The debate about whether the United States should use military force in Libya (and if so in what capacity) is on. Here’s one version of the debate from the PBS Newshour. It’s between two former State Department Directors of Policy Planning: Richard Haas (who served under George W. Bush) and Ann-Marie Slaughter (who just left […]
Unsurprisingly, after the UN Security Council referred the Libya situation to the International Criminal Court (ICC), John Bolton took the opportunity to criticize the ICC and, more generally, international law itself. He dubs the ICC “one of the world’s most illegitimate multilateral institutions,” argues that the threat of ICC prosecution will not alter Gadhafi’s behavior, […]
So there’s now officially a debate on the right about the idea of lawfare. One side says: the U.S. is in danger because its weaker enemies are using international law to undermine its objectives. The other side says: there’s nothing to worry about because international law, and even domestic law, is fairly impotent when it […]
Here are two radical proposals for Afghanistan. Neither of them has yet been attempted by the United States. They are: engage in counterinsurgency and attempt to make peace deals with the Taliban. As I’ve noted before (here, here, and here), though there’s a lot of talk of counterinsurgency, the current NATO effort does not very […]
Though the ultimate outcome of Egypt’s revolution remains uncertain (it’s still possible that it might wind up not being a revolution at all), it is worth asking: what factors make security forces more likely to decide to side with protesters? Michael Auslin flirts with this question in relation to China at the National Review. He […]
There’s been a story brewing for a couple weeks about a lawsuit against Jimmy Carter and Simon & Schuster, who published Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The plaintiffs in this $5 million lawsuit claim that the book should not be classified as non-fiction because they dispute some of the Carter’s assertions. As Kevin Jon […]
Joshua Pollack at Arms Control Wonk predicts that the IAEA is preparing to refer the Syria situation to the UN Security Council. The situation has been strange since it began in September 2007, when Israel bombed a suspected nuclear facility in Syria. The initial Syrian response was to denounce the Israeli violation of Syria’s sovereignty […]
In my first post about Egypt, I noted the view articulated by Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution, that in revolutions, the members of the army and/or the police force are the ones who decide what happens. If the government loses control of its coercive forces, the revolution succeeds. So the question we, and […]
Some people on the right are trying to do to same thing with Egyptian democracy promotion that they’ve done with the International Criminal Court (ICC) – fallaciously argue that Obama’s policy has been drastically different than that of Bush. From Clifford May at the National Review: …[T]he fact is that Bush did push for democratic […]
Though the Egyptian government met with some opposition leaders over the weekend, the divide between them remains large. This is especially true when we look at how they want to deal with Egypt’s constitution. Mubarak wants to reform the current constitution. As he said in his Feb. 2 speech (in which he announced his decision […]
Though the opposition in Egypt is frequently presented as a bottom-up movement, there is, in fact, a top-down element to it. As the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, the opposition is being led by a ten-person steering committee. This committee arose from a 100-person shadow parliament established in Egypt well before the protests broke out. […]
Normally I don’t bother to take the time to discuss distortions of facts that occur on cable news programs. Such occurrences are, to me, as surprising as eating cauliflower. But I think this one, even though it happened a couple weeks ago, is worth commenting on: Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and […]
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