A colorful mosaic of flower petals brightens an otherwise grim corner in the Woolwich section of London. Its mirror image rests outside a quiet home in Middleton, Greater Manchester. Each bouquet serves as a worthy tribute to both the beautifully adorned uniform of an Army Drummer and the character of …
I like to write my own blogs, and too often have too much to say to readers who want it short and sweet. But the push to attribute past and future attacks on U.S. citizens on U.S. to “self-radicalization” is the kind of linguistic legerdemain too sweet not to invite …
With nearly 70,000 dead Syrians since the beginning of the unrest, the Syrian conflict certainly join a select group of international massacres. At this path Samathan Power will have enough facts and material in order to write volume two of “A problem from Hell” looking at the ghosts of Syria. …
“It’s all psychological. You yell barracuda, everybody says, ‘Huh? What?’ You yell shark, we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.” In the summer of 1975, the budding auteur, Steven Spielberg, created a virtual panic at America’s beaches with ingeniously crafted screen images of a certain …
The recent terrorist attacks that took place in Mogadishu and Boston were not just intended to kill and mutilate many civilians, but to create widespread terror, disarray, and insecurity that would last far beyond the initial shock of these bloody events. It goes without saying — anyone who takes part …
A defining moment for Mr. Obama’s foreign policy legacy is fast approaching
From the Levant and the Persian Gulf to the Korean peninsula, events in recent weeks have offered a clinic in the difficulty of enforcing red lines on rogue regimes and their weapons of mass destruction, as well as how …
I’ve been reading an awesome book about Winston Churchill called The Last Lion by William Manchester and Paul Reid. One of the many things in the book that jumped out at me was a quote from a speech Churchill gave in Nov. 1942 after British forces defeated Rommel and his …
Bostonians are stunned by the marathon “pressure cooker bombings” that killed three people, including an eight-year-old boy, and injured hundreds of others — spectators and participants — with the kinds of battlefield injuries we’ve only read about until now in reports about Afghanistan and Iraq — shrapnel injuries, amputations, burns …
U.S. Congressman Mike Rogers chairs the House of Representatives’ panel on intelligence, which this week overwhelmingly approved a new cyber security bill designed to enhance data sharing between the government and private industry to protect computer networks and intellectual property from cyber attacks.
Yet the day before it passed, Rogers had …
I’ve been off the blogosphere because of a recurrence of back problems which didn’t allow me to spend much time seated. I mention this because in a recent talk, the new Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel made the following comment:
“In many respects, the biggest long-term fiscal challenge facing …
Not so long ago, after twelve hours in the air, I found myself stranded at an international airport at 2 in the morning. The flight had been delayed—my pre-arranged pickup had abandoned his mission or just not shown up, and there was one taxi about to pull out and head home for the night. I was still 90 miles from my room for the night, and offered him twice the normal rate to take on one last fare, which he pointed out, wasn’t even close, direction-wise, to his own waiting bed. But for twice the money, and for Allah, he would do it.
The irony, of course, is that the FSA is just an umbrella term for a loose aggregation of Sunni militias whose best units–and consequently the fighters awarded the most money and the most lethal weapons– are, according to its own reports, puritanical Islamic jihadists, shouting ‘death to the United States and the West’ even as these targets scramble to comply with strategies the Saudis clearly believe are in their own best and immediate interests.
The good news in nuclear arms control this last week was of course China’s rather surprising decision to join in international sanctions against North Korea. The single most important thing about sanctions, almost always, is not their material effect but, rather, when the sanctions are universal, the moral and political …
In what seems to be a response to the Corker/Inhofe op-ed in the Wall Street Journal of last week, elder statesmen George Shultz, Bill Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn reiterated their call for more urgent progress on reducing nuclear risks, particularly proliferation. This is their fifth article …
In two previous posts, I wrote about the work of three Ohio State University researchers who are using GPS to detect covert nuclear tests. Now, there is word that the International Monitoring System (IMS) of the the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) is of increasing …
