Some weekend foreign policy reading

Foreign policy magazine has done a great job creating a stable of foreign policy experts who now blog. Their newest blog is called In Other Words which is a blog about foreign policy books. Be still my beating heart!

The initial set of blogs is a series of critiques of Tom Ricks's new book on Iraq called the Gamble. You can read Dan Drezner's take here, Marc Lynch's here, Christian Brose's here, Susan Glasser's here, and Stephen Walt's here. Then go to the top and read down for Rick's responses.

What is really exciting about this is having a group of smart people with deep expertise discussing a subject in a central location with the time and space needed to make their points. Individual blogs have been excellent for single viewpoints and the better news shows have been great at bringing people together, but this is the best of both worlds.

Block out an hour or so this weekend to read this. You won't come away with easy answers, in fact you will likely just have more questions, but you will have a much better understanding of what happened in Iraq over the past few years and what it means.