-
Two Theories of Wikileaks, or Just One?
So far as I can tell, the news coverage of the latest diplomatic infodump breaks along a line orthogonal to ordinary US partisanship. Either: 1. There’s nothing new here, although the possibility of future exposure may hamper diplomatic efforts in the near term. or 2. Secrecy is bad, here are some secrets. Neither perspective is particular…
-
Could the Iraq War have been prevented?
In the comments to a post on Republican obstructionism, my old colleague Will Roberts proposes the following historical counterfactual: if the American left had been willing to fight harder and dirtier, they could have prevented or arrested the war in Iraq. He goes on to propose a variety of actions that might have achieved this…
-
The Tea Party Movement
The New York Times’ article on Tea Party ‘founder’ Keli Carender, struck me as an interesting corrective to much of the treatment of the movement as either a Fox News ‘stunt’ or a wing of the Republican Party run by the same old white men with a few token non-males and non-whites. Carendar is apparently…
-
Policing Theory
In a recent report on British policing, Denis O’Connor criticized the growing use of paramilitary policing in the UK: “British police risk losing the battle for the public’s consent if they win public order through tactics that appear to be unfair, aggressive and inconsistent,” he said. “This harms not just the reputation of the individual…
-
War, Bureaucracy, and Public Opinion
David Brooks writes: The disadvantage [of Obama’s style of governance] is the tendency to bureaucratize the war. Armed conflict is about morale, motivation, honor, fear and breaking the enemy’s will. The danger is that Obama’s analytic mode will neglect the intangibles that are the essence of the fight. It will fail to inspire and comfort. Soldiers…