Syrian Crisis Won’t Be Resolved With The Tactics Used In Libya by P.J. Crowley

TheDailyBeast.com August 4, 2012 President Obama's strategy in Libya helped depose Qaddafi in short order. But P.J. Crowley says the same tactics won't work in Syria--and the crisis will only get worse. The resignation of Kofi Annan, the U.N. and Arab League special envoy for Syria, made official what was long ago apparent. His six-point …

How to Become a Better Leader by Nadia Goodman

view original / entrepreneur.com As an entrepreneur, you are responsible for building an effective team and enabling your employees to do their best work. To do that successfully, you need to cultivate empathy, or the ability to imagine yourself in another's shoes. "For leaders in particular, empathy means understanding how you come across to others and how you're perceived …

Ode To Cheese

Great new work from that up and coming new teen poet... Luke DeMarco... great stuff!  Ode To Cheese.

Idealism And Pragmatism In The Middle East By Henry A. Kissinger

DeM Banter:  Can you hear the applause?  Why are we not hearing more of this debate and dialog?  Too complex? There are issues, concepts, strategies that have to be addressed and wrestled with.  This is not easy by any stretch, but I don't see it going away anytime soon... do you? Washington Post August 5, …

The real problem with the civilian-military gaps : By Rosa Brooks

ForeignPolicy.com DeM Banter: And why do we have these issues? Would be very interested in any thoughts... August 2, 2012 Thought Cloud One of the biggest misunderstandings about the civilian-military gap is that it is cultural -- the national security version of the red state-blue state divide. But the distance between those in and out …

Senate Panel Funds Ships, Drones Military Doesn’t Want by Spencer Ackerman

wired.com / view original DeM Banter:  Really? We can't help ourselves can we? For the first time in over a decade, the Pentagon’s budget has to shrink, thanks to a deal to cut the deficit that Congress and President Obama struck last year. Yet a key Senate panel voted on Thursday to fund big-ticket hardware — ships, …

America’s 7 mistakes in Afghanistan by Michael Rubin

view original / globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School. He also teaches Afghan history to deploying U.S. Army units. The views expressed are solely those of the author. More than a decade into the conflict, the Afghan war isn’t going well. Politically, Afghanistan …

U.S. model for a future ‘Air-Sea Battle’ stirs ire in China and inside Pentagon By Greg Jaffe

DeM Banter:  Sounds like there are many assumptions here that may indeed prove false...how many times in the past century and a half have we correctly predicted the next conflict? Planning is important however...there is a fine line between planning, funding, and execution.  Eisenhower is famous for saying..."Plans are nothing; planning is everything."  Washington Post …