Kate Malcolm makes a great point about academic legal writing (and, consequently, about academic writing in general):

Many scholars get away with loads of stuff that makes little to no sense simply because the reader’s [sic] have been conditioned to believe that such incoherence is a sign of higher-level thinking. WRONG. If it doesn’t make sense, it sucks.

A common failing of academic writing in general—and I say this as someone who’s been up to his neck in political science journal articles for the past five years, which often manage to combine the excessive verbosity of a Faulkner novel with the impenetrability of an economics paper—is that people confuse saying a lot with saying something worthwhile. This is particularly pronounced in political science, where the norm seems to call for repeating one’s points ad nauseum in a discipline where journal space is at a premium.

That being said, one of the virtues of the dissertation process is that since you normally have to explain what you’re doing to someone who doesn’t study your discipline (the outside reader) is that the opposite temptation—to assume your reader knows what you know about the discipline as a whole and where your work fits into it—is tempered considerably, which helps in coming up with a coherent explanation of why your research matters (the “rodent sphincter test,” as an ex-colleague colorfully described it).

This New York Times op-ed news story alleges that some analysts think the mobile bio-weapons labs aren’t mobile bio-weapons labs; instead, they think Saddam Hussein used them to produce hydrogen gas for use weather balloons. This apparently because you need clandestine mobile facilities to make hydrogen for weather balloons, stationary factories being unsuitable for the task.

Only two people are quoted by name, neither of whom have anything to do with the investigation. So, until proven otherwise, any rational observer should consider the rest of the quotes to have been made up by Jayson Blair—er, “Judith Miller and William J. Broad.” By the way, “Miller” allegedly was in two places at the same time (“Iraq” and “Kuwait”) while writing the story, while “Broad” was supposedly reporting from “New York.” To top it all off, the article also reads the minds of unnamed “critics” instead of bothering to find any to quote (on background or otherwise). It’s all typical, Pulitzer-quality (or at least Sulzburger-quality) Times journalism. Sign me up for a subscription!

Dan Drezner thinks the way to repairing the rift between the U.S. and the “International Community” (that’s France to those not who don’t have their international relations decoder rings handy) is for the U.S. and Europe to take “concerted action against any authoritarian government that thinks it can exploit divisions within the West to crack down on their own populations.”

That’s a lovely sentiment, as far as it goes, but I’m not sure it’ll work in practice. Take Dan’s three examples of prominent problem children in the international community:

1. Cuba: The country that the Europeans and Canadians have been propping up ever since the Russians withdrew their support in the early 1990s, and one of the few remaining dictatorships in the western hemisphere. The new EU sanctions hardly compensate for decades of the international community thumbing its nose in Washington’s direction by fêting Castro.

2. Zimbabwe: The country whose serial-human-rights-abuser-slash-dictator Jacques Chirac invited to Paris to take part in his “Africa united against America” summit on the eve of the Iraq war.

3. Burma: The country whose leaders have been spending most of the last decade courting European companies, and where French-Belgian oil giant TotalFinaElf (remember them?) has allegedly been involved in laundering the dictatorship’s drug money.

So, forgive me for not being all that optimistic about the prospects for Euro-American cooperation on democratization, even though I agree with Dan that this is one area in which U.S. and European (noncommercial) interests clearly coincide.