"A few blogs have thousands of readers, but never have so many people written so much to be read by so few."

What about quality of readership? Many superb academic publications like Society have only around 2,000 subscribers. The real question is this: Does Dan Drezner’s blog influence a high number of the movers and shakers of public opinion?

For all our sakes, I'd like to think so.
In any event the obvious takes over; Of COURSE the Times is going top dis all over Blogs. It's a matter of fearing what they cannot control. And why would they do THAT?

Simply put... THEY think blogs influence a high number of the movers and shakers of public opinion... and they see it possible that that number will exeed the number of the influence of print media.

"...never have so many people written so much to be read by so few..."

You sure this guy is talking about bloggers? It sounds like he's talking about people who post notes in comment sections.

Yes, he talking about the bloggers. Who'd bother to waste their time talking about the people who post in the comments section? I can't imagine being more irrelevant...

My name is Ruth H and I am a blogoholic. I do not write a blog, I read blogs. I enable the bloggers by reading their words.
And I don't intend to stop.

Dan -

I just read your article over at TNR, and since there is no way to comment there, I thought I would drop a line here. In your article you argue that

Indeed, regime change in the Middle East looks like a lousy, rotten policy option for addressing the root causes of terrorism, until one considers the alternatives--appeasement or muddling through.

In my opinion, you fail to address a fourth option, which is containment. I will not try to go through the nuances of containment, but I will direct you to the article written this month by Wesley Clark for the Washington Monthly. In that article he argues that our leaders failed to learn the proper lessons from the Cold War. I find his arguement to be cogent and convincing. Perhaps you could address it at some point.

timshel, I can address Clark's containment argument right now. Containment of Iraq is what put us on the path to 9/11 in the first place. Containment is why we are so deeply distrusted by the Shiite majority who remember their abandonment in 1991 even if we have forgotten. Containment of Saddam Hussein is the foundation stone of the idea by now well established in the Arab world that standing up to the Americans can be something other than a fatal mistake if it is done cleverly enough.

I have always dismissed talk of a "clash of civilizations" because I regard use of the plural as absurd; I don't doubt democracy is possible in the Arab world but believe it to be the work of generations. The justification for war I took seriously was the one involving security, which rested on badly mistaken intelligence regarding Iraq's capacity to produce usable weapons of mass destruction. Having a correct picture of that aspect of the situation would certainly have altered my support for the invasion had I had it a year and a half ago.

It would not have altered my conviction that the containment structure erected in 1991 to compensate for the first Bush administration failure to finish its work in the first Gulf War represented a grave and unacceptable weakness in America's strategic position, a drain on our alliances and a rallying cry for our enemies. The 9/11 terrorists did not need 135,000 American troops in Iraq as incentive to commit mass murder; a couple of air bases in Saudi Arabia were enough. I will not pretend to have a magic key to the puzzle of undermining the Baathist regime without a full scale invasion, though in retrospect the WMD inspection process launched in response to US pressure in 2002 may have had some potential in that regard.

But containment -- maintenance of the status quo until such time as Saddam Hussein and his sons died of natural causes, or until the civil war we are dreading now erupted without our help -- was never a realistic option, or to be more precise was never an option we could follow without having to pay an unacceptably high price. The analogy to the Cold War is an intellectual dead end; the nuclear-armed Soviet Union was far too dangerous to be dealt with by means other than containment, and threatened parts of the world America had no choice but to be deeply involved in. Iraq by contrast has always been primarily a regional problem that grew in importance because it was allowed to fester.

The partisan advantage in arguing for containing Saddam Hussein now, of course, is that it represents a plausible alternative to the course the Bush administration has taken. This is something the majority of national Democratic politicians -- who before 9/11 had not thought seriously about national security affairs in over a generation -- badly need. But because an hypothetical alternative is plausible does not mean it was ever realistic. The Bush administration, flawed though its thinking and execution of policy has been since 9/11, at least deserves credit for recognizing that.

Did the NY Times ever stop to think that maybe it's not the bloggers who are addicted, but the NON-bloggers who are addicted to NOT blogging? Huh? Huh?

Didn't THINK so.

When she knocked on the door, she found him seated with his laptop balanced on his knees, typing into his Web log, a collection of observations about the technical world, over a wireless link.

Ah, for the good old days, when a man would steal away to his computer to download pornography.

Alt-Tab, anyone?

"The real question is this: Does Dan Drezner’s blog influence a high number of the movers and shakers of public opinion?"

I'm not sure what you mean by movers and shakers of public opinion. Do you mean smart people like us? Seriously, I suspect that most people that blog or comment on blogs already have their minds made up on most issues. It doesn't seem to me that a lot of people have their minds changed even though we see a lot of good discussion. It seems that the election is likely to come down to a relatively small group of undecideds in a few key states. My intuition is that people that don't know yet whether they are voting for Kerry or Bush most likely are not interested enough in politics to read blogs and probably get most of their news from traditional sources, ie, newspapers, TV. I guess those aren't movers and shakers but they might be more important since they are likely to decide the election. I think political blogs are great, but I'm not convinced they have that much influence.