When it comes to the war on drugs, here are two awfully good reasons not to be a supply-sider:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The CIA obstructed inquiries into its role in the shooting down of an aircraft carrying a family of U.S. missionaries in Peru in 2001, the agency’s inspector general has concluded.
The inspector-general’s report said a CIA-backed [...]

A U.S. judge has ordered that five Algerians captured in Bosnia after the September 11th attacks be freed from Guantanamo. My colleague Chris Boucek does groundbreaking work on counterterrorism and detainee issues at Carnegie, and I drew on his expertise in my remarks at last night’s AFF roundtable.

Larison asks why Evangelicals are being blamed for the GOP’s failures. They have been the least influential segment of the party in recent years, despite being numerous and reliable (or perhaps because of it, no?). He suggests it was because:
they were too wedded to the Bush administration and its failed record, and they were too [...]

Polansky the Younger has a nice one up on the front page today. Here’s a taste:
Of course, suggesting that the neocons will somehow manage to pervert our descendants’ understanding of the present is pointless, insofar as the consensus of our children’s children is unlikely to be right in the first place. Most people are poorly [...]

It’s these sorts of things that make you wonder what the situation in South Asia would look like if we hadn’t squandered so many opportunities for cooperation since September 11th:
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) – Gunmen abducted an Iranian diplomat in Peshawar on Thursday, a day after a U.S. aid worker was shot dead in the city [...]

If this New York Times piece is true, it’s time to start rethinking U.S. policy toward Georgia:
TBILISI, Georgia — Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the longstanding Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and Russian aggression.
Instead, [...]

My colleague Amr Hamzawy has a partial post-mortem on Bush administration Middle East policy in Al-Ahram:
After two Bush administrations, which sought to redraw the map of the Middle East in order to eliminate or marginalise forces antagonistic to its policies in the region, Washington is incapable of controlling conflicts in Lebanon, in Palestine between the [...]

I think Dan and pmm have fair points about Palin’s role in contributing to McCain’s unpopularity at this point, but in the end, I think Palin is mostly a distraction. If this election were a referendum on experience, Obama himself would be in trouble. What’s really at issue is judgment. Looking at polls on Iraq, [...]

So once again, in Sonny’s view, there’s no difference between imperfect cooperation and no cooperation at all. Some might say we should think a few steps ahead before shaving our heads and going straight for our guns every time we run into a problem. As Stephen Van Evera wrote in the inaugural issue of the MIT [...]

Yes, there are reasons not to do things like this:
DAMASCUS, Syria – Syria threatened Wednesday to cut off security cooperation along the Iraqi border if there are more American raids on Syrian territory, and the U.S. Embassy announced it would close Thursday because of a mass rally called to protest a deadly weekend commando attack.
Assuming [...]

Nicholas Kristof makes light of an al-Qaeda supporter’s endorsement of John McCain in the U.S. presidential election:
“Al Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” read a commentary on a password-protected Islamist Web site that is closely linked to Al Qaeda and often disseminates the group’s propaganda.
There are two ways to read this: [...]

Sonny points out that I was unclear in my earlier post: I’m talking about the WTC bombing of February 1993, hence the reference to attacking Afghanistan in 2000 or 2001. A good part of why we ended up where we got is that President Clinton failed to make good on his promise to bring [...]

James Goldgeier thinks a President Obama would have just as tough a go of it as a President McCain would:
“There is an expectation by the Europeans that Barack Obama could come in as president and he is going to wave his magic wand and everything is going to be different,” said James Goldgeier, expert at [...]

There’s a difference between bad and worse. To me, Sonny’s historical perspective reads like: Gaza was a hellhole, anyway, so why not bring Hamas to power? The Iranians have been trying to build nukes for 30 years, so why not invade Iraq and provide them an object lesson in why they need one sooner rather [...]

I’d like to belabor this, at least a little, because the difference in our conceptions of how to protect our people is the difference between a foreign policy that works and a foreign policy in which we continue creating more problems than we can solve.
In the past few years, the idea that we can take [...]

Sonny’s right about the applications of plausible deniability in the war on terrorism. The trouble is that “plausible” part.  It’s one thing when a senior Syrian security official gets stabbed in a freak mugging in the capital. Another when a helicopter air assault comes from inside Iraq. At that point, it’s pretty useless for the U.S. [...]

Ordinarily, this would fall flat on its face, but these guys have accomplished a rare feat: repeating history first as farce, and second as tragedy:

Charles Krauthammer has penned his endorsement of John McCain: 
The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing [...]

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea that when it comes to the executive branch, at least, we don’t have two parties, we have one: the party of the Establishment.
The lecturer in one my courses today nicely expressed this when he summed up the relative lack of disagreement in last week’s presidential debate [...]

Dawn and CNN are reporting that Pakistan Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud has died of kidney failure.  The Pakistani government blames Mehsud for the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.  The Taliban denies Mehsud’s death.  Details are still sketchy. (Hat tip: Kalsoom Lakhani at CHUP.)