An important story as been hanging out in the news for the past couple months and it’s time I wrote about it. Barney Frank is on a serious campaign to get the U.S. to curb military spending. Earlier this year he convened a Sustainable Defense Task Force to find ways to do it. Read their […]
At Informed Comment yesterday, Tom Engelhardt ripped counterinsurgency (COIN) a new one. He writes that we should “start talking about the madness of making counterinsurgency the American way of war.” The Counterinsurgency Field Manual is a blueprint for civilian-killing and failure, he argues, and he concludes: …[L]et me offer my one-line rewrite of their 472 […]
What’s been striking is not so much the content of what he’s said but the fact he can say it at all The semi-retired Cuban leader got some attention and aroused a good deal of surprise in recent weeks with intemperate remarks about Iran and Korea, suggesting that the United States was pushing the crises […]
Lest my last post left the misimpression that I consider the issue of South Korean nuclear fuel reprocessing to be unimportant, let me emphasize this: I don’t consider it unimportant, merely unpromising as a path for furthering the cause of arms control and disarmament. To elaborate, as I see it, the case against South Korean […]
Last week Daniel Hannan of the Telegraph argued that since, per the Lisbon Treaty, the EU can now sign treaties, it is now a state (h/t Opinio Juris). Hannan cites Article I of the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States: The state as a person of international law should possess the […]
“Transnational crime” suggests new answers to an old question: what is the relationship between organized crime and terrorist funding?
IRAQ POST-ELECTION VIOLENCE 18 Jul: Suicide bomber kills 43 in attack on government-backed Sunni militia in Radwaniya near Baghdad 7 Jul: Series of bombings targeting Shia pilgrims attending festival in Baghdad leave more than 40 people dead 20 Jun: 26 killed in twin suicide car bombings close to bank in Baghdad 21 May: Car […]
According to a just released ABC news report, U.S. public support for the war in Afghanistan has dropped from 52% in December to 43% today. The Taliban must be rejoicing because this shows, at least for the moment that their strategy is working. The bottom line is the Taliban knows they can’t beat U.S. forces […]
If you’ve been closely following the best daily press or tuning into debates among professional arms controllers, you will have noticed some concern about China’s intention to supply additional nuclear power to Pakistan and South Korea’s growing determination to reprocess nuclear fuels. Just how concerned should we be? To be honest, though I recognize that […]
On Wednesday, NATO and the Karzai government struck a deal to arm Afghan locals for defense against the Taliban. It’s a temporary measure devised to make up for the slowness of training permanent security forces. The local forces will be paid for and supervised by the Afghan Interior Ministry. But, of course, there are risks. […]
Shallow piece in the NYTimes today on a modest slowdown in economic growth reported in China for the second quarter, prettily written by non-economists. For a better analysis, not so elegantly written, have a look at the CSFB note from today (below) that explains that growth has slowed due to slackening investment (in Chinese terms […]
Antonio Maria Costa, the UN Drug Czar, is a modest man, so when he stands up, as he did on June 23, and tells an audience at Johns Hopkins-SAIS, in Washington, DC, that we have to start thinking about transnational crime in an entirely different way—it’s news. Costa, whose degrees, from UC-Berkeley and the University […]
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