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 [...]
