The Coming Wars: What the Pentagon can now do in secret. “The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.”

about the Guantanamo prison facility have leaked, and they’re not pretty: Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantánamo.

at the Daily Kos: Terrorist Strategy 101. Very cogent and concise description of what’s going on and why the current policies do not address the issues adequately.
By Pericles, aka Doug Muder.

that a leader is dead than the denials. Well today we have a whopper: Doctors Deny Reports of Arafat’s Death.

Update: Arafat actually held on for a lot longer than expected, but now (Nov 11) he has finally slipped out of his coma. Any prognostications on the what this means for the future of the region would be wild speculation at this point.

has published a post with an extended quote from his own article in The Atlantic this summer that very clearly makes the distinction between the two foreign policy stances at play in this election. I wonder if John Robb has a reaction to this. Unfortunately for me I haven’t been following his site closely enough of late.

My own view is that non-state actors and others outside the state system were some of the prime movers, though often hidden, behind most if not all of the battles of the latter period of the Cold War. The fighting occurred within the context of the state system, with one side or the other jockeying for control of one of the dozens of proxies for either the US or the Soviet Union, but that doesn’t mean it was just an extension of earlier state-centric battles. Just because groups were coopted by one side or the other doesn’t obviate the fact that there were a lot of non-state actors of great – primary -significance. Iran-Contra, Afghanistan in the Soviet era, the rise of narco-terrorists in Columbia and elsewhere in Central America – all of these involved non-state actors and weren’t primarily about a state per se but much more diffuse control and power issues. You might say I agree with the Democratic vision as expressed in the article and would take the analysis even further.