I’ve got a thing this morning reporting on the director of national intelligence. It’s going to eat up my morning and I’ll be probably without internet access during that time. Since I didn’t plan ahead to recruit any guests or pre-schedule any posts (except for one), that means this blog will be dark until probably [...]

An awesome Scott Horton interview with Gary Solis clarifies many questions about the law of war — from the Wikileaks video to the targeting of CIA operatives to why material support for terrorism can’t reasonably be considered a war crime. One day I will understand why “unprivileged belligerent” is a reasonable designation to members of [...]

James Dobbins, you crazy for this one! Though the United Nations routinely fields such integrated missions, in which the military commander is directly subordinate to the civilian representative of the Secretary General, the Israelis are unlikely to accept a chief of mission from the United Nations. Israel gets, uh, kind of black-helicoptery about the U.N., [...]

Not literally. But seven CNAS scholars try to think through the security-related modalities of midwifing a Palestinian state. Over the course of 100 pages. That I have barely started to read. But to some degree, what’s important is that CNAS devoted any effort to this subject at all. Anything CNAS writes gets gobbled up by [...]

I’m going to make you care.

That terrorism book I mentioned before? Audrey Kurth Cronin’s How Terrorism Ends? The website for the book is here. I’ll have a review — heh, written from Guantanamo Bay — hopefully next week.

Rest in peace, Guru.

The Taliban murdered the deputy mayor as he prayed in the mosque. And it has real strategic significance.

Happy birthday to Israel. What was once an emotional outburst amid eccentric European Jews is an international fact and among the crowning achievements of the Jewish people. I wish, for your birthday, you wouldn’t squander your inheritance in shortsighted, paranoid and self-defeating ways. (Haaretz: “[Israel] is devoid of any diplomatic plan aside from holding onto [...]

For an eye-opening post about the role of nuclear weapons in India’s grand strategy, read Michael Krepon’s Arms Control Wonk offering. As you’ll see, it’s less about India than it is about the calculations that lead a country whose policymaking elites championed global nuclear disarmament for decades to get a bomb and operate outside of [...]