Darwin the Alligator lives in the lagoon under my friend Kate Brown’s deck in Hilton Head. Lovely.

Armenian President Serzh Sargsian and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at Davos. The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that the administration is reconsidering President Obama’s campaign promise to declare that the Armenians were victims of a genocide during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire nearly one hundred years ago.

You may have seen that Carlos Lozada of the Washington Post highlighted “The Autonomy Rule” as a new conceptualization of American foreign policy framing in his “Big Ideas” column on Sunday.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell and is chairman of the New America Foundation/U.S.-Cuba 21st Century Policy Initiative. There are several dimensions to the debate over the U.S.

Katherine Tiedemann is a program associate at the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program. I have to push back on Ben Katcher‘s previous post on several points.

A quick follow up to my last post on Afghanistan. Frederick Kagan penned an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in October 2007 called “Spend Whatever It Takes to Win the War on Terror.

It has slightly bothered me that the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project grabbed some Hamilton branding for ideas that were anything but.

Kirby Dick, the Academy Award nominated film director for This Film Is Not Yet Rated, will soon be releasing a new film on the hypocrisy of in-the-closet gay politicians and the lengths Washington will go to help protect them even as they vote and legislate against equal rights and protections for gay and lesbian Americans….

Many thanks to friends and fellow bloggers at TWN for covering for me this last week as I was away traveling and offline. I am back in Miami today — heading back to Washington, DC this morning. More soon.

(Photo credit: Army.mil’s photostream) Max Boot, Frederick Kagan, and Kimberly Kagan argue in today’s New York Times that we cannot afford to “lose” Afghanistan and suggest a number of tactical changes to our operations there. Their argument contains three major flaws.