International Relations

Update

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Between dissertating, data collection, and side projects, blogging has been pretty lite here lately.  I'll try to keep up with the occasional updates so as not to dissappoint our loyal reader… Protests continue in Syria. France drops arms to Libyan rebels.  What's particularly interesting about this event (a couple days old I admit) is the … Read more

The Targeting of Corporate Executives

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I came across this article from Defense News yesterday, and the topic is something that I have not come across before.  The gist of the article is that a Pakistani branch of al-Qaeda, or at least with members affiliated with al-Qaeda, was planning the assassination of Lockheed Martin's CEO.

More after the jump…

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Obama’s New Chairman of the Joint Chiefs

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Things have been fairly quiet here—all of us here at QP have been pretty busy with the end of the year and the onset of summer.  Anywho, I came across this article today and wanted to offer a few quick comments. Obama has named Admiral Mike Mullen's replacement as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of … Read more

Evolution, Secrecy, and Bureaucracies

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This sort of reminds me of this.  Really one passage in particular, I suppose: We tend to marvel at the Darwinian perfection of organisms now, saying 'this must have been highly selected for, it's a tuned and sophisticated machine'.  In fact, it's a mess – there's so much unnecessary complexity. Bear with me.  The preceding … Read more

Quick Word on Elite Actors

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Dan Drezner has the most recent in a line of posts discussing the role of elites vs. masses in policymaking (See Drezner for links to the other posts in the series–they're worth reading). I don't really have much to add to the pile here–these are some pretty smart folks and they've said a lot of … Read more

Aid to Pakistan

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Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy has a piece up regarding the changes to US-Pakistani relations that may be coming out of this week's events.  Rogin is specifically discussing the debate in Congress over cutting military assistance to Pakistan.  Clearly this discussion has a long way to go, and the article indicates that significant divisions are emerging in both houses of Congress over what the appropriate response is. 

More below…

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A bit more on Messrs. Y.

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I previously wrote a bit about the document released a few weeks ago by Colonel Mykleby and Captain Porter.  Well here is a NY Times article (a brief one) on the issue.  I suspect the quick references to Bin Laden were added after this article was essentially finished, but there's probably more room here to … Read more

The Situation Room Photo

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Here are some interesting observations from the Situation Room photo from yesterday. 1. The photo on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's laptop is blurred. This is obviously a classified document. 2. As some of the people on Reddit pointed out, there is a burn bag next to Obama. Burn bags are used to burn classified documents. 3. Everyone … Read more