Richardson: A New Realism

By Aziz P. -
Video of Richardson's speech about foreign policy and Iraq at the CSIS is now online. The AP has a summary as well.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wow, I'm a political blogger!

By Razib Khan -
I'm feeling kind of strange, blogging about political and foreign policy issues. I'll be honest, I don't follow this stuff anymore, I have a hard time getting my head wrapped around a lot of topics and I don't expend much CPU cycles to the bread & butter of the political blogosphere. But a few points: 1) I've been motivated to make some negative comments about what I perceive to be unhinged fantasists because even if I don't focus on this area much I can spot incorrect assumptions since those assumptions are derived broadly from other disciplines. 2) Several individuals in a thread below referred to the potentiality of Islamists. As I said to Dean , England made its craven peace with Germany 1 year before war. Fascist brownshirts had been terrorizing Jews, Austria had been annexed and the Rhine remilitarized. Germany had already been involved in a World War. The comparison of the potentiality of threat seems a very stretched analogy to what had been...
Read more

Wrong reason

By Razib Khan -
No matter the reality that reason is imperfect because our own reasoning process is fraught with "noise" introduced by our biases in the form of slanted premises and unexposed assumptions I believe it is a good place to start, sometimes. John Emerson in the comments says this: The idea that militant Islam is a threat equal to Nazi Germany or the USSR, or might become that big a threat, is assumed by many and perhaps most hawks, and it really underlies the whole Iraq War. That idea is almost impossible to argue in detail and I've seldom or never seen it argued. It's just pure fantasy . I don't know if it is pure fantasy, but yes, I do think that to a great extent it is fantasy. I've believed this from the fall of 2004 when I extended my reading to non-science blogs. Many of the individuals expressing a hawkish perspective claim a historical perspective, but as someone who loves history for its own sake I tend to find their analyses grounded in biased and m...
Read more