The Sunni Awakening, combined with the surge, has genuinely changed the situation in Iraq and so profoundly that it is difficult to get a good overview free from the emotions and more or less fixed views that have characterized the debate on the war. Bartie Bull, writing in Commentary provides a very useful one in [...]

I want to contrast two examples of the use of media in the war on terror. The first is a Washington Post article about the Voice of America by Robert R. Reilly, its former director, complaining that the VOA Broadcasting Board of Governors have pursued a policy of dropping content and replaceing it with pop [...]

Ever since 9/11 I have held two different and apparently contradictory views of radical Islam. On the one hand, as I came to understand Osama and his followers and the ideology that drove them, it was clear that they lived the world of the Crusades. That they saw the West through a medieval lens untransformed [...]

Is Multiculturalism good or bad? I think it is both good and bad and a case where an either or approach can be disastrous. It is a classic case where policy demands balance. The still breaking story of the Canadian terrorist bust brought out a comment that I found to be the best short critique [...]

A key personal reason for starting Yankeewombat was to clarify my own thinking by putting myself in a position where I had to actually write down my reaction to events – not just think about them. Also given the repetitive nature of news cycles I’ve noticed inside myself that just passively reacting tends to recycle [...]

Wretchard of The Belmont Club in a brilliant post describes what he sees as a change of tone in the Blogsphere recently. My own hunch is that in the last two or three months there’s been a change in the tone of the blogsphere. Nothing definite, simply a change in atmosphere in proportion to the [...]

Alan Johnson writing on Normblog, points out that the Euston Manifesto gets unfairly criticized by both left and right because they see it through the lens of their own static ideology. So strong are those lenses at this juncture in political debate that the critics entirely miss the clear words of the Manifesto. The third [...]