I’m going to spend the day with friends and my dog, Oakley, fishing and kayaking on the Chester River in Chestertown, Maryland as I tick off another year today. Lyndon Baines Johnson and Mother Teresa both share my birthday of August 27th. Confucius, Many Ray and Pee Wee Herman too.
(Yasukuni Shrine where the souls of Japan’s soldiers who died on the battlefield — as well as WWII class A war criminals — are deified) The Washington Post has just published an article of mine,”The Rise of Japan’s Thought Police,” that will appear in tomorrow’s Outlook pages, but which is available on the web now….
Christopher Preble, Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, just published this on the Partnership for a Secure America’s blog. Preble and I are two of the three executive committee members of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy. Chris Preble has organized a good forum at an awful time — 8 a.m….
UPI Editor Emeritus Martin Walker has put out a useful essay on a Royal Institute of International Affairs report on Iran and the U.S. The Chatham House/RIIA report can be downloaded as a pdf here. I love the line about American poker players and Iran’s chess strategy.
Today at 12:15 p.m., I will be charing a session with RAND’s International Security and Defence Policy Center Director James Dobbins and my new colleague Daniel Levy, who has just joined as a Senior Fellow of the New America Foundation and is Director of NAF’s Middle East Policy Initiative.
My colleague Flynt Leverett has just published a superb American Prospect article that I discuss below — but its sensibleness compels me to start with concerns about the President’s key advisor on the Middle East, Elliott Abrams. Few would question that Elliott Abrams is a brilliant guy.
One chronologist has just noted that it has been exactly 1,800 days since George W. Bush said he would get Osama bin Laden. What got in the way of Bush’s plan? Two things — Dick Cheney and Iraq.
We have been so distracted by serious problems around the world — and in Washington — that we completely forgot that The Washington Note was founded on August 3, 2004.
(Japan’s Prime Minister INUKAI Tsuyoshi who was assassinated in May 1932 in his official residence by a group of right-wing militarists who opposed Inukai’s recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Manchuria and who was a staunch defender of parliamentary democracy in Japan) Japan is making its way back as a topic of interest on the nation’s…
For those in the DC area, I am hosting a brown bag lunch meeting on America’s Foreign Policy Challenges in the Middle East on Thursday, 24 August, at 12:15 p.m. with Ambassador James Dobbins who directs RAND Corporation’s International Security and Defense Policy Center.
