• Pages

  • About us
  • Articles & publications
  • Contact
  • Reading List

• Authors

  • Alex Evans
  • Charlie Edwards
  • Daniel Korski
  • David Steven
  • Elizabeth Sellwood
  • Jules Evans
  • Mark Weston
  • Richard Gowan

• Topics

  • Africa (25)
  • Asia (52)
  • Asia Pacific (4)
  • Cities (15)
  • Climate Change (105)
  • Communication (79)
  • Conflict and security (114)
  • Cooperation and coherence (57)
  • Development (57)
  • Europe (62)
  • Food prices (50)
  • Global economy (73)
  • Influence (106)
  • Leadership (64)
  • Middle East (90)
  • Networks (54)
  • News (169)
  • Off topic (11)
  • Public diplomacy (41)
  • Religion in politics (18)
  • Resilience (56)
  • Scarcity (79)
  • Technology (28)
  • Terrorism (60)
  • UK politics (75)
  • US politics (118)
• 
  

• Archives

  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007

• Reading List

  • Military analysts named in Times exposé appeared or were quoted more than 4,500 times on broadcast nets, cables, NPR
  • Things younger than John McCain
  • Connecting with Consumers Using Deep Metaphors — HBS Working Knowledge
  • An Idea Whose Time Has Gone - School Vouchers
  • Bird flu pandemic risk just as real and probably growing
  • After the boomers, meet the children dubbed 'baby losers' | World news | The Observer
  • 13 Year Old Steals Dad's Credit Card to Buy Hookers
  • Kimmage fired: resource tradeoffs and the war on ideas
  • Obama's Consolidation of the Party
  • Resisting Authority: A Personal Account of the Milgram Obedience Experiments

• Links

  • Afghanistanica
  • Center on International Cooperation
  • Cooperation Commons
  • Dan Drezner
  • Dani Rodrik
  • Democracy in America
  • ECFR
  • Fistful of Euros
  • Foreign Policy Watch
  • ForeignPolicy.com blog
  • Gideon Rachman
  • Global Guerrillas
  • i on Global Trends
  • Institute for the Future
  • Kevin Drum
  • Many to Many
  • Mapping Strategy
  • Network Weaving
  • New Security Beat
  • Schneier on Security
  • Small Wars Journal
  • The Carpetbagger Report
  • The Interpreter
  • The Politics of Wellbeing
  • The Strategist
  • William Lind
  • Yorkshire Ranter

• Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.org

Meaningless, but fun…

The Guardian today has a lengthy piece by John Vidal on “the looming food crisis”:
A “perfect storm” of ecological and social factors appears to be gathering force, threatening vast numbers of people with food shortages and price rises. Even as the world’s big farmers are pulling out of producing food for people and animals [in [...]

Greece from space (hat-tip: NASA).
Meanwhile, John Robb at 4GW blog Global Guerrillas is saying that
…according to my Greek sources, most of the fires have been set around the country’s biggest electricity plants. So the potential for a cascading cycle of damage, where the fires knock out electricity production which in turn hampers relief is [...]

Unreal. On Thursday night’s Jon Stewart show in the US, one of the guests was Lt. Col. John Nagl - one of the leading US military experts on counter-insurgency and fourth generation warfare (link here). Following his appearance, the Counterinsurgency Field Manual - of which he’s a co-author - leapt into the top [...]

Well, that’s the rumour doing the round on various American blogs today, anyway. Here’s the gossip at US News:
The buzz among top Bushies is that beleaguered Attorney General Alberto Gonzales finally plans to depart and will be replaced by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Why Chertoff? Officials say he’s got fans on Capitol Hill, [...]

View Larger Map
Back when the US chaired the 2004 Sea Island G8, George Bush’s flagship proposal centred on the idea of a Greater Middle East Initiative, or GMEI (by way of a reminder, here’s what Brookings had to say about it then). At the time, there was heavy criticism - not only of of the [...]

The New York Times this morning has a leaked copy of a UN report due out on Monday, with news of another record opium crop in Afghanistan - “led by a staggering 45 per cent increase in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand”. But, the NYT goes on:
Loren Stoddard [the head of the US Agency [...]

Another week, another comparison between the US and the last days of Rome. This week, the man full of woe about military overstretch and fiscal implosion is David Walker - the Comptroller General of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office, no less - who writes in the FT that:
America’s [...]

Writing in the Washington Post today, George Will poses a question that I’ve been wondering about lately: if political pressure on the Bush Administration forces a substantial withdrawal of troops sooner rather than later, just as conservatives in the US begin to hope that the tide is turning, what the hell will that do to [...]

I’m reading David Bohm in spare moments this week. Bohm was a US-born quantum physicist who worked with Einstein and died in 1992. In his later career, he became fascinated by the links between science, philosophy and cognition, including how they intersect in the real world of global issues. Here’s a sample:
…So [...]

From the Los Angeles Times this morning: the news that the US Department of Defense was (until halted by an investigation by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation) intending to distribute “freedom packages” to troops in Iraq. What would they contain?
Not body armor or home-baked cookies. Rather, they held Bibles, proselytizing material in English and [...]

Talking Points Memo has this: last week, US Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell was giving an interview to a Texas newspaper, and when asked about the upcoming Congressional debate over wiretapping, he said the result of having a public debate over the legislation would be that:
“…some Americans are going to die.”
Indeed. As one [...]

Gregory Djerejian at Belgravia Dispatch has a good tip if you’re after an informed blog to decode recent happenings on the financial markets: Nouriel Robini’s page on RGE Monitor, a macroeconomic analysis site. Robini’s diagnosis:
Investors are now realizing that:
- We are at a “Minsky Moment”: the deleveraging of a credit boom driven asset bubble [...]

Someone’s found interview footage of Dick Cheney being interviewed in 1994 about the 1991 Gulf War. Should US or UN forces have pressed on to occupy Baghdad, the interviewer wonders? No, says Cheney: it would have led to a quagmire. Anyway, he continues, the Administration concluded that when it came to figuring [...]

Despite the feverish speculation, Nibras Kazimi isn’t buying it. His take:
These are the usual amateurish stunts that US diplomats and spooks resort to when trying to arm-twist a Middle Eastern ‘flunky’.
Perhaps he should go the whole hog and call it public diplomacy…

Not the grass roots, seemingly…
For years, the military has been warning that soldiers’ blogs could pose a security threat by leaking sensitive wartime information. But a series of online audits, conducted by the Army, suggests that official Defense Department websites post material that’s far more potentially harmful than blogs do.
The audits, performed by the [...]

Or not. According to research into news reports in ten US papers:
About 69 percent of the 3,600 news sources [eg people named in an article] completed the survey, and they spotted 2,615 factual errors in 1,220 stories. That means that about half of the stories for which a survey was completed contained one or [...]

With the new edition of Foreign Affairs now out, we can gorge ourselves on the feast that is Rudy Giuliani’s essay about his national security priorities. And what a smorgasbord it is. Some highlights:
Rudy on Iraq:
America must remember one of the lessons of the Vietnam War. Then, as now, we fought a war [...]

Over at the New Yorker’s blog, George Packer (whose December 2006 piece played a big part in bringing counter-insurgency guru David Kilcullen to prominence) is reflecting on Karl Rove’s departure from the White House at the end of this month:
Karl Rove’s resignation brought to mind a conversation I had a few weeks ago with an [...]

My CIC colleague Barney Rubin has an excellent post this morning comparing the recent New York Times and Wall Street Journal [subscribers only, annoyingly] op-eds on Afghanistan, which have sharply divergent perspectives: broadly speaking, half empty and half full respectively. (See also Barney’s mostly approving discussion yesterday of the NYT article.)
But, Barney argues, the [...]

keep looking »