WPR Blog Archive

CARACAS, Venezuela — The first thing I noticed, after we’d swatted through the horde of zealous taxi drivers at the airport and were on the road into town, was the endless stream of political slogans and pro-Chavez campaign posters lining the autopista. Speeding past the mountain-side barrios that surround Caracas late last night, the one that grabbed my attention most read, in Spanish: “Vote Against The Devil. Vote Against Imperialism. Vote For Chavez.” No doubt, the president’s backers are in full campaign mode. That’s why it came as something of a surprise Sunday to learn that Chavez has temporarily suspended […]

With the advent of a blog-style Web site called “For the Record,” the U.S. Department of Defense has gotten into the business of fact-checking journalists. It’s only the latest example of how the Internet is usurping the monopoly traditional media outlets have on providing information to the public. Governments more and more are attempting to use the Internet to bypass press channels and provide information direct to their constituents. Given the importance of perception and the “battle of ideas” to warfare, it’s not surprising that in the U.S. government, DOD has been a pioneer in this kind of thing. Witness, […]

A year after riots rocked the suburbs of French cities, French Police are denouncing what they see as coordinated attacks on their officers by Muslim youth in Paris’s banlieues. An official of one right-leaning French police union has even labeled the new round of attacks an “intifada” against French police. The latest incident occurred Friday night and early Saturday morning in the Paris suburb of Epinay-sur-Seine, when police responding to reports of thievery were ambushed by a group of youths wielding stones and other weapons. One officer was injured when a stone hit him in the jaw, according to accounts […]

Apparently, the seismic and geological analyses of the North Korean nuclear tests that are now beginning to trickle in point toward a failed test. This Korea Times article is the first news report I’ve found questioning the test’s success. And Jeffrey Lewis at the blog Arms Control Wonk is all over the story. He cites already published U.S. Geological Survey data as evidence that the test was a dud. According to Lewis, the French defense minister was the first official from the government of a major power to entertain the possibility of a failure. Lewis also explains why it didn’t […]

The conventional wisdom is that the “global war on terrorism” can only be won if the spread of the ideology that feeds terrorism — Islamism, Islamic extremism or whatever you want to call it — is halted, discredited and rolled back. Even the Bush administration, which has been criticized from the left and right for relying too much on “hard power” instruments such as the military in its foreign policy, now seems to realize this. One much-heralded case in point was the appointment of Bush confidant Karen Hughes as under secretary of state for public diplomacy. Another is the Defense […]

The North Korean foreign minister announced Tuesday his country will conduct a nuclear test, the Associated Press reports. We managed to get our hands on the English version of the nuclear test announcement put out by North Korea’s state-controlled media organ, the Korean Central News Agency. The release doesn’t appear to be posted on the KCNA’s Web site as yet. Reading the announcement gives one a sense of the regime’s propaganda style, and the paranoid, almost desperate, voice that characterizes it: DPRK Foreign Ministry Clarifies Stand on New Measure to Bolster War Deterrent Pyongyang, October 3 (KCNA) — The Foreign […]

With the publication of his new book, State of Denial, the third tome he’s written on the Bush administration after Sept. 11, Bob Woodward is everywhere. The Washington Post Company is milking the Woodward book for all its worth, publishing two excerpts so far in the paper (see here and here) and another in Newsweek. (More on the content of Woodward’s book later). But Woodward is far from the only big-time journalist that’s helping to write the first-draft of the history of the Iraq war. An astonishing number of books on the conduct of war — examining decision-making in Baghdad […]