Oh. Dear.

Do you remember how the 9/11 attacks happened, and then there was an investigation into whether anything could have been done differently to prevent it, and it turned out that the various government agencies hadn’t been sharing intelligence and information very well? And do you remember how George W Bush (“He Kept Us Safe“) fixed [...]

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Change

Those United States just might become a nation of laws:
President Obama on Thursday signed into effect the Executive Order directing the closing of the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  The final Order, containing his signature, is here.
… a plan for, first, a full-scale review of the case of each of the remaining 245 or [...]

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Mission Accomplished

The worst Presidency ever is finished, and a guy who appears capable of restoring the rule of law and doing some good has been sworn in.
Full text of the inaugural address is here. It was a solid speech – not the most stirring one Obama has delivered, but appropriate for the occasion and the times. [...]

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Book Review

“Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power“ by Fred Kaplan (Wiley, 2008).
I just finished reading this book last night and posted a review to my weRead app on Facebook; here’s a copy of what I had to say:
(4.5 out of 5)
An excellent examination of the foreign policy ideas that drove the Bush [...]

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Peace on Earth

Turns out the war is over, after all. Which war? All the ones America is involved in.
That’s the only explanation for John Yoo’s about-face. You see, he used to be a stern critic of executive overreaching, saying things like this:
President Clinton exercised the powers of the imperial presidency to the utmost in the area in [...]

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Dying for a bargain

And then, amongst all the horrific news of deaths due to terrorism and disease, there are these deaths.

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Operation Iraqi Freedom

It is pleasing that the 1,000th post on this blog is about political progress in Iraq (although it’s a dreadful shame that the news is overshadowed by events in India). While today’s achievement is not quite a match for this fictional New York Times headline, it’s still a step in the right direction:
With a substantial [...]

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Teh Surge != Victory!

Over at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, Dan Froomkin has written a good analysis of what is missing from the “the surge has worked” perspective on Iraq. Froomkin discusses the argument about the surge made by Peter Galbraith. Some of the key points in Froomkin’s piece:
Certainly the surge has been accompanied by a dramatic and [...]

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Pepe Escobar on South Ossetia

Hat-tip to Toaf for pointing me to this video, in which Pepe Escobar discusses the broader context of the South Ossetia conflict. He points to the United States’ foreign policy approach in Eurasia – which he sees continuing along the same lines under either McCain or Obama – as prompting Russia to push back against [...]

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Serious minds

Andrew Bolt continues to ramp up the argument that teh Left is made up of communist sympathisers with love in their hearts for (non-communist) Mother Russia. It’s more straw men and caricatures, and really does nothing more than give his commenters another chance to agree that anyone not organising a march today against Vlad Putin [...]

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