A Knight in Dragonland

There is something about this quest for absolute security that is self-defeating. It is an exercise which, like every form of perfectionism, undermines and destroys its own basic purpose. The French have their wonderful proverb: Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien–the absolute best is the enemy of the good. Nothing truer has ever been said [...]

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Scott McLemee, who writes the Intellectual Affairs column at InsideHigherEd.com, recently came up with an interesting term (tongue-in-cheek): Islamophobofascism.
Not all Islamophobes are fanatics. Most, on the contrary, are decent people who just want to live in peace. Islamophobia forms only part of their identity. They grew up fearing Islam, and they still worry about it [...]

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The United States State Department released the 2006 terrorism statistics today. No big surprise … there’s been another massive increase in terrorism deaths since 2005.
The graph below was created using the Terrorism Knowledge Base from the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. They have an incident analysis wizard that can generate all [...]

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There are some very interesting remarks in this article in the New York Times about mounting tensions in the Horn of Africa. Ethiopian troops are preparing to confront the Islamist forces that have taken control of much of the southern portion of Somalia. The only internationally recognized government in Somalia sits besieged by [...]

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Yes, I realize that December 7 was last Thursday, but I just ran across some interesting posts related to the 65th anniversary of Imperial Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
I’ve been a frequent critic of comparisons between the current military situation and World War II. This post from Balkinization does not compare the two [...]

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The ridiculous overreaction to Senator Kerry’s comments – a botched joke at the President’s expense for which Kerry has apologized repeatedly – indicates that the current administration is beyond dysfunctional. The President says it was never stay the course, and then Keith Olbermann shows a compilation of 29 different times Bush used the phrase [...]

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Andrew Sullivan, a conservative columnist, has this post on his Daily Dish regarding the recent “compromise” (ohhh does that word have multiple meanings) on the issue of torture. Let me quote a good chunk of it, with my own emphasis:
The truly disturbing part is that the only criterion for detaining anyone without charges [...]

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There is an article in the New York Times regarding the National Intelligence Assessment on the state of global terrorism. The emphasis present throughout this post is my own.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and [...]

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The captured soldiers should be kindly treated and kept.

This is called using the conquered foe to augment one’s own strength.

In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns.

Thus it may be known that the leader of armies is the arbiter of the people’s fate, the man on whom it depends whether the [...]

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The Bush administration describes Pakistan as a great ally in the War on Terror. Excuse me? Pakistan’s government just concluded a deal with tribal leaders in Waziristan editorialized here in the Washington Post. The deal results in a withdrawal of Pakistan’s army troops from the region. In return, these tribal leaders [...]

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