Those zany university radicals

Reading a post at Quotha about the murder in Honduras of Julián Hernández (president of MARCA, the organization of peasants in the Aguán), I saw this aptly placed reference. It’s a policy brief from last summer, by one Patrick B. Johnston at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

No academic hedging here. The title states the message with brutal clarity: “The Effectiveness of Leadership Decapitation in Combating Insurgencies.” It can’t even be claimed that “decapitation” is purely metaphorical, since, as history has shown, its literal meaning is included in the metaphorical use.