Dueling takes on Al Qaeda
So, how's Al Qaeda doing? Let's ask the experts! Bruce Hoffman, what do you think? 2008 marks the twentieth anniversary of al-Qaeda’s founding. The movement thus joins a select group of terrorist...
View ArticleWhat do Al Qaeda and Illinois Nazis have in common?
Al Qaeda is beginning to articulate its approach to the Obama administration: Al-Qaida's No. 2 leader used a racial epithet to insult Barack Obama in a message posted Wednesday, describing the...
View ArticleI'd like to thank Al Qaeda for clearing that up
Reuters' Inal Ersan reports on a shocking announcement from Al Qaeda: If it were in a position to do so, Al Qaeda would use Pakistan's nuclear weapons in its fight against the United States, a top...
View ArticleMy one post about Captain Underpants
Longtime readers might have noticed that I did not blog about the Captain Underpants Bomber from Christmas Day 2009. Why not? Well, two three reasons: This might shock you, but there are some issues...
View ArticleYour weekend reading on terrorism
Your humble blogger has been relatively sanguine about the attempted Times Square bombing effort. That said, Bruce Hoffman's National Interest essay -- published before the attempt -- is a sobering...
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Why I'm glad I'm not a counter-terrorism expert
Over the weekend, CIA chief Leon Panetta had a chat with This Week's Jake Tapper, and provided the following assessment of Al Qaeda' capabilities: TAPPER: How many Al Qaida do you think are in...
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You know what? Let the terrorists win.
You wouldn't know it from the blog, but for the past week I have been astonishingly productive. I've written long-overdue papers, copy-edited long-overdue page proofs, prepped long-overdue syllabi,...
View ArticleYou say strengthening, I say weakening
Over at Shadow Government, Mary Habeck argues that al Qaeda's capabilities are on the rise, as evidenced by the recent effort to launch a trans-European Mumbai-style bombing. This is akin to a CNN...
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How Al Qaeda has become a rock star cliché
Over at Wired, Spencer Ackerman assesses how low al Qaeda has fallen: Nine years ago, al Qaeda crashed a plane into the Pentagon and came dangerously close to taking out the White House. Now it wants...
View ArticleI'm still waiting to be scared
Stephen Colbert's Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's attempt to rally fear in the hearts of Americans through its foiled toner cartridge gambit continues to reverberate in homeland security circles....
View ArticleSo how's the global jihad going?
Hey, remember Al Qaeda? I wonder if the group responsible for that extra-special pat-down* I got at Logan earlier this week is still capable of serious power projection. Peter Bergen in Vanity Fair...
View ArticleU.S. forces have killed Osama bin Laden. Discuss.
I was going to title this post, "Osama bin Laden, R.I.P." but the thing is , I really don't want him to rest in peace. He's definitely dead, however. I'll write a longer blog post about the...
View ArticleWhy killing bin Laden is a big f***ing deal
As a group, foreign policy analysts and international relations theorists tend to focus on how large, impersonal factors affect the contours of world politics. We're like this for two reasons: a)...
View ArticleWhat should the U.S. do in Mali?
The moment U.S. armed forces are deployed somewhere, that place moves to the top of the pundit queue. As a result, the bylaws of the International Brotherhood of Foreign Policy Pundits mandates that...
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