the bomb disposal team leave on missions without much other military support. The team members clear buildings by themselves, become skilled snipers and spotters when they stumble upon some British mercenaries, and...
As you might expect, I've had a number of conversations with friends and colleagues about the prospects for the so-called "Afghan surge." Boosters like to point to the alleged success of the Iraq surge, but many of them ignore some salient points.For example, the U.S. also changed its military tactics in Iraq even as it implemented the surge. The military embraced counterinsurgency tactics, something it had been reluctant to do since Vietnam.Moreover, the surge coincided with the so-called Anbar awakening. Sunni tribal sheikhs split from al Qaeda and ended up working with the U.S. military...