According to Oxford University Press, my book checks in at a healthy 452 pages. I still can't quite believe that I wrote something so long -- approximately 165,000 words, 130,000 more than anything else I've ever written. Writing the book was extremely fun, but the hard work before the writing, the researching and the outlining, was often anything but. It's...
Needless to say, there’s a much warmer atmosphere at this year’s climate conference in Cancun than last year’s conference in Copenhagen. By all accounts, the Mexicans have done a great job both in preparing the diplomatic groundwork for this year’s meeting and in running the conference during its first week. They certainly have learned the lessons of the last war. ...
It's easy to laugh at the USG for its directives to employees re the handling of Wikileaks cables (as the NYT put it this morning, a case of "shutting the barn door after the horse has left"). The idea that a State Department employee talking about the cables in a Starbucks, much less with her spouse at home, would constitute...
Well, not quite that broad, but almost. This letter from career services at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (posted here) is a stunner: Hi students, We received a call today from a SIPA alumnus who is working at the State Department. He asked us to pass along the following information to anyone who will be applying for...
And why not? Assuming that the feds don't catch up with this operation at this rate (by my calculation) we have more than four years of daily document dumps ahead of us. From Foreign Policy, let's welcome Wikileaked to the blogosphere. Today's highlights include more accounts of inebriated and otherwise less-than-sparkling eastern European and central Asian leaders. (Material from these realms...
I don't know enough about the facts or the law in the U.K. to know whether there is a serious basis for charging Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapaksa with war crimes arising out of the conflict last year with Tamil Separatists. But it looks like there will be an attempt to force his detention and a war crimes investigation during his...
From an interview with Jennifer Rubin, a new conservative blogger on the WaPo: Bolton has begun to talk openly to conservative gatherings and media about his interest in a 2012 presidential run. "I'm seriously considering it," he told me in an interview, in large part because of the "lack of foreign policy debate." Having gotten past the idle...
Peter's posts on how Wikileaks actually makes the US and its diplomatic service look fairly good are spot on. The Foreign Service looks a lot more interesting now that I know I get to spy for the U.S., too! But as this article from Slate notes, Secretary Hillary Clinton made it official State Department policy ("The "National Human Intelligence Directive on...
The Wikileaks episode seems to be turning to the USG's advantage, at least domestically: it's provoking a lot of sympathy for the government as an entity. That's a rare sentiment these days. Leave aside angry calls for Assange's head (almost literally), people are actually feeling sorry for the USG. One way that's being expressed is to compare the government to private...
I suspect this will be a much bigger story than the previous Iraq and Afghanistan disclosures, mostly because there will be something here for everyone. I'm not sure that the State Department looks particularly bad, as Timothy Garten Ash explains. It shouldn't be a revelation to anyone that diplomats sometimes do something that looks like spying. This is much more...
The stories of the earthquake and then the cholera coming out of Haiti continue to horrify and sadden, if it the global media wasn't already numb from Haiti stories. There is plenty of blame to go around: Bill Clinton, the Haitian government, and now we can add the United Nations to that list. Almost everyone now accepts that the United Nations...
I know Facebook does some strange things regarding friend suggestions, but I think this "tag your friends" request might take the cake. Behold how Facebook interpreted a photo I took of Mein Kampf in the Nuremberg Documentation Center: ...
