(photo credit: Serge Giachetti) I really enjoyed the meetings today in Iowa City. About 180 people showed up at the Iowa City Public Library and another dozen or so at the Prairie Lights Bookstore where TWN had a blog salon.
As I reported earlier, I am getting the full outside the beltway treatment in Iowa and Wisconsin. I’m actually having a great time and have met some fascinating folks out here — but because I had some toothpaste, deoderant, shaving cream and all that, I checked in my small bag.
My colleague in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and CNN’s terrorism analyst Peter Bergen is broadcasting live intermittently today on CNN from the Afghanistan/Pakistan border from a U.S. base camp there.
Vice President Cheney has come out of the shadows to defend his role as hardliner-in-chief in the so-called “war on terror.
It’s taken a bit of doing. I flew into Chicago. Connecting flight to Cedar Rapids was cancelled. Told there were no more flights until tomorrow. Rented the last car they had available for a one-way trip to Iowa City. Drove four hours.
When I recently met Mohammed Khatami, Iran’s former President, one of the first things he said was no one more than Iran applauded the fall of Saddam Hussein and the routing of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Truth in advertising. I consider myself a friend of Eli Lake. He’s a hard-working journalist whose sympathies are with the neoconservatives, but he doesn’t let them get away with vapid thinking or positions that are completely beyond sensibility.
(Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner is going to miss his traveling dad) Marwan Kraidy of American University and I are going to be spending time in Iowa and Wisconsin the next couple of days.
The first ever public assembly of ALL candidates to succeed Kofi Annan as UN Secretary General will shortly be announced. (Well, TWN is actually announcing their event before they are. . .
This is seriously interesting — and just demonstrates how rich the blogosphere can be. A reader of The Washington Note who is in the UAV business was watching a YouTube video of an F16 flying with the “Hunter UAV payload.” I recommend you turn your volume down when you watch the clip.