Arms Control Wonk

I spoke with a military officer who suggested that the recent civil violence in Iraq had accelerated implementation of an “enclave” strategy in Iraq. He thinks this may help us turn the corner; I think he is nuts. The creation of the “Fallujah Brigade” (which was briefly to be headed by a Saddam henchman) was …

The ICRC called a press conference to comment on the publication, by the Wall Street Journal, of a confidential January 2004 report on detention in Iraq submitted by to Coalition Forces in February 2004. The report alleged that the conditions were “tantamount to torture.” Pierre Kraehenbuehl, director of operations of the International Committee of the …

The Washington Post has an excellent editorial today, linking the human rights abuses in Iraqi prisons with the Bush Administration/’s pathological aversion to international norms and conventions: Abuses will take place in any prison system. But Mr. Rumsfeld/’s decisions helped create a lawless regime in which prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been humiliated, …

Working on my dissertation, I/’ve noticed a strange fascination among the nuclear warfighting crowd with the idea that 20 million casualties was low enough to risk in a crisis with the Soviets. Here is a passage from Herman Kahn in On Thermonuclear War (1961): “Feasible combinations of military and non-military measures might make the difference …