# Posted 9:29 PM by David Adesnik  

THE MUD HAS BEEN SLUNG: Via TPM, I came across this NYT article on an RNC commercial for Bush that will start running in Iowa. According to the NYT, the new commerical

shows Mr. Bush, during the last State of the Union address, warning of continued threats to the nation: "Our war against terror is a contest of will, in which perseverance is power," he says after the screen flashes the words, "Some are now attacking the president for attacking the terrorists."

That is low, misleading and flat-out wrong. Unsurprisingly, the White House has tried to distance itself from the commerical and say that the RNC was in charge. But how credible a defense is that?

If this is what we can expect from the Bush campaign, count me out. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:06 PM by David Adesnik  

BOOOORING: Dan Drezner has an excellent post on the new Medicare bill which begins with Matt Yglesias' statement that bloggers (including himself) should learn to pay attention to critical issues such as Medicare no matter how boring they are.

That's why I'm putting up this link to Dan's post. We can't pretend that foreign policy and the war on terror are separate from domestic issues. If Medicare and Social Security and tax policy keep us in the red, we won't be able to devote the necessary resources to fighting terror. It's not a choice of butter vs. guns. It's a challenge to be reponsible and efficient in our consumption of both so that choices don't have to be made.

Anyhow, when reading Dan's post, do you know which link was the only one I followed? This one. So much for practicing what I preach... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:57 PM by David Adesnik  

@#$*%&! In a pre-Thanksgiving display of blogospheric love, Dan Drezner is cursing out James Lileks for cursing out Salam Pax. The whole thing started because Salam said some pretty dumb things in the Guardian, to which Lileks responded with some good points that were pre-empted by stupid insults. Rather than bring everyone back to the substantive side of things, Dan lost his temper and decided to chew Lileks out for being a jerk.

As far as the bad blood goes, I think it should be water under the bridge. Salam, Lileks and Dan have contributed so much to the blogosphere that no one should hold it against them if they lose it once in a while.

However, I would like to respond to what Salam said, since I think it deserves a serious response. At the core of SP's open letter to George Bush is his sarcastic frustration with the US-led reconstruction effort:

To tell you the truth, I am glad that someone is doing the cleaning up, and thank you for getting rid of that scary guy with the hideous moustache that we had for president. But I have to say that the advertisements you were dropping from your B52s before the bombs fell promised a much more efficient and speedy service. We are a bit disappointed. So would you please, pretty please, with sugar on top, get your act together and stop telling people you have Iraq all figured out when you are giving us the trial-and-error approach?

Given that Salam lost numerous friends and relatives to Saddam's brutality, it is surprising to see him triviliaze the value of liberation. Moreover, as Lileks suggests, it would be nice to see some recognition on Salam's part that American soldiers are giving their lives day in, day out, to prevent a Ba'athist resurgence and facilitate the reconstruction.

But leaving all that aside, let's look at what Salam is really asking for: a more credible guarantee that the United States will not cut and run, but rather stay in Iraq as long as is necessary to ensure prosperity and freedom. The hesitant and sarcastic way in which Salam gets this message across reminds of something that Tom Friedman said a while back [no permalink]. Friedman reminded us how dependent and helpless it must feel for the people of Iraq have the United States army liberate them and supervise their recovery from three decades of dictatorship.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that Salam puts up an aggressive and critical facade to mask his desire for cooperation. Moreover, the United States has a compelling interest in learning to distinguish between constructive critics and corrupt subversives. We have to be 'big' enough to get our emotional satisfaction elsewhere while rebuilding Iraq.

If we do our job right, than twenty or thirty years down the line, Iraqis will think of the occupation the way the Germans and Japanese think of theirs. It won't become an excuse for wholesale submission to everything the US wants, but it will establish an unbreakable bond that lets citizens of both nations know that they are on the same side regardless of how fiercely they disagree. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:51 PM by Patrick Belton  

A BAD MAN GOES TO JAIL: Mohammed Hamdi al-Ahdal, a senior Al Qaeda leader who was involved in the terror attack of the USS Cole, was arrested today by Yemeni security forces. (CNN) Al-Ahdal had been reported to be in hiding in the Marib province of Yemen, perhaps under the protection of armed local tribesmen. The previous deputy to Al Qaeda's director of operations in Yemen, Abu Al-Harithi (also known as Abu Ali), Al-Ahdal took over the organization's operations in Yemen when the CIA successfully detonated two Predator-launched Hellfire missiles into Abu Ali's convoy in November, removing the chief operative and several other leaders from the scene. (ABC)

Online Islamist sources indicate that Al-Ahdal was among the first Mujahideen to enter Bosnia, fighting in the Battle of Tishin (August 1992) against the Serb army and losing one leg and use of an arm in that battle. After making Hajj in 1998, he was arrested by the Saudi government in Makkah on suspicion of plotting against the government, and was interrogated by the Saudis in the Ar-Ruwais Concentration Camp, Jeddah. On support for Al Qaeda in the Yemeni hinterlands, see BBC and EurasiaNet. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:21 PM by Patrick Belton  

DAVID BROOKS AT THANKSGIVING: Warming up for the holiday in which we celebrate the Puritan and Kemalist legacies, David Brooks argues that American exceptionalism has been reborn, and it is a good thing:

The American work ethic shifted, so that the average American now works 350 hours a year — 9 or 10 weeks — longer than the average European. ...Economically, the comparisons are trickier, but here too there is divergence. The gap between American and European G.D.P. per capita has widened over the past two decades, and at the moment American productivity rates are surging roughly 5 percent a year.

While I'm not sure my French friends would let me live down giving thanks this week for a longer workweek, Brooks then goes on to some trends that we can all feel some measure of gratitude for:

In fact, we may look back on the period beginning in the middle of the 1980's as the Great Rejuvenation. American life has improved in almost every measurable way, and far from regressing toward the mean, the U.S. has become a more exceptional nation.

The drop in crime rates over the past decade is nothing short of a miracle. Teenage pregnancy and abortion rates rose in the early 1970's and 1980's, then leveled off and now are dropping. Child poverty rates have declined since the welfare reform of the mid-1990's. The black poverty rate dropped "to the lowest rate ever recorded," according to a 2002 study by the National Urban League. The barren South Bronx neighborhood that Ronald Reagan visited in 1980 to illustrate urban blight is now a thriving area, with, inevitably, a Starbucks.

The U.S. economy has enjoyed two long booms in the past two decades, interrupted by two shallow recessions, and perhaps now we're at the start of a third boom. More nations have become democratic in the past two decades than at any other time in history.

Even more heartening, Brooks attributes much of this to new, ambitious, talented young blood from the rest of the world:

The biggest difference is that over the past two decades the United States has absorbed roughly 20 million immigrants. This influx of people has led, in the short term, to widening inequality and higher welfare costs as the immigrants are absorbed, but it also means that the U.S. will be, through our lifetimes, young, ambitious and energetic.

Amen, brother. Pass the cranberries. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:02 PM by Patrick Belton  

I ALWAYS WONDERED HOW THEY GOT THOSE:

An American woman has been left with a British accent after having a stroke. This is despite the fact that Tiffany Roberts, 61, has never been to Britain. Her accent is a mixture of English cockney and West Country. (via BBC)

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:56 PM by Patrick Belton  

I WANNA BE A SEA URCHIN.

(Okay, a healthy one). (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:49 AM by Patrick Belton  

MEDICARE PRESCRIPTION DRUG BENEFIT TO PASS TODAY: And hardly anyone seems too terribly happy about it. The left, c.f. Senator Kennedy, is worried that the introduction of competitive mechanisms will pave the wave for the privatization of social security. The right perhaps might not think that would be such a terribly bad thing, but is concerned that we've just created a quite large entitlement without really thinking about how to pay for it. On these lines, the WaPo was opposed to the bill, arguing principally that the cost-control provisions to be passed along with the new pricey drug benefit were not powerful enough - but also because an extremely important, 1,100-page bill with profound effect on the nation's fiscal and physical health was brought up for a House vote only one day after it was finished in largely secretive conference, making it impossible for legislators to have any real idea of what they were voting for or against. TNR's Jonathan Cohn criticizes the bill for giving unduly sweet deals to the large-contributing insurance and pharmaceutical industries, while including a competitive mechanism (Senator Breaux's) which he argues costs the government more than it saves. Equally critical is The Economist, which calls it "At a price-tag of $400 billion over the next ten years (and far more thereafter)...an extremely expensive way to buy votes." (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:27 AM by Patrick Belton  

A HECKOFA LONG TIME TO EAT PEANUTS: Okay, I'm personally very fond of Singapore as a country. But Singapore Airlines is advertising at the moment to win free tickets on its new, 18.5 hour long-haul nonstop flight from Singapore to Los Angeles. 18 hours - think about it, that's a whole day squeezed into a airplane seat, eating airplane food, and being subjected to that very unique form of authoritarian governance known more commonly as the flight attendant system. If that isn't far enough for you to go without getting out of your seat, lucky you - this will be followed in several months by a non-stop Singapore to New York route. (And if you like airline food, hey, on the internet there's a page for every sort of kinky obscene taste nowadays ....) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:06 PM by David Adesnik  

A NOVEL EXPLANATION FOR NYT MEDIOCRITY: Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum think that the 800-word limit on NYT biweekly columns stifles creativity and prevents some authors from putting their foot forward.

My response: Huh? There is an almost endless supply of 800-word columns out there that contain both new information and original ideas. Granted, most of those columns are in the WaPo. But that just goes to show that format isn't what's holding the NYT back.

Moreover, I think Kevin & Matt would grant that what's wrong with Bill Safire or David Brooks is their ideas, not their format. By the same token, you won't find me complaining about the format of Dowd & Krugman's columns (or Safire's for that matter).

Now, Kevin does raise an interesting point about the NYT constantly hiring columnists who have no experience in the genre. Why not, he suggests, recruit the best columnists from leading regional papers? I agree. But I think the problem with unproven columnists is not that they have trouble adjusting to the format, but rather that they don't have a demonstrated ability to bring new ideas into play on a biweekly basis. As a former bimonthly columnist myself, I'd say that the challenge of op-ed writing is finding something worthwhile to say, not figuring out how to say it in 800 words.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:44 PM by David Adesnik  

GRASSROOTS DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ: The WaPo has an excellent report. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:39 PM by David Adesnik  

UNITED AGAINST IRAN? The US and Europe have taken a big step closer to confronting Iranian nuclear ambitions togehter. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:35 PM by David Adesnik  

"THEIR BREASTS ARE SO LARGE THAT THEY ARE UNABLE TO WALK OR EVEN HAVE SEX": Plastic surgery gone awry? Nope. Just your typical factory-farmed turkey. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:24 PM by David Adesnik  

THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN: The citizens of Hong Kong want more democracy. And they want it ASAP. (Note to Singapore: What "Asian Values"?) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:34 PM by Patrick Belton  

WORRIED THAT YOUR ENGLISH IS TOO COMPREHENSIBLE? Not to fear, OxBlog is here. This fun list will provide you with many amusing ways to worsen your English, and fit in more in (say) English text messaging communities, or American teenage chat rooms. (Note: OxBlog actively does not endorse picking up teenagers. Particularly by our readers at http://www.clintonpresidentialcenter.com; you know who you are. This is with the possible exception of in Idaho, where that sort of thing seems to be legal.)

IANAL. KWIM? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:50 AM by Patrick Belton  

AMY CHUA ON DEMOCRACY AND MARKET-DOMINANT MINORITIES: Young Yale Law professor Amy Chua has a beautifully written piece in Prospect Magazine (UK), on the possibility that social changes accompanying democratization will unleash forces of resentment against market-dominant ethnic minorities. Amy Chua's subject is close not only to her research interests but also to her personal experience from an ethnic Chinese family in the Philippines. Of course, Chua chooses not to stress that market-successful ethnic minorities are prone to scapegoating under authoritarian states, too, which generally seek ways to deflect popular discontent from themselves - think Stalin (or, for that matter, Putin) and Jews. However, Chua's argument is well-presented, and her prose style is remarkable, as here in her opening paragraph:

In many poor countries, markets concentrate wealth in the hands of prosperous ethnic minorities. In these places, democracy can be an engine of vengeance.
One morning in September 1994, I received a call from my mother in California. In a hushed voice, she told me that my Aunt Leona, my father's twin sister, had been murdered in her home in the Philippines, her throat slit by her chauffeur. My mother broke the news to me in our Hokkien Chinese dialect. But the word "murder" she said in English, as if to wall off the act from the family through language.
The murder of a relative is horrible for anyone, anywhere. My father's grief was impenetrable; to this day, he has not broken his silence on the subject. For the rest of the family, though, there was an added element of disgrace. For the Chinese, luck is a moral attribute, and a lucky person would never be murdered. Like having a birth defect, or marrying a Filipino, being murdered is shameful.

I find Chua's writing to be some of the best-written prose, if nothing else, coming out of the academy at the moment. If the Bulldogs lost the Yale-Harvard matchup on the football field last Saturday, then we certainly won with regard to luring Chua away from Cambridge. I'll look forward to reading much more from her in the future. And her final note is more optimistic with regard to ways in which market-dominant minorities may be ultimately reconciled with their broader societies - i.e., by being seen to be "significant and visible" contributors to those societies:

The University of Nairobi, for example, owes its existence to wealthy Indians in Kenya. The Madhvani family, owners of the largest industrial group in east Africa, provide education, healthcare and housing for their African employees, and also employ Africans in top management. In Russia, there is the unusual case of the Jewish billionaire Roman Abramovich, whose philanthropy won him election as governor of the poverty-stricken Chukotka region in the Russian far east. More typically, however, building ethnic goodwill requires collective action through ethnic chambers of commerce, clan associations, and so on.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:36 AM by Patrick Belton  

WHITHER CONTINENTAL DRIFT? Our foreign policy society's DC chapter took up the theme of Euro-American relations last night; here are the notes. We discussed the topic here in Oxford too, just a couple of weeks ago. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:26 AM by Patrick Belton  

ITALIAN NATIONAL ALLIANCE LEADER GOES TO JERUSALEM to apologize for Mussolini's misdeeds, and is received by Israel. Deputy Minister Fini, wearing a skullcap, paid a visit today to Yad Vashem and is being received later in the week by Sharon, Shimon Peres, FM Shalom, and President Katsav in what's being perceived as the culmination of Fini's decade-long campaign to haul his National Alliance out of its post-fascist fringes and into the mainstream. Ha'aretz writes favorably of his trip, citing sources as saying, "apart from converting he has made every possible step to get closer to us and to Italy's Jews." (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:23 AM by Patrick Belton  

SNIPER TO BE EXECUTED: The sentence has just been handed down by the Prince William County jury, subject to Circuit Court Judge Millette's ratification on February 12th. More when more is available....

UPDATE: WaPo has more. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:26 AM by Patrick Belton  

TWO GOOD PIECES in the Weekly Standard today: The first is on why the U.S. military requires staying power, and more divisions, for theaters such as Iraq, rather than Secretary Rumsfeld's dream of a lighter, faster, leaner army. The second, by Bob Kagan and Bill Kristol, beautifully praises the President's pro-democracy rhetoric during his trip to London, and hopes that it is the President who wins in the councils of his advisors:

There can no longer be any doubt that whatever Republican "realist" inclinations the president may have inherited from his father and his father's advisers when he took office, he has now abandoned that failed and narrow view and raised the torch previously held high by Ronald Reagan--and before that by John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman.

In this respect, Bush has broken from the mainstream of his party and become a neoconservative in the true meaning of the term. For if there is a single principle that today divides neoconservatism from traditional American conservatism, it is the conviction that the promotion of liberal democracy abroad is both a moral imperative and a profound national interest. This is a view of America's role in the world that has found little favor in the Republican party since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. Reagan was a modern exception--the product, no doubt, of his own roots as a Truman Democrat--but this aspect of Reaganism was largely abandoned by Republicans after 1989. And so we are not surprised to see traditional Republican conservatives, of whom there is no more esteemed intellectual spokesman than George Will, now denouncing the supposed folly of such ambitious ventures. Nor are we surprised that in Bush's own cabinet, neither his secretary of state nor his secretary of defense shares the president's commitment to liberal democracy, either in Iraq or in the Middle East more generally. Indeed, the only thing that surprises us, a little, is the failure of American liberals--and European liberals--to embrace a cause that ought to be close to their hearts.

If the President would like to earn a place in the ranks of TR, JFK, Truman and Reagan by promoting a principled policy of national strength in the service of democracy, this Scoop Jackson Democrat, for one, will not be minding in the least. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:11 PM by Patrick Belton  

UPDATE ON GEORGIA: Shevardnadze has resigned power. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:38 AM by David Adesnik  

BULLDOG! BULLDOG! At The Game. No blogging today either. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:34 AM by David Adesnik  

CASE UN/CLOSED: Newsweek rebuts Stephen Hayes. Hayes responds. Newsweek gets one good shot in (which Hayes acknowledges), but also seems to have made quite a few mistakes. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:08 AM by David Adesnik  

NOT ENOUGH PROTESTS IN LONDON: George Bush gets a villain's welcome. But Jiang Zemin, Vladimir Putin, Bashar Assad and Robert Mugabe get left a lone by the protesting masses. Why? Greg Djerejian explains.

And while you're at it, take a look at Greg's extended fisking of some of the letters from prominent intellectuals that the Guardian published in honor of George Bush's visit.

Finally, if you enjoy nothing more than mocking misguided demonstrators, than head over to this Instapost and scroll down for plenty more. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:03 AM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG SLANDERS SOUTH & MIDWEST: When you blog, everything you write gets put under the microscope. Sometimes I wish it weren't so. But at the end of the day, it is precisely this sort of challenge that makes this a rewarding experience.

For example, I randomly decided to put up a post on this list of America's 10 most dangerous intersections. It turns out to be a pretty flawed list. In my original post, I wrote that "It's hard to believe that none of [the 10 interesections] are in Boston or New York." Yet as MG points out, State Farm's "national" list only includes information on those states where it sells insurance. Had I paid closer I attention, I would've noticed that neither New York nor Massachusetts is one of those states.

Next up, DB points out that State Farm's "danger index" only takes into account the number of accidents at an intersection, not the amount of traffic that goes through it. Furthermore, DB went looking for aerial photos of the intersections on the list and discovered that that most of them are really, really big. In other words, the frequency of accidents at those intersections may not be exceptionally high, but sheer size catapults them to the top of the list. (For a photo of the number one intersection, click here.)

All in all, I'd say that this is a pretty good demonstration of how the blogosphere forces all of us to think more seriously about everything we say. Without hundreds of writers and thousands of readers, the system wouldn't work. The end result? My apologies to the South & Midwest for naively accepting groundless assertions that their drivers are worse than our own up here in the North. I guess OxBlog won't be getting the votes of anyone with a Confederate flag on the back of their truck...

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:07 PM by David Adesnik  

TOO POPULAR FOR THEIR OWN GOOD: Crescat Sententia was down yesterday because of insufficient bandwidth. But now they're back and better than ever with an upgraded account, an interesting post on homosexuality and the bone marrow donation process, and 20 Questions for Stuart Buck. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:39 AM by Patrick Belton  

A SAD DAY IN ISTANBUL: Between three and five coordinated explosions have struck the Turkish city this morning, and our thoughts are with the many victims of these latest senseless outrages against human decency. (CNN, NYT, BBC). Their perpetrators are murderers, and must be treated as such.

UPDATE: The press is now reporting that HM Consul General in Istanbul, Roger Short, was assassinated in the day's attack. A lifelong diplomat since his graduation from our university, Short was remembered by the Archbishop of Canterbury as a 'kind and caring' diplomat. (His obituary) Fluent in the nation's language, Turkey was his the site of his first and last posting. He is survived by a wife and three children; Basiniz sag olsun. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:11 AM by Patrick Belton  

TIME FOR THE WORLD'S MOST UNUSUAL SPORT: That being the Eton Wall Game, played (in the version that counts, anyway) annually on the Saturday before St Andrew's Day. (Which also happens this year to be the date of another important academic sporting event in Britain's daughter country.) Thus Economist:

The wall game is played on only one ground in the world, at Eton College, a few miles west of London; and even there, only by a select few of the school's 70 “collegers”, or scholarship-holders, plus a small number of “oppidans”, the fee-payers who comprise most of the school's roughly 1,300 pupils. Add a few former (or unsuspecting) players invited to make up the occasional visiting side, and you have the wall game community of the planet.

Eton helpfully provides the rules of the game (the inspiration of rugby as well as Harry Potter's Quidditch), as well as a brief explanation of something which, to many O.E.s as well as bystanders, seems perennially to defy explanation.

The Collegers v Oppidans match takes place this Saturday at the Wall, at 11.10. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:13 AM by David Adesnik  

CRIMSON SOLIPSISM: Ah, the Internet. I live and work in Cambridge, MA but had to find out from Steve Sachs in Oxford, England that the editors of the Harvard Crimson are up in arms about a supposed plan to reinstate the draft.

While Josh did link to Steve's post about the Crimson last week, I thought that my reliance on Steve to find out what's in the Crimson substantiates what Steve has said more recently about the Internet having the potential to unite those divided by long distances and divide those united by short ones. On an even more fascinating note, Steve cites the work of legendary historian Marc Bloch, who observed that information flows in medieval Europe had the same tendency to unite the distant and divide the promixate.

Anyhow, in case you haven't read Steve's post on the reinstatement of the draft, it turns out that the whole thing was cooked up by a far-left hack who got the Guardian and others to play along. Exposing this fact promptly resulted in Steve being denounced as a shill for the Bush administration.

Bottom line: The Crimson editorial got played big time. So much for Harvard having the smartest undergraduates. And come Saturday, it should become painfully clear that their football team sucks, too. Go Bulldogs! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:09 PM by David Adesnik  

FRENCH DEMOCRACY PROMOTION: This TNR piece says French troops are accomplishing nothing in Cote D'Ivoire, but it seems to me like they're doing their best to promote peace and democracy. It isn't easy, you know. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:02 PM by David Adesnik  

MORE BUREAUCRA-SPEAK: Stephen Hayes puts the DoD's press release under the microscope and finds it to be vague and misleading -- half-way, that is, between a denial and a non-denial. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:52 PM by David Adesnik  

ASTROTURF BLOGGING: TAPPED's Nick Confessiore has an article up exposing TechCentralStation as a front for corporate lobbyists. Glenn Reynolds thinks this is ridiculous, since no one ever tells him what to write in his TCS columns. Dan Drezner says pretty much the same thing.

Reading the article, what struck as most interesting is that TCS seems to devote a lot more coverage to issues that affect its corporate sponsors. Then again, TCS founder James Glassman tells Confessiore that "We're an advocacy group. There's no doubt about that. I don't think we ever had pretenses of being an academic think tank." Not exactly stonewalling, is he?

UDPATE: Matt Yglesias also notes that he was never told what to write for TCS. The difference between Matt's post and the ones put up by Glenn and Dan is that Matt's post is an actual effort to apologize for his association with TCS, which he seems to be sort of embarrassed about. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:09 PM by David Adesnik  

HAL TADRUS AL-ARABIYYA? American students' interest in Arabic language courses has spiralled since 9/11. More than 10,000 students are studying Arabic right now, out of a total of 1.4 million students studying some foreign language.

According to the State Department, Arabic is a "super-hard" language to learn, a classification shared by Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Even so attrition rates in Arabic programs have been lower than expected.

Here at Harvard, the department is struggling to find enough teachers and assistants to staff the Arabic courses. Personally, I have had the great good fortune to be taught by the illustrious Mostafa Atamnia. My aspiration is to have OxBlog become the official blog of Al-Jazeera.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:13 AM by David Adesnik  

EATING IT UP: Liberals, even my fellow hawks at TNR, are extremely pleased with Bob Kagan's recent column that declares Howard Dean's foreign policy safe for the mainstream. The folks at &c. are even projecting that Dean will run against Bush from the right on foreign policy.

While I can accept Kagan's basic premise that Dean is no McGovern (granting for the moment that McGovern was a McGovern), there still seems to be good reason to belive that Dean's foreign policy would be both excessively multilateralist and insufficiently committed to democracy promotion. Of course, you could probably say the same about Kerry, Clark and Edwards.

Personally, I still can't get over Dean's statement that the fall of Saddam Hussein might have been a good thing. It's very hard for me to dismiss that as just a gaffe. From where I stand, it is an indication of Dean's instincts.

On the other hand, I'm probably going to find myself apalled at the cheapshots that the GOP will take at Dean's dovishness if he gets elected. They'll try to blur the line between being against the war in Iraq and being against the war on terror. And so it will come down to the lesser of two evils. Sigh.

UPDATE: There go those instincts again. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:47 AM by David Adesnik  

CONSERVATIVE WOLF IN LIBERAL SHEEP'S CLOTHING: Matt Yglesias has an interesting column up about Peter Boyer, author of a recent hatchet job on Wesley Clark that somehow made it's way into the liberal New Yorker. As both Matt and Fred Kaplan argue, there isn't much substance to Boyer's case that Clark shouldn't be taken seriously when it comes to foreign policy. But why worry about what Boyer says, when Clark is doing such a good job of demonstrating his own incompetence? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:59 PM by David Adesnik  

UNPROCESSED INTELLIGENCE: Glenn links to a whole bunch of sites that are trying to put together as much raw infomation as possible about the occupation. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:57 PM by David Adesnik  

CROSSING INTO MODO-LAND: Lately, David Brooks has been spending his time reading fashion magazines. Halfway through Brooks' column, I thought to myself, "Oh my God, he's becoming another Dowd." Yet by the end, Brooks had made a reasonably intelligent and coherent point about the magazines' socio-political significance. Think he'll give Maureen some lessons on how to do it? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:45 PM by David Adesnik  

ROOT CAUSES: France has decided to combat anti-Semitism by spending $8 billion on urban renewal in rough neighboorhoods with heavily Muslim populations. The package also includes tougher policing and prosecution measures. My gut says that the latter initiatives are far more important. But let's give the French a chance to prove that carrots have a more lasting effect than sticks.

Alternately, the French could let the Turks into the EU and ask them to share some of their remarkable tolerance for Judaism with their French counterparts. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:22 PM by David Adesnik  

ONLY IN ISRAEL: Where the army is filled with guilt-laden doves. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:06 PM by David Adesnik  

MUCH ADU ABOUT SOMETHING: 14-year old Ghanaian-American soccer phenom Freddy Adu has signed a six-year deal with DC United after turning down offers from Man United and Chelsea. The future of American soccer may already be here. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:02 PM by David Adesnik  

A SHORT, EASY SLOG: Phil Carter says Rumsfeld's new warfighting plans blatantly disregard the lessons of recent history. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:26 PM by David Adesnik  

HOWARD'S TOP 10: It's turns out that Howard and I both have the same favorite recording artist: Wyclef Jean. Andrew Sullivan likes Dean's taste in music since Wyclef is known for appreciating the rewards that the free market brings.

I would not be so sanguine, however. If you listen to The Score or The Carnival, you might figure out why Howard Dean thinks all Southerners have the Stars & Bars in their pickups.

One of Wyclef's big messages is that the black man must wear a mask of respectability until he is powerful enough to overthrow the white order. Needless to say, I appreciate Wyclef for his talents as a musician and storyteller, not his advice on social policy.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:12 PM by David Adesnik  

BELIEVE IT OR NOT: In the space of 27 hours, Matt Yglesias has both admitted that he is too poor to get laid and praised an OxBlog post without resorting to a single backhanded compliment or snide remark. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:05 PM by David Adesnik  

THE TIMES' SALVATION: John Burns alone makes the NYT worth reading. (Via Instapundit) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:58 PM by David Adesnik  

BIZARRE: BBC reports that Italian anti-war activists are raising money for Ba'ath aligned insurgents in Iraq. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:29 PM by David Adesnik  

THE BIGGER THE MOUTH, THE BIGGER THE SHOE: Wes Clark is doing an uncannily good job of undermining his credentials as the serious foreign policy candidate. The place to turn for the best accounts of his foot-in-mouth performances in TNR. In the TNR primary, we get to hear about how Wes Clark thinks that "engaging" Eastern Europe (via Citibank) won the Cold War, how working more closely with the Saudis dictatorship is the way to stop Al Qaeda, and how it was OK to go fight Milosevic without a UN resolution -- but not Saddam -- because Milosevic had abused Kosovar human rights.

When Clark finally decided to show some foresight by saying that it's time to lift the embargo on Cuba, he quickly backed off the statement and hypocritically added that candidates shouldn't make "foreign policy announcements" in the middle of a campaign (except on such important subjects as the giving the UN control of Iraq.)

On the bright side, it turns out that Clark may not be as arrogant as we all once thought. Then again, walking around with one's foot in one's mouth is conducive to humility.

Clark also seems to get in shape rhetorically when facing off against the right. Yet even Clark supporter Kevin Drum, who proudly asserts that Clark knows more about foreign policy than both Glenn Reynolds and Kevin's cat, admits that the General has a habit of saying some very stupid things about foreign and domestic affairs. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:12 AM by David Adesnik  

MIRACLE ON 44TH STREET: Kevin Drum reports that the NYT has decided that bloggers can now post real permalinks to its content, not just semi-permalinks that disappear once the content goes behind the NYT firewall.

As a result of this new policy, Kevin has decided to declare the NYT more blog-friendly than either the WaPo or LAT, since both of them move their content behind a firewall after a fixed period of time. However, I think the WaPo deserves a lot more credit than Kevin is giving it. If you go to the WaPo webpage for any given topic or country, you can usually access 100 recent stories about it, sometimes going back more than a year. That's a tremendous amount of information that you can't get out of the NYT. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:51 AM by David Adesnik  

THE SHI'ITE VOTE: Take a look at this somewhat better than usual article on Shi'ite attitudes toward democracy. It has some interesting information about Ayatollah Sistani and the way he expresses his official opinions.

What I don't about like the article is the way it argues by implication that Iraqi Shi'ites just want power and don't understand and/or care about democracy as a system of government. For example, WaPo correspondent Anthony Shadid describes some pro-Iranian graffiti outside the office of Sistani's spokesman before letting us hear the spokesman's endorsement of constitutional government.

Is this supposed to be a tip off that Iraqi Shi'ites want an Islamic state? If so, why not just ask Sistani's spokesman about Iran? Why not ask him whether he sees democracy as a permanent system or just a transitional process? And ask those same questions to all the other man-in-the-street types whose opinions fill out the second half of all these articles.

We've known since day one that the Shi'ites have a lot of incentives to support democracy just long enough for them to take control of postwar Iraq. Now it is time for the media to stop repeating that fact endlessly and figure out whether the Shi'ite leadership means what it says about democracy or whether it just talks about democracy to advance its own interests.

By the same token, the American occupation authorities should be hammering away at a similar point when talking to the Shi'ite leadership: The more of a commitment that you show to democracy as an institution, the faster we can transfer power to an elected government in which your representatives will have a majority. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:56 PM by David Adesnik  

DETOUR RECOMMENDED: Here's a list of the 10 most dangerous intersections in the United States. It's hard to believe that none of them are in Boston or New York. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:35 PM by Patrick Belton  

RICHLY-DESERVED PLUG: One of the best choral ensembles currently around working with the polyphonic Renaissance repertory, the Tallis Scholars, will be touring around the United States and Britain in December. Here are their tour dates - if they're in your city, you should go!

Tuesday 2 December - Oberlin, OH
Wednesday 3 December - Kansas City, MO
Friday 5 December - Seattle, WA
Saturday 6 December - Vancouver, BC
Sunday 7 December - Los Angeles, CA
Tuesday 9 December - Portland, OR
Wednesday 10 December - Berkeley, CA
Friday 12 December - Boston, MA
Saturday 13 December - New York, NY
Sunday 14 December - Daytona Beach, FL
Saturday 20 December 2003 at 7.30pm (Hazard Chase Christmas Festival, St John's, Smith Square, London, call for tickets)

Apart from London, I'm not sure where they're performing in each city, but their publicists'll know. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:53 AM by David Adesnik  

PARSING THE BUREAUCRA-SPEAK: While the meaning of this DoD press release isn't exactly clear, it seems like a repudiation of the Saddam-Al Qaeda memo published in the Weekly Standard. Is the DoD denial more credible than the original report? I don't know. But it does seem fairly clear that there is a bureaucratic scuffle going on inside the executive branch, perhaps inside the Pentagon. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:42 PM by David Adesnik  

JESSICA LYNCH AND WOMEN IN COMBAT: The National Review says that the capture of Jessica Lynch demonstrates the heavy price paid by female soldiers as a result of feminists' efforts to force them into front-line roles. Phil Carter responds to this charge point-by-point and shows that it is based on an apalling amount of distortion and ignorance. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:30 PM by Patrick Belton  

ROUND-UP OF THE NEWS ON THE ISTANBUL TRAGEDY: At the moment, Turkish officials are placing the number of causalties at 23 dead and 302 wounded. While the Iran-backed Great Eastern Islamic Raiders' Front, also known as IBDA-C (info, more), immediately claimed responsibility in a telephone call to the Anatolia News Agency (Guardian), Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul blamed international terrorist organizations for being principally responsible (Zaman, Turkey). Similarly, Israeli officials are saying that they had never heard of the group before Saturday, and are blaming Al Qaeda rather than Hezbullah (Haaretz), while Prof. Gabriel Ben-Dor of Haifa's National Security Studies Centre argues that indigenous Turkish Islamists could not have carried out the attacks unaided by external networks: "These were fairly sophisticated terrorist attacks, carried out almost simultaneously, that would have required quite a good deal of planning, intelligence, logistic support, and so forth," he said in an interview. (Jerusalem Post). Israel has sent Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom to Istanbul, as well as a police forensic unit. CNN reports on three arrests in connection with the bombings.

Turkey's Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Haleva said he had warned Turkish police before that car traffic posed a threat to the two synagogues (News 24, South Africa). Mossad had also passed warnings about threats to the two synagogues onto Turkish intelligence on two occasions in the preceding months. (AP) One blast, in Neve Shalom synagogue, took place during a Bar Mitzvah (Guardian). Reuters includes a history of the Sephardic community in Istanbul.

Eli malei rachamim sho-khein bam'romim, hammtzei m'nukhah n'khonah al kanfei hash'khinah. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:27 PM by David Adesnik  

COLLIN MAY IS BACK at Innocents Abroad. His first post is on the crisis of confidence that has emerged in France despite Marianne's apparent vindication in Iraq. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:04 PM by David Adesnik  

TRAGEDY IN ISTANBUL: Wherever our people lives, it is the target of vicious hatred. Our thoughts go out to the families of the dead and injured.

Of course, our thougths also go out to the families of the non-Jews killed and injured in the attack. Initial reports suggest that there were 14 passesrby and 6 synagogue-goers killed. In Istanbul, those passersbys were most probably Muslism. And so the irony of September 11th recurs: in an effort to slaughter the Zionists and their American allies, innocent Muslims lives are taken. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:53 PM by David Adesnik  

WAITING FOR THE OTHER SHOE TO DROP: I just read the Weekly Standard article on the Saddam-Osama connection which Patrick mentioned earlier. I'd like to believe that such a connection existed, but for the moment I'm not buying it.

Something just seems wrong. Why has the information turned up now? Why would the White House sit on information that would vindicate its decision to invade Iraq? The Standard article says the information was compiled in response to a request by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Why the heck would the administration wait until the Senate showed an interest before doing some serious research on the Saddam-Osama connection? I thought that was the kind of research that they'd been doing all along.

Another set of concerns are raised by Matt Yglesias. The information in question is contained in a memo from Doug Feith's office at the Pentagon. Given Feith's connection to the controversial Office of Special Plans (OSP), one has to wonder. Even if you don't accept Matt's premise that the OSP is an operations center for partisan hacks intent on distorting the intelligence process, it is fair to ask why this memo didn't come from a source with greater public credibility.

In short, I think we are waiting for the other shoe to drop. My guess is that someone in the government feels very strongly about this report, and is trying to get the White House to stand behind it by indirectly going public. But if the case can't be made on its own merits within the government, then something may be very wrong. We'll find out exactly what that is when the Washington press corps gets a hold of the story and starts telling us far more than the Weekly Standard's source wants us to know.

PS: How convenient is it that this information is coming out now, at a moment when Howard Dean is threatening to wrap up the Democratic nomination? A proven Saddam-Al Qaeda link would blow his campaign out of the water. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:04 PM by Patrick Belton  

MORE ON IRAQ-AL QAEDA COOPERATION: The Weekly Standard's website is down at the moment, so Little Green Footballs is mirroring a piece by Steve Hayes which details in great depth newly uncovered instances of alleged operational cooperation between Iraqi intelligence and Al Qaeda, beginning in 1990 and continuing through mid-March of this year. Definitely worth a read. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:18 AM by David Adesnik  

MOM FINDS OUT ABOUT BLOG! Oh no. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:10 AM by David Adesnik  

PNAC VS. BUSH: The issue is China. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:03 AM by David Adesnik  

FAIR AND BALANCED: Since the previous post was pretty harsh on JMM, I thought I'd link to one of the many good and informative posts on TPM. This one is about some CPA documents that fell (how exactly?) into Josh's hands. The documents make the case that the US would be better off curtailing its search for non-existent WMD in Iraq and focus instead on locating the scientists who worked for Saddam's WMD program but may now migrate to Syria or worse, Al Qaeda. While it's hard to know just how much effort should be put into the WMD search, it is certainly is worth tracking down the brains behind the WMD operation. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:48 PM by David Adesnik  

JOSH MARSHALL IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS: It looks like Generation X is taking over the foreign policy establishment. Too bad FA doesn't print author photos, otherwise Josh's oh-too-stylish headshot from the TPM website could have livened up the pages of that august publication. Anyhow, what's going on in is that FA has published Josh's review of Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay's "America Unbound", a mildly critical account of the Bush administration's foreign policy by a pair of scholars at the Brookings Institution.

While endorsing the standard multilateralist critique that Daalder and Lindsay advocate, Marshall takes them to task for underestimating the neo-con influence on Bush's foreign policy. As Marshall writes,

The "neocons," they say -- referring to them as "democratic imperialists" -- may be powerful at magazines such as The Weekly Standard and think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, but key movement figures such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Pentagon adviser Richard Perle actually missed out on the top appointments. Those plums went to people such as Cheney, Rice, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who the authors claim are more properly classified as "assertive nationalists."

I think "assertive nationalists" is a pretty good way to describe them, with the exception of Rice, who is a dyed-in-the-wool realist. While Marshall shares that assessment of Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al., he counters that

The defining characteristic of the Bush administration's foreign policy, in fact, has been the way the neocons in and out of office have been able to win so many of the key battles -- if not on the first go-round, then on the second or the third...

At the Pentagon, for example, Rumsfeld may have played the key part in internal debates over defense transformation, but on foreign policy issues, his neocon lieutenants, Wolfowitz and Feith, were decisive, and managed to secure nearly total control of all aspects of policy surrounding the war and the subsequent occupation.

And what is it that differentiates a neo-conservative policy from an assertive nationalist one? Marshall's answer is that,

Although it is the sworn enemy of realism, neoconservatism has never been and is not now limited to one particular foreign policy school. It is a protean construct centering on a belief in the righteousness of American power, the wonder-working qualities of bold gestures, and an unwillingness to muddle through.

Righteous power? Bold gestures? That sounds like....assertive nationalism. According to the conventional wisdom on both sides of the aisle, what separates neo-conservatism from assertive nationalism is its hopeful vision of a global democratic revolution. Yet Marshall dismisses this distinction on the grounds that too many neo-conservatives showed too much sympathy for too many right-wing Third World dictators back in the 1980s.

That point is a fair one. Yet it completely ignores the transformation -- better, purification -- of neo-conservatism that began during Reagan's second term and accelerated during the aftermath of the Cold War. Moreover, it prevents Marshall from emphasizing the best evidence for his theory of neo-con dominance, i.e. the ideologically-charged occupation of Iraq.

Strangely, Marshall insists on

the essential continuity of the administration's policy before and after September 11, 2001. The attacks on that day allowed President Bush to refashion American foreign policy in a far bolder and more audacious fashion than otherwise would have been possible, the authors argue, but in fact the administration's essential goals, premises, and assumptions changed very little.

But what about the pronounced aversion to nation-building that defined Bush's foreign policy on the campaign trail? Surely the simplest explanation for his about face on this issue is the influence of the neo-conservatives.

Ultimately, Marshall's hands are tied by his unwillingness to acknowledge that intellectually dishonest neo-conservatives could be the driving force behind a morally progressive international agenda such as global democracy promotion. While there is no direct evidence of this in Marshall's review of America Unbound, it is a point that will be familiar to those who have read "Practive to Deceive" Marshall's anti-neo-con polemic in the Washington Monthly or to those who visit his website on a regular basis.

When it comes down it, Marshall is right that the neo-cons credibility is on the line in Iraq and that its success or failure will have a tremendous impact on their reputation. Yet that suggestion only makes sense if one gives the neo-cons credit for giving the occupation of Iraq its moral foundation, regardless of whether the implementation of their vision was competent enough to ensure its fruition. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:55 PM by David Adesnik  

WHO IS SUSAN SACHS? All I know is that she won't be working at the NYT much longer if she keeps writing such ridiculously optimistic stories about Baghdad like this one. It's about the new major crimes unit of the Baghdad police and reads like a 1950s profile of J. Edgar Hoover's righteous crusade against Communists. And it's supposed to be a news story.

Apparently, the headline writers think Sachs has to be reined in, since they took her 99% positive story and titled it "Joy, and Jeers, as New Police Patrol Baghdad." The jeer referred to in the title comes from one citizen who asks the new Baghdad cops, "What took you so long?" Of course, that is just about the last question anyone would ask when Saddam's uniformed thugs came knocking at the door. But why should OxBlog point that out when Sachs does it herself?! As she writes,

Such a happy scene would have been unimaginable a year ago. The Iraqi police force was as tainted as the rest of Saddam Hussein's security forces, feared for its casual brutality and powers to spy, residents said.

It can't be long before she's working for Fox. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:43 PM by David Adesnik  

ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA BIAS: I don't usually read movie reviews, but since I'm a really big Russell Crowe fan, I thought I'd see what the WaPo has to say about Master & Commander. According to Desson Howe, the film

isn't just a fabulous seagoing spectacle. It's one for the ages. Not only does Peter Weir's film give you an atmospheric feel for the agony and ecstasy of early 19th-century sea warfare, it's a rollicking good story.

On the other hand, Stephen Hunter says the film

feels weirdly overstuffed, as stories keep stumbling into and over one another or are buried beneath the arrival of other stories. The worst example is the film's narrative framework...

While film reviews are obviously a matter of taste, it's a little strange to hear two-highly paid professionals disagree about virtually every aspect of a film (except the opening battle sequence, which they both think is great.)

Sadly, I must admit that my impulse is to distrust the positive review. In other words, I'm an optimist when it comes to Iraq, but not when it comes to Hollywood. There is something of the beret-clad art-house critic in me, so I tend to believe that there really is such a thing as taste in film and that most of what comes out of Hollywood is recycled trash.

On the other hand, I love Jet Li and Jackie Chan and all sorts of far-out action flicks that don't pretend to offer you anything but a good time. So while I tend to trust bad movie reviews, I was also taught at a young age how the permanent presence of a stick in most film critics' hindquarters (especially at the NYT, my adolescent paper of choice) means that they will poo-poo any film which offer its viewers a good time rather than a sobering intellectual odyssey.

Speaking of which, what does the NYT have to say about Master & Commander? According to A.O. Scott,

This stupendously entertaining movie, directed by Peter Weir and adapted from two of the novels in Patrick O'Brian's 20-volume series on Aubrey's naval exploits, celebrates an idea of England that might have seemed a bit corny even in 1805, when the action takes place.

Hmmm, so you start out thinking it's a compliment but then it turns out to be somewhat backhanded. Later on, Scott tells us that

The Napoleonic wars that followed the French Revolution gave birth, among other things, to British conservatism, and "Master and Commander," making no concessions to modern, egalitarian sensibilities, is among the most thoroughly and proudly conservative movies ever made. It imagines the Surprise as a coherent society in which stability is underwritten by custom and every man knows his duty and his place. I would not have been surprised to see Edmund Burke's name in the credits.

So is this a good thing or a bad thing? Burke: Intellectual and European. But also conservative. Cleverly, Scott also points out that the date of the action in the film has been moved back a few years from 1812 to avoid the unpleasant fact that at the time, the Anglo-American special relationship was not all that special. At least they don't let Krugman do movie reviews... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:28 AM by Patrick Belton  

SOME INTERESTING READING TO GO WITH YOUR COFFEE: And you can even read these if you don't drink coffee. In the Middle East, Sharon indicated he would meet with Palestinian PM Qurei, though he may backtrack now that Arafat has triumphed in a struggle with Qurei over control of the Palestinian security apparatus. Hezbollah leader Sheikh Nasrallah is negotiating with a German intermediary over a prisoner exchange with Israel. Some commentators argue that the prisoner swap will elevate Hezbollah's stature in Lebanon at a time it has been declining. And Bremer has been dispatched back to Iraq with instructions to accelerate the political transition to self-governance, as Operation Iron Hammer continues.

Central Asia Analyst has an interesting analysis of Uzbekistan's repression of its outlawed opposition parties (which the analyst argues has grown milder since the U.S. presence began; the opposition parties enjoy widespread domestic support). The site also analyzes Kyrgyzstan's antiterrorist units and their commander's strategy of seeking security assistance from any neighbor who would offer it. Georgian parliamentary elections drew stunning participation, and represented a strong rebuke for the governing party. In the Moscow Times, India is setting up bases in Tajikistan.

In the Americas, Columbia's AUC is beginning to disarm, unrest brews in the Dominican Republic, and Mexico is complaining of a relationship of "convenience and subordination" with its northern neighbor on the eve of the cabinet-level Binational Commission's meeting. (And incidentally, joining us later in the afternoon in the OxBlog studios will be our ex-girlfriends, to speak further on this theme of relationships of convenience and brutal subordination.)

In East Asia, reporting has centered on China's sexual revolution (the most shocking finding: "half of the urban males in their thirties say they have had more than one sexual partner." ed: oooooooh. half of urban males in graduate school haven't had more than one sexual partner), and the party is making limited gains in attempting to coopt Chinese entrepreneurs. China is also indicating it will shortly take up a more hawkish policy toward Taiwan. (And in OxBlog's consular affairs department, check your credit card receipts next time you're in Hong Kong.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:26 AM by David Adesnik  

MISERY LOVES COMPANY: If things in Iraq really do go all pear-shaped, then I'll probably give Mike O'Hanlon a call so we can commiserate about the sad plight of being failed optimists. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:13 AM by David Adesnik  

THE MILITARY FRONT: Phil Carter surveys the situation on the ground in Iraq. Phil also has insightful comments on the nature of American heroism and profound concerns about the future of the Army reserve. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:52 AM by David Adesnik  

BITTER ANTI-FRENCH INVECTIVE: Plus some good thoughts from Greg Djerejian about the prospect for elections with the Ba'athist insurgency still raging. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:58 PM by Patrick Belton  

WE'RE ALL MALE: At least according to the internet Gender Genie. Following Glenn and Andrew, I visited said Genie today to judge by my use of definite articles and conjunctions whether I wrote in a way more in keeping with male or female writers. I write like a guy; okay, no huge surprise there. Then I tried running through an op-ed piece by Rachel in the WaPo; somewhat surprisingly, the Genie thought she was a guy as well. So then, I tried running through the algorithm the most recent online writing of several female friends, prominent bloggers, and columnists - Virginia Postrel (whose picture is on her blog; she clearly isn't a guy), YaleDiva, Maureen Dowd, and Anne-Marie Slaughter (as well as a post by Rachel on Thucidydes). This sample included some variance in ideology and prose style. And, I don't mean to use a phrase from back in high school here, but - it was a total sausage fest. Every single one of these women writers came up as male. So either the algorithm's not spectacularly powerful (i.e., "guess male"), or perhaps the concept that the gender of an author can be inferred from a text needs revisiting. But given that we're all guys here, I figure I might as well stick with Rachel over Maureen. (Though I guess I'll probably be needing one of Eugene's pills....) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:44 PM by Patrick Belton  

WORTH READING TODAY: TNR's editors are effusive in praise of Bush's democratization speech: "It was a radical speech, and for once the radicalism of this administration did not seem small or sectarian. It contained arguments, not slogans; a sense of history, not a sense of politics. It was the credo of an idealist, but there was realism in it, too. The interesting question is whether the president grasps that the moral and strategic course that he set at NED may be at odds with the requirements of his own reelection. For Bush's international campaign is not exactly what Bush's domestic campaign has ordered." Elsewhere in the blogosphere, it's Josh Marshall's blogiversary. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:22 PM by Patrick Belton  

ALCOHOL, ISRAELI ESCORTS, AND PLAGUES OF LOCUSTS: Heck, I can't wait to see who gets sent here from google today.... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:18 PM by Patrick Belton  

STORM OVER THE ATLANTIC (BUT INSIDE THERE'S PORT AND GOOD CONVERSATION): The Oxford chapter of our foreign policy discussion group took up Euro-American relations last night. This is what people had to say. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:02 PM by Patrick Belton  

SO INSTEAD, DO THIS: It's official - Guinness is good for you! This courtesy of our good friend Josh Cherniss:

The old advertising slogan "Guinness is Good for You" may be true after all, according to researchers.

A pint of the black stuff a day may work as well as an aspirin to prevent heart clots that raise the risk of heart attacks.

Drinking lager does not yield the same benefits, experts from Wisconsin University told a conference in the US.(BBC)

Well...sláinte - to your health - which seems appropriate! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:13 AM by Patrick Belton  

HERE'S ONE MORE good reason not to go see hookers. Particularly if you live in a fairly small country. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:52 PM by David Adesnik  

FREE TRADE is not on the Bush agenda. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:45 PM by David Adesnik  

WALKING A FINE LINE: NYU law prof Noah Feldman takes a careful look at the conflict between Islamic and democratic provisions in the new Afghan constitution. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:41 PM by David Adesnik  

JUST ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: According to a new UN report, the wall that Israel is constructing between itself and the Palestinians will put 15% of the West Bank on the Israeli side of the barrier. While Israeli spokesmen are probably right that the 15% figure is an exaggeration -- not to mention the UN's estimate that the barrier will disrupt the lives of 600,000 Palestinians -- I think it is safe to say that a good bit of the West Bank will wind up on the Israeli side of the fence.

(NB: I have no evidence that the UN is exaggerating. But it has chosen sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict no less firmly than the United States has.)

Now, Israelis officials have insisted repeatedly that the wall is not a political barrier and would not affect the status of land on either side. Even so, it seems clear that neither individual Palestinians nor the Palestinian authority will exercise any effective control over land on the Israeli side. And that may be a good thing.

For the moment, Israel has very little new to offer the Palestinians at the negotiating table. While I am firmly of the opinion that the Israelis offered more than enough at Taba and that Arafat's rejection of that offer was criminal, I recognize that something will have to change for negotiations to work.

As it happens, President Arafat is calling for negotiations again, now that he has installed another Prime Minister who controls neither the Cabinet nor the security forces. Perhaps if Arafat recognized that the wall had cut off some of his precious West Bank, he will try to get it back by actually doing something about suicide bombings.

Of course, the chances of that sort of thing working aren't high. On the other hand, waiting for a plan with a good chance of success would mean waiting indefinitely. (Or until the Palestinian Authority get serious about internal democratic reforms. In other words, indefinitely.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:20 PM by David Adesnik  

THE FAINTEST OF SILVER LININGS: For the first time in six months, the news coming out of Iraq has given me that bad feeling in my gut. Above all, I am dismayed by the apparent conclusions of a top secret CIA report which asserts that the people of Iraq are losing faith in America's commitment to stay the course, thus creating a more secure base of support for the Ba'athist insurgency.

Departing from convention, Paul Bremer explicitly endorsed the CIA report, which was the apparent cause of his sudden decision to return to Washington for consultation. It was during those consultations that Bremer and the Bush administration principals decided to schedule Iraq's first national elections for early to mid-2004, rather than the end of the year. Rather than waiting for the emergence of a constitution that would govern the electoral proces, the government elected early next year will have a mandate to define the constitutional drafting process.

According to the WaPo,

Th[is] decision represents a major shift in U.S. political strategy. Mirroring the U.S. military strategy of "Iraqification," Washington now wants to hand over as much responsibility for the political process as is feasible, as fast as it is feasible.

When you read something like that, your gut says that the Administration is getting ready to cut and run. I don't believe that just yet, but the prospect is going to gnaw at me.

As Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias have been quick to point out, Bill Kristol & Robert Kagan have already decided that the Bush Administration won't match its soaring democratic rhetoric with a real commitment on the ground. The development that most concerns them is the Pentagon's mad rush to train Iraqi security forces without any apparent concern for their preparedness, either militarily or politically. As I said a few days ago, that is a concern with which I wholeheartedly agree.

(NB: I fully expect an I-told-you-so post from Matt Yglesias in response to this post, since he's already put one up in response to Josh's post on the Italian bombing earlier today.)

Also relevant right now are speculations that electoral motives are behind George Bush's decision to rush the political transition in Iraq. The timeline is certainly plausible. Elections at mid-year make him look good and keep the Democrats quiet during the campaign. Then if Bush wins, he has a free hand to either declare victory and withdraw or use his new mandate to fulfill his democratic pledge.

In the meantime, I would hope that the Kristol/Kagan editorial puts Bush on notice that he may begin losing support on his own side of the aisle if he doesn't demonstrate a concrete commitment to building democracy in Iraq. While I don't think that editorials (even in the Weekly Standard) have all that much effect on this White House's foreign policy, Kristol/Kagan may get a lot of nods on Capitol Hill, enough to force the administration to pay attention.

Finally, the silver lining. The NYT reports that

Elections have been demanded by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most influential Shiite religious leader. Experts assume that Shiites, who predominate in Iraq, would win a commanding majority of seats in any election.

Ayatollah Sistani's demand stirred fears among some American officials that an elected constitution-writing body might write a theocratic charter that enshrined Islam as a state religion and marginalized the Sunni minority, potentially aggravating the violent rebellion of remnants loyal to Saddam Hussein.

Now that doesn't sound like good news. Even if fears of an elected Shi'ite theocracy are often exaggerated, they should be on the table. Still, I find Sistani's demands encouraging. Would he be that forceful if he didn't see elections as a legitimate political institution, rather than a one-shot grab for power?

Admittedly, Sistani has a motive to be cynical. The real question is, what will happen if Paul Bremer draws him out on his approach to democracy? Is Sistani willing to say not just that he demands elections now, but that elections -- real elections for real power -- must be a permanent feature of Iraqi political life? If yes, that would have a very powerful impact on Iraq's Shi'ite community, as well as credibly signaling to the United States that the Shi'ite clergy have an appreciation of democratic politics far richer than a short-sighted insistence on "one man, one vote, one time."


(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:59 PM by Patrick Belton  

LETTER FROM KABUL: OxBlog's Afghanistan bureau chief is likely the only Evangelical in the world to be keeping Ramadan fasts at the moment. With the extra time he's saved by not eating (and also by not brushing his teeth), he's written us this:

One of the many ways for bored expats driving around Kabul to pass their time is to speculate about which of the foreign restaurants are actually brothels. All new restaurants immediately fall under suspicion, especially those attached to new guesthouses. Chinese restaurants draw a wildly disproportionate share of hearsay. I've heard rumors from several sources about the curtained Croatian place across the street -- including from my housemates, who have managed not to eat there in the entire year they've lived on Taimani Street. My disappointment at discovering these particular rumors to be false was more than outweighed by discovering what is almost certainly the best calamari in Kabul. The welcoming yet slightly dictatorial proprietress (probably the inspiration for many of the rumors) starts off every table with a tray of dough balls fried according to an old Dalmatian recipe; and her chocolate walnut crepes are the best dessert I've had in this town.

I've had a number of good chats about ISAF, the King, and the future of Afghanistan over beers and Zadar Authentic Croatian Cuisine during the last week, but I think I'll wait and try to put my impressions of Afghan politics and economics into one big package next week. (Knowing that not everyone I send these updates to will be interested in those impressions, I'll send that one out only to known foreign affairs junkies, Oxbloggers, and readers of The Economist. Plus anyone who asks for it). Instead, this dispatch will be about adventure, appalling recklessness, and really good views. I'll thank you all not to forward it to my mother.

The city of Kabul is divided by a pair of mountains, Asmayi and Sherdarwaza. The Kabul River trickles through the ravine between the two, and the city runs a surprising way up their arid, craggy slopes. A drivable road leads up to the summit of Asmayi, which bristles with TV and radio antennae. The higher mountain, Sherdarwaza, is the anchor of Old Kabul -- a tight-packed, mostly treeless maze of small brick and stone houses spreading out from the mountain's skirts. On the eastern slopes is Shohadayi Salehin, the largest cemetery in a city full of graves. There are no roads or antennae atop Sherdarwaza; instead, the thousand year-old wall of the old city runs along the serrated summit ridge, from an imposingly dilapidated British fort on one end to the abrupt plunge to the Kabul River on the other.

When I told the gang at Zadar that I was planning to hike the length of the boundary wall, their first response was, "Aren't there landmines up there?" In all-too-recent memory, the twin mountains of Kabul were the poles of the mujahidin's civil war, with Ahmad Shah Massoud's faction dug in on Asmayi and Gulbuddin Hekmetyar fortifying Sherdarwaza. They shelled each other and the streets of Kabul below until Hekmetyar was finally forced to retreat. Like much of Afghanistan, the Kabul mountains are plagued with mines and rumors of mines. "I dunno if I've ever seen anyone grazing sheep up there," said one refugee worker doubtfully. But I'd heard other rumors that people had hiked the wall end to end, and I figured we'd stick to well-maintained trails, keep our eyes open, and ask the locals to steer us clear of any particularly dangerous slopes.

So on Friday morning, I arrived at the Kabul River side of the mountain with my grizzled Alaskan co-worker Ray and our gruff, long-suffering Afghan driver Basyir. Basyir had proposed that we drive up one of the foothills of Sherdarwaza and hike the relatively gradual slope up to where it intercepts the wall; but Ray was
dead-set on following every inch of the wall, which meant starting at the foot of the ravine and heading straight up. "It's like sheep hunting in Alaska," Ray said cheerfully. "The cliffs always look impossible from a distance, but when you get there, you realize you can haul yourself up." I thought he had the right idea. "Course, getting back down with the sheep again can be a little tricky," he added a few minutes later, but I didn't find that too upsetting.

The village headman told us that a couple Westerners had climbed up to the base of the old wall, but we were the first he knew of to try hiking all the way up. He also assured us, to our relief, that there were no mines along the wall. That first ascent was a good scramble, with a little light rock climbing and much vertigo. Basyir began to cough heavily -- I can't imagine that spending your work day on the Kabul roads does anything good for your lungs -- and eventually drifted away to take a gentler path up. Ray went straight for the wall, climbing up thousand-year old, eroding adobe. I stuck with the steep rocks just to the left of the wall. The lower slope of Sherdarwaza was densely inhabited, with sturdy mud houses built on tall stone terraces; as the hill grew steeper, the houses fell away, save for a scattering of small stone buildings balanced on rocky outcrops. We quickly left the houses behind, climbing a sheer, jagged gorge that the locals clearly deemed most useful as a toilet. Spent 22mm shells clattered underfoot, and Ray once beckoned me over to inspect the bones he'd found half-buried in the wall, but I declined.

Basyir rejoined us at the crest of the first ridge, where the wall leveled out and began a more gradual ascent to the peak. Now above the smogline, we could see the snow-capped Paghman Range to the west, which Basyir identified as his ancestral home. To the north was central Kabul, barely visible through the thick, brown morning haze (though as we continued to hike, much of the smog burned off, and by noon our view over the city was reasonably clear). Thistles bloomed all along the rocky hillside. For a couple hundred yards the wall was merely a mound of toppled earth and stone. "Massoud did this," Basyir explained, pointing across the ravine to Asmayi. "To chase out Gulbuddin. The artillery was set up there, and there."

As we approached the summit ridge, the wall sprang up again, with occasional holes and craters. Soon we could clearly see the fortifications at the top. At this point, however, we also noticed that there were three young men running up the hill after us. Ray asked Basyir to find out what they wanted, and strode boldly onward toward the summit. I hung back a bit, and thus was close enough to hear Basyir rather matter-of-factly say, "Mines?" I looked up and saw Ray about to climb into the fortifications at the summit. Running up to where he was standing, I said, "Ray, I think I heard them say..."

"Mine!" one of the young men yelled as he crested the wall below us, and illustrated his point with an explosive noise and gesture. Basyir craned his neck to face us and clarified helpfully: "He says there are mines up there." I froze. Ray looked around rather doubtfully, then continued at a slow, deliberate pace in the direction he'd been going. This elicited a frantic burst of Dari from the three young men; I began walking back down, and Ray was finally convinced to follow. Our benefactors informed us that there were mines everywhere up here, and that a man had been killed by on just a few months before. Ray tried to convince them that there were only a few mines, and that we would be perfectly safe if we just stayed to the main trails. The young men understandably felt that they knew better than Ray on this point.

At length, one of them tentatively led us up to the summit fortifications, with glorious views on all sides. Old machine-gun nests were littered with fallen stones, shells, and (a little incongruously) kite string. The old wall ran off along the summit ridge to the southeast; a smaller, parallel wall and ditch had been constructed by Gulbuddin's men during the war. We realized that the highest peak was a short ways farther along the ridge, and was even more heavily fortified than the one on which we stood. As we watched, a small silhouette walked up to that peak from the far side of the mountain.

This was more than enough to convince Ray that we could go there too. He interrogated the young men (by way of Basyir) as to whether we could safely take the large, clear trail that ran some ways downhill of the fortifications to the east. They seemed to sort of agree that we could maybe do so, and Ray forged ahead, me and Basyir in reluctant train. About three minutes later, Ray's eyes began to wander back to the wall; it was clear that the magnetism that had drawn him back on the cliff was still in full effect. "I think we should try to stay closer to the wall," Ray said decisively. "Try not to step on any loose piles of rock." And he stepped off the path -- behind us, the three young men threw up their hands and stalked away -- and began moving in the direction of the old wall. I started to protest, then realized that if I let him get more than a few steps ahead, I would lose track of exactly where he'd put his feet. "You figure if they mine anyplace, it'll be the area right in front of the wall," Ray commented as we walked gingerly onward. "So we should try to get in between the two walls. We'll be safe if we walk on the wall." This was wildly unnerving as we walked ever closer to the fortifications, from the outside. I tried to recall if I'd ever heard of Afghans using the mines with timers set to explode when the _second_ guy in line stepped on them.

We made it safely to the low wall built by the mujahidin -- Basyir and I exhaled windily -- and hiked on to the peak, hopping across the ditch once or twice to the ancient boundary wall to look down into West Kabul. To our surprise, the fortifications on the peak were inhabited. A bunch of Afghan soldiers emerged from a dugout to look at us with some curiosity. They had a well-oiled Russian 22mm gun on a tripod, a fence of old shells and mortar casings, and a very unfriendly off-white dog. We chatted with them for a while, and they reassured us that the trails were in fact safe, and that all the mines were on the West Kabul side of the mountain. We surveyed the hills off to the south, and were told where the minefields were there as well. The views were amazing, and I had a sudden vision of taking a few soldiers out to mark out "Mine-Free" hiking trails for tourists -- once the tourists start coming, anyway.

The downhill hike was terrific, too -- the battlements of the old wall are essentially intact, and as you walk down them you can peer out through the old arrow slits into the valley below. The great cemetery is down there, as is Kabul's largest lake (completely dry now, after the five year drought). On the other side, you can see and hear the whole old city of Kabul, with the laughter of children, the clangor of metalsmiths, and the chanting from the Shi'ite mosque reverberating up through the clear, dry air. About halfway down Sherdarwaza, the old boundary wall finally collapses into a mound again, with a single pillar of brick and stone rising like a crooked finger from the last rampart. When you think of the effort it must have taken to build so long a wall to the peak of the highest mountain in Kabul -- much of the stone and all the water carried up from the valley below -- it's nothing short of astonishing. Far below, people today are quarrying the foundations of the wall for granite for their homes.

In the shelter of some large rocks, we came across a group of gamblers, surreptitiously crouching in a ring around a stack of crumpled afghani notes and tattered playing cards. They cheerfully hailed us in Dari, then Urdu, then broken English. "They hide out here because the police will stop their games otherwise," Basyir explained. "Yes, this gambling is illegal. It is a bad use of money." I asked whether this was really the best place for the gamblers to hide out, with soldiers hiking up the ridge every day. "Oh, the soldiers will not stop them," Basyir laughed. "They do not care. Only the police."

We descended at last to the old British fort, Bala Hasar, where the Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum holed up during the civil war. By this point, Basyir's enthusiasm for pointing out the various sights of Kabul was at its peak; so after dropping off Ray at the office, he drove me across town to Bagh-i-Bala, the hilltop palace built by Amir Abdurrahman a century or so ago. It's a small and now slightly shabby building, closed and shuttered when we were there, and its grounds have suffered greatly from the drought and war. There used to be countless grapevines here, Basyir informed me, and fruit trees. There are still several scattered pines -- "very old trees" -- but most of the rest have dried up. We stood looking over the empty swimming pool (built in the 70s to replace the wading pool of Abdurrahman), and the rehabilitated but still dry irrigation channels dug in the newly raked gardens. "When I was a young man," Basyir said gruffly, "there were flowers everywhere here. And many trees. It was very beautiful."

It still is.

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# Posted 6:49 PM by David Adesnik  

SOUTHERN EXPOSURE is the name of a new group blog focusing on Latin America. It came to my attention thanks to Randy Paul, creator of the very good one-man Latin American blog, Beautiful Horizons. At the moment, SE has good posts up on Brazil reaction to the WTO ruling against US steel tariffs, the Guatemalan elections, and the turmoil in the Bolivia (as well as its relationship to events in Venezuela.)

While it is hard to get bloggers -- let alone most Americans -- interested in Latin America these days, I think Randy does a great job of making the region interesting. While my own posting will probably stay focused the occupation of Iraq and the war on terror, I know that Randy -- and now SE -- is there when I need informed commentary on a region whose politics are continually distorted by the mainstream media. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:33 PM by David Adesnik  

SCOTS CONSPIRACY THEORISTS: JR points to this mind-bogglingly bizarre investigative report in Scotland's Sunday Herald. In a new twist on the Mossad-was-responsible-for-9/11 shtick, the report suggests that Israel was aware that Al Qaeda had something big in the works but decided to keep quiet in the expectation that an attack on American citizens would generate sympathy for Israel.

According to the Sunday Herald's homepage, it's investigation has "provoked an international storm". If you follow the link on those words, you get to another page listing the eminent news organizations that have picked up on the story, including The Palestine Chronicle, Indymedia, Antiwar.com, and Sullywatch.

There are two reputable organizations on the list, however: ABC News and New York's Jewish weekly, the Forward. While neither one substantiates any of the ridiculous suggestions made by the Herald, there was an interesting story behind the hype.

It turns out that the FBI picked up five Israelis on the afternoon of September 11th, thanks to a tip from a New Jersey housewife who saw the men acting strangely and filming the burning towers. When arrested, one of the men had thousands of dollars of cash in his sock, while one of the others had mutliple passports. Most ominously, one of the men had a boxcutter.

Upon further investigation, it turned out that the moving company the five men worked for was a front, probably for the Mossad. In custody, the men were subjected to repeated lie detector tests.

According to the Forward, the real story seems to be that the five men were Israeli intelligence agents spying on radical Muslims in the United States. Since Israel (and other US allies) are supposed to coordinate such activities with the US government, a thorough investigation had to be conducted.

Given that it will be another fifty years before we know all the details of the case, it simply won't be possible to disabuse conspiracy theorists of their more bizarre notions. Then again, it is that sort of undisprovability that it is the bread-and-butter of true conspiracy theorists.

UPDATE: According to a Scots journalist,

The Sunday Herald is a genuinely curious newspaper - it's increasingly red-green and anti-American for one thing - but even by its standards this was an extraordinary piece. One thing woth noting is that within Scottish journalism circles the author of this article, Neil McKay, is notoriously flaky (the editor Andrew Jaspan also gets a little too carried away on occasion). There are, I know for a fact, a number of editors in Scotland who would never ever even briefly consider employing him. He has a record of extravagant "scoops" that subsequently are revealed to be much, much less than they seem.

Full disclosure: The author of this comment works for one of the Herald's rivals. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:34 PM by David Adesnik  

GENOCIDAL DICTATOR DEFEATED: Voters turned back Guatemala's Gen. Efrain Rios Montt in his effort to win yesterday's presidential election. Rios Montt headed a military government in 1982-83 that sought to crush a leftist insurgency by indiscriminately murdering Guatemalan peasants.

Monday's election was also the most peaceful in recent Guatemalan history. It also had the largest turnout. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:22 PM by David Adesnik  

MISSION TO AFGHANISTAN: 15 envoys -- one from each state represented on the UN Security Council, have returned from Afghanistan with a mixed report on its progress toward democratic government. The mission found that

while Afghan officials have largely achieved the benchmarks of the Bonn agreement, which established the interim government and a timeline leading to national elections in 2004, "the conditions necessary for a credible political process are not yet in place," Mr. Pleuger [the German representative] said.

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# Posted 7:15 PM by David Adesnik  

A TRIBUTE ON VETERANS DAY: The NYT has published a set of letters sent home by servicemen and -women who later lost their lives on the battlefields of Iraq. All of them are well worth reading. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:06 PM by David Adesnik  

DEAD-TREE HYPERLINKS: As Josh mentioned earlier, David Brooks' latest column relies heavily on some excellent research and writing done by the blogosphere's own Dan Drezner. But since you can't link directly from Brooks column to Dan's work, I thought I'd provide some links here on OxBlog.

First up is Dan's recent article in Slate. After reading that, check out the extra material -- all of it well worth reading -- in this post on Dan's website. Finally, OxBlog is proud to say that it told the world how great Dan Drezner's work was three whole days before David Brooks decided to share it with the NYT's seven-figure readership. Go us! But more importantly, congratulations to Dan. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:25 AM by Patrick Belton  

COME PLAY WITH US: I've mentioned a few times here before that a few friends and I have started up a foreign policy society, which runs discussion groups in a handful of cities in the U.S., and also has a think-tank side that is aimed at contributing to the national foreign policy conversation the analyses and considered thoughts of the young, rising generation of foreign policy professionals.

Well, I'm happy to report that we've got a few more local chapters starting up: in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and New Haven, with two more to come shortly in Boston and L.A. as well. Each group will be meeting twice a month to discuss a topic in U.S. foreign policy - early topics will probably include our relationships with China, Russia, and Europe, and lessons to be learned from the U.S. experience in democracy promotion, development, and the war on terror. Our more established groups, in D.C. and Oxford, always warmly welcome new participants too.

So please drop me an e-mail if you'd like to come out and talk with us! I think we'll have fun. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:29 AM by Patrick Belton  

HEADING TO SEE THE MATRIX THIS WEEKEND? Don't do it - learn from your older brother Josh's mistakes! (And if you're even thinking about taking a date, just think about the variegated romantic repercussions of a bad movie upon your love life.... And now that I've heartlessly played on your worst insecurities, move on and read the next paragraph)

Instead, you might think about accompanying your popcorn (sorry - don't read that) with a quite good Irish art film called in America, which is by Jim Sheridan of "My Left Foot" directorial fame. It's a very well done film, with ample untaken plot twists touched on very lightly and deftly. It also includes a dextrously handled recurrent theme of depiction and representation (introduced by the young girl's camcorder), and presents one of the strongest black masculine roles in a recent cinematic history generally given to superficiality and type-casting. (Don't believe me? Try googling black men movies.) Much of what it does could have been heavy-handed in a less skillful treatment, and it is in this that Mr Sheridan's adeptness of his craft truly shows. So go see it; at the moment, it's playing in Oxford at the Phoenix, in LA (in the Egyptian), and one assumes it will probably be out in the east coast before too long as well.

And your date will like you for it, too. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:22 AM by Patrick Belton  

YALE PROFESSOR DAVID GELERNTER, writing in the Weekly Standard:

Does Iraq bring back memories of Vietnam? The president's critics say yes, and they are right. Vietnam came to mind when we saw Saddamites torturing their captives on camera. Do President Bush's opponents grasp that those are (or were) real people getting beaten to a pulp, mutilated, tortured, murdered? (If they did, wouldn't they be overjoyed now that the smug murderers have been thrown out, and radiantly proud of America?) Our moral obligations as the world's most powerful nation come strongly to mind when we hear about rape rooms and children's prisons; when we read about captives fed into industrial shredders, and swaggering princelings dragging women off the street to the torture houses.

We are haunted by the image of Vietnamese who trusted and supported us trying frantically to grab a place on the last outbound helicopter; by Vietnamese putting to sea in rowboats rather than enjoy Uncle Ho's "Workers' and Peasants' Paradise" one more day. We are haunted by the consequences of allowing South Vietnam to collapse. Tens of thousands of executions (maybe 60,000), re-education camps where hundreds of thousands died, a million boat people.

We put them in those rowboats--we antiwar demonstrators, we sophisticated, smart guys. The war was nearly over when I graduated from high school. But high school students were old enough to demonstrate. They were old enough to feel superior to the fools who were running the government. And they were old enough to have known better. They were old enough to have understood what communist regimes had cost the world in suffering, from the prisons of Havana to the death camps of Siberia. It was my fault, mine personally; I was part of the antiwar crowd and I'm sorry. But my apology is too late for the South Vietnamese dead. All I can do is join the chorus in shouting, "No more Vietnams!" No more shrugging off tyranny; no more deserting our friends; no more going back on our duties as the strongest nation on Earth.

Today we are haunted, in thinking about Iraq, by the fact that a noisy, self-important, narcissistic minority talked the United States into betraying its allies. (Loyalty didn't mean a lot to antiwar demonstrators; honor didn't mean a lot.) We betrayed our allies and hurried home, to introspect. They stayed on, to suffer. We were eager to make love, not war, but the South Vietnamese weren't offered that option. Their alternatives were to knuckle under or die.

Voltaire once felt obliged to rouse all Europe over the judicial torture of one man. Europe today reacts with the same charming befuddlement it felt back then: What's all the fuss? Surely, it's none of our business.

People ask: Are you proposing to overthrow every sadist tyrant on Earth? No, only proposing to be proud that we overthrew one.

His full article is here. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:53 AM by Patrick Belton  

TODAY THE GUNS FELL SILENT OVER FLANDERS, and so today we pause to call to mind those whose lives were silenced as well by all wars in the preceding century.
Britain comes to a halt today for two minutes at 11:00, as do her Commonwealth allies, among them Canada and Australia, which relative to its population suffered more losses than any other in the First World War. Here in Britain, the Queen unveiled a monument to Australian war dead, and the BBC dedicates a page to remembrance. Oxford has a page dedicated to poetry from the Great War.

They ask me where I've been,
And what I've done and seen.
But what can I reply
Who know it wasn't I,
But someone just like me,
Who went across the sea
And with my head and hands
Killed men in foreign lands...
Though I must bear the blame,
Because he bore my name.
- Wilfred Gibson, private, "Back" (1915)

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# Posted 6:25 AM by Patrick Belton  

THEY'VE GOT ISSUES: and this one's very good. Lots of good pieces in this week's TNR, on Khodorkovsky, al Sadr, the need for more troops in Iraq, Peter Beinart on the Democrats on Iraq, and the Dean campaign's inventive use of the internet. (There's also a lovely review of Rebecca West's unfinished writing on Mexico, for readers who've ponied up their subscriptions, and bought lunch for some lucky intern.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:39 AM by Patrick Belton  

FOR DEMOCRACY IN THE MIDDLE EAST: ARABS -
The Daily Star (Lebanon): "Good Rhetoric and Goals Need Good Follow-Up Policies"

Hafez Abu Se’da, head of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights:
"It is an historical speech, and I agree with what the president had to say, and this is the first time....It is a new vision from the United States now because they focus on democracy. For a long time, they focused on economy and commercial interests. It is historical because the United States is talking about democracy and the interest of the people in these countries.”

AGAINST: NYT, GUARDIAN, AND THE LEFT -
Guardian: "It Would be Laughable, Were it Not So Pathetic" (which, incidentally, includes only one quote from an Arab source)

MSNBC: "Arabs to Bush: Mind Your Own Business" (virtually the entire story, by the way, is made up of quotes from Iranian government sources - who, as OxBlog has often controversially pointed out, aren't Arab)

Ditto NYT: "In Mideast, Reaction to Bush Speech is Dismissive," where the only actual dismissive reactions come from official Iranian sources, and, of course, from the reporter.

World Socialist: "Bush Vows Decades for War for 'Democracy' in the Middle East'"

(And the Times of India, by contrast, simply reports the speech this way: "Pak Not a Democracy: Bush") And who says there's no objectivity left in journalism? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:29 AM by Patrick Belton  

YOU TELL 'EM: Brookings's Michael O'Hanlon, one of the young stars of the think tank world, writes this week to call on Democratic presidential candidates to offer critiques of the administration's foreign policy which are substantive, fair, and politically useful. He says, however, that what they're currently offering up is none of the above.

Instead, says O'Hanlon, Democratic candidates are dwelling on three misgrounded premises:

The first mistake is to argue that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were not a serious concern before the war. The second is that somehow Bush administration unilateralism has been the principal cause of our current problems on the ground in Iraq. And the third is the assumption, explicit or implicit, that the Iraq mission will remain just as difficult as it is today right through general election time next year.

Michael's piece is a refreshing breath of good sense, both for those of us who still want to call ourselves Scoop Jackson Democrats, and also for everyone who simply values a fair public debate on matters of foreign policy. His whole piece is here.


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# Posted 5:29 PM by Patrick Belton  

REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY:

They shall not grow old as we grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning
we will remember them......

-Laurence Binyon, For the Fallen (1869 - 1943)

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# Posted 10:09 AM by Patrick Belton  

SARTRE, ET LES SARTRIENS: I paid a visit, about a fortnight ago, to Sartre and Simone at the Cimetière du Montparnasse. Slate has a thoughtful piece up this week on his legacy. For all his weaknesses, including his oft-raised inability to inoculate himself with his own vaccine against totalitarianism, no subsequent philosopher (or earlier, pace Voltaire) has to such a great extent engaged the broader culture of his day, and wrapped it around himself:

Despite the phenomenological complexities of his philosophy, Sartre managed to make it exciting. Anybody could become an existentialist, especially the young. The teutonic dread of Kierkegaard and angst of Heidegger gave way to Sartrean fun. In the underground caves of St. Germain-des-Prés, jazz dancing was deemed the highest expression of existentialism. Never has a serious philosopher had such an impact on nightlife.

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# Posted 9:26 AM by Patrick Belton  

FAREED ON BUSH'S DEMOCRACY PROMOTION SPEECH: Fareed applauds the President's speech heartily in his Newsweek column, and calls for a redoubling of U.S. efforts and resolve in what he warns will be a "long, hard slog" toward the building of a world of liberal democracies.

Whatever the problems—and I’ll get to them—as a speech it stands as one of the most intelligent and eloquent statements by a president in recent memory.... If it marks a real shift in strategy, it will go down in history as Bush’s most important speech.

Then,

Sometimes I think that President Bush’s critics need to put up a sign somewhere in their rooms that reads: “Some things are true even if George W. Bush believes them.” A visceral dislike for the president is boxing many otherwise sensible people into a corner because they cannot bring themselves to agree with anything he says.

Read the whole thing. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:18 AM by Patrick Belton  

JAPAN VOTES TODAY: Pollsters are predicting that Koizumi's LDP-led coalition will triumph, but narrowly, with the Democratic Party poised to make major gains. CNN, Reuters. The election is being fought principally over the stalling Japanese economy, with supporting roles being played from time to time by pension reform (a significant issue in heavily greying Japan), the prime minister's support of the US over Iraq, and his push to permit the Japanese army to engage in counterterror operations.

The prime minister's hair, however, has yet to play a major role in the election. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:15 AM by David Adesnik  

CULTURAL INSENSITIVITY: The WaPo reports: "The mujaheddin hosted a banquet for the Americans, laying out a spread of chicken and French fries after showing off a new museum dedicated to the history of their struggle." Those are FREEDOM fries, dammit! I said FREEDOM FRIES! (Regardless of whether that joke made you laugh, the WaPo article is worth a read.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:09 AM by David Adesnik  

SHOW ME THE MONEY: Howard Dean's decision to opt out of the federal campaign finance program hasn't exactly been an exercise in intellectual honesty. Yet leaving aside the issue of hypocrisy, I am glad to see a Democrat boldly willingly to state that he is going to match the Republicans dollar for dollar. I just with it weren't this particular Democrat... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:59 AM by David Adesnik  

THE ETERNAL PESSIMIST: Today's NYT features an essay from Milt Bearden, a 30-year veteran of the CIA's directorate of operations. Mr. Bearden warns that the Ba'athist insurgents in Iraq have developed a brilliant strategy worthy of Sun Tzu and that the prospects of American success are doubtful at best.

Two years ago, Mr. Bearden published an essay in Foreign Affairs entitled "Afghanistan, Graveyard of Empries". In it, he warned that

It is more than doubtful that the Northern Alliance forces could capture bin Ladin and his followers, and there is no reasonable guarantee that they could dislodge the Taliban. On the contrary, the more likely consequences of a U.S. alliance with the late Masoud's fighters would be the coalescing of Afghanistan's majority Pashtun tribes around their Taliban leaders and the rekindling of a brutal, general civil war that would continue until the United States simply gave up. The dominant tribe in Afghanistan, which also happens to be the largest, will dominate; replacing the Pashtun Taliban with the largely Tajik and Uzbek Northern Alliance is close to impossible. The threat of providing covert assistance to the Northern Alliance might be a useful short-term strategy to pressure the Taliban, if it is handled delicately, but any real military alliance to Masoud's successors will backfire.

Without pretending that the American-led reconstruction of Afghanistan has been a success, I think it is pretty fair to say that Bearden's prediction of a US military failure was far off the mark. Also of special interest is his misguided belief that there would be a Pashtun backlash if the United States chose to side with the Northern Alliance.

During the first months of 2003, OxBlog patiently documented the widespread belief that a potential US invasion of Iraq would provoke a massive backlash throughout the Arab world. And yet the peoples of the Arab world stayed home, rather than flooding the streets and toppling their governments -- just as the Pashtuns have not declared war on the US-backed government in Afghanistan.

The point here is that those who expect failure on the part of the United States almost always underestimate the ability of Middle Eastern and other "non-Western" peoples to distinguish between imperialists, e.g. the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and liberators, e.g. the United States in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is not to say that the establishment of a democratic order in either Afghanistan or Iraq is even close to being guaranteed. But if we commit ourselves to working honestly toward that goal, the people we work with are likely to recognize that their best interest is ours as well, and vice versa.

UPDATE: It seems that Wes Clark is also in the habit of overestimating Iraqi resentment of the United States. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:27 AM by David Adesnik  

THE SANCTIONS PARADOX: I expect that that the blogosphere's resident expert on sanctions will soon post something about this one-sided column from Nick Kristof. In the meantime, I'm going to ask aloud why the Burmese junta has decided to release Aung San Suu Kyi if international economic pressure has been completely ineffective. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:21 AM by David Adesnik  

WHO'S STEALING CHINA'S JOBS? According to conventional wisdom, China's low-paid labor force lets it steal jobs from American workers. But it turns out that China has lost an even greater percentage of its manufacturing jobs than the United States has.

So, you might ask, who is the culprit? Answer: efficiency. Now it's true that some jobs are leaving the United States for lower-wage markets. But as massive factory job losses in China, Brazil and elsewhere in the developing world show, protectionism is not the answer. With any luck, public awareness of this trend will increase support for making the Western Hemisphere the largest free trade area on earth. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:56 PM by Patrick Belton  

NEW FROM SUU KYI: The Burmese junta has released Suu Kyi from her house arrest, but the persecuted pro-democracy leader is refusing liberty until 35 colleagues arrested at the same time as her are released from detention as well. CNN, BBC, Suu Kyi's pages.

(More on our past vocal support for Suu Kyi and for the cause of Burmese freedom is here, and as a cautionary note, we've noted here that she's been released in the past under international pressure, only to be reimprisoned shortly thereafter - after the junta had garnered trade and other benefits for releasing her.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:50 PM by David Adesnik  

ZELL EXPLAINS JOE SIXPACK: Greg Wythe has an in-depth review of Zell Miller's new book. On a more substantive note, Greg also reviews avant garde film classic Satan's Cheerleaders. Plus, Greg mentions my favorite place in Texas: New Braunfels. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:43 AM by David Adesnik  

AND NOW FOR SOME REAL NEWS: Everytime I sit down to blog I think, "Gee, I should focus on something other than the occupation of Iraq. You know, put up one or two posts about it, but give some serious airtime to all the other important issues out there." But then I read something that gets me all worked up about the occupation, so I write about it. Again. And again. And again.

Anyhow, I thought I'd break the monotony by linking to this story about Tenacious D's abortive hunger strike, which the band had hoped would last "for 45 days or until their DVD went platinum, world hunger came to an end or there was peace in the Middle East." Now that's what I call social activism. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:33 AM by David Adesnik  

A BLOGGER AND A GENTLEMAN: When expounding upon his interest in pornography, Matt Yglesias spends his time defending OxBlog's honor. As Matt writes,

I keep wondering why I see conservative writers saying the Democratic candidates want to cut and run from Iraq and that the great thing about George W. Bush is that he wants to stay the course. My best guess was that they're just liars. After reading this from David Adesnik, though, I'm not so sure, since David's no liar.

While Matt's compliment is somewhat backhanded, I'm proud to accept it. A reputation for honesty is very hard to come by. But we all say dumb things about politics sometimes.

Still, I'm not about to disavow my criticism of Howard Dean. As Matt goes on to note,

David explains that we can't get too focused on little things like Dean's "official position" on the war. David, apparently, was able to gaze into Dean's heart and see that he has a secret plan to end the war.

Meanwhile, we know that Bush is going to stay the course because, after all, his official position is that we're going to stay the course.

In other words, Matt thinks that "official positions" are more credible when they come from Howard Dean than when they come from George Bush. But I'm not so sure.

Bush & Co. may have said a lot of misleading things, but they have been consistenly clear about where the stand on the two biggest issues of the day: taxes and Iraq. In contrast, Dean is the kind of guy who publicly asks

"Where do you get this 'I'm a strong supporter of NAFTA'?" -- though in fact he had described himself as "a very strong supporter of NAFTA" on that same network [ABC] eight years earlier

Of course, the NAFTA incident doesn't mean that Dean isn't being up front about Iraq. While that is my sense of the matter, I recognize that the issue is a controversial one. For example, one of the comments appended to Matt's post (by Swopa) points to the following statement by Howard Dean in a the Oct. 9 Democratic debate:

Now that we're there [in Iraq], we can't pull out responsibly. Because if we do, there are more Al Qaida, I believe, in Iraq today than there were before the president went in. If they establish a foothold in Iraq, or if a fundamentalist Shiite regime comes in, allied with Iran, that is a real security danger to the United States, when one did not exist before when Saddam Hussein was running the place.

That's a pretty firm statement, so I'm going to have to do some more research on the issue before I convince anyone that I have a strong case. Still, what is clearly absent from either this statement or the one from Dean that I initially criticized is that he really cares about building democracy in Iraq. For him, the occupation is a mounting cost without any possible benefits -- which leads me to think that he will not respond to unexpected events in the Middle East the way that a liberal hawk might want him to. What he wants is to avoid entanglements, not fight a war of ideas.

UPDATE: This persuasive Peter Beinart column (recommended by HTY) makes a point about Howard Dean very similar to my own. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:55 AM by David Adesnik  

SO WHAT YOU'RE TRYING TO SAY IS...Josh Marshall says everyone should read this column by Fareed Zakaria. Now here are some highlights from it:

Frustrated by the lack of quick progress on the ground and fading political support at home, Washington is now latching on to the idea that a quick transfer of power to local troops and politicians would make things better. Or at any rate, it would lower American casualties. It was called Vietnamization; today it's called Iraqification. And then as now, it is less a winning strategy than an exit strategy...

This new impulse has less to do with Iraqi democracy than with American democracy. The president wants to show, in time for his reelection, that Iraqis are governing their affairs and Americans are coming home. But it might not work out that way...

For the neoconservatives in the Pentagon, a quick transfer fulfills a pet obsession, installing in power the Iraqi exiles led by Ahmad Chalabi. Last week the Philadelphia Inquirer quoted a senior administration official as saying, "There are some civilians at the Pentagon who've decided that we should turn this over to someone else and get out as fast as possible." But every indication we have is that the exiles do not have broad popular support.

There are no shortcuts out. Iraq is America's problem. It could have been otherwise, but in the weeks after the war the administration, drunk with victory, refused to share power with the world...

In short, Zakaria's column covers all the bases of the Josh Marshall Weltanschauung. There is the Bush administration's ignorance of history, its preoccupation with electoral concerns at the expense of the national interest, the devious and self-destructive influence of the neo-cons, and a reckless disregard for allied opinion.

The funny thing is, that despite all of these hyperbolic attacks on the administration and comparisons to Vietnam, Zakaria's message is almost identical to that of the President himself, i.e. we must stay the course in Iraq, come hell or high water, because our national security depends upon it. If you click over to Zakaria's column, you'll see that after denouncing the Bush Administration for "refus[ing] to share power with the world", Zakaria writes that "Now there can be only one goal: success."

Moreover, the point of his Vietnam analogy is not that American has entered a quagmire, but rather that we cannot depend on incompetent local allies. In fact, drawing a sharp contrast to the US effort in Vietnam, Zakaria believes that we have the fundamentals of victory in place the insurgents lack popular support and external sources of supply.

In policy terms, Zakaria's is also the opposite of what one might expect from the quagmire camp. His answer to what's going wrong right now is not a faster exit, but a more patient one. And I wholeheartedly agree. Zakaria is absolutley right that

The desperation to move faster and faster is going to have bad results. Accelerating the training schedule (which has already been accelerated twice before) will only produce an ineffective Iraqi army and police force. Does anyone think that such a ragtag military could beat the insurgency where American troops are failing?...

The idea of a quick transfer of political power is even more dangerous. The Iraqi state has gone from decades of Stalinism to total collapse. And there is no popular national political party or movement to hand power to. A quick transfer of authority to a weak central government would only encourage the Shiites, the Sunnis and the Kurds to retain de facto autonomy in their regions and fragment the country.

The question Zakaria didn't ask but should have is whether all of the pressure to "Iraqify" the occupation as quickly as possible is the result of premature pessimism about its outcome. By making it seem that Iraqification is the Administration's preferred option, Zakaria avoids asking whether the Administration has begun to drift toward such a reckless strategy in response to widespread, often exaggerated perceptions that the United States is achieving nothing on the ground.

What it all comes down to is a question of rhetorical strategy: Does Zakaria's harsh criticism of the administration increase his credibility as an advocate of intensive nation-building? Or is he making it even harder for the US government to support the nation-building process by packaging his support in criticism that reinforces the arguments of all those who want to us to end the occupation as soon as possible? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:17 AM by David Adesnik  

THE DEFENSE RESTS ITS CASE: There's something we've wanted to know for a long time now -- Is it true that the Bush Administration has been handing out reconstruction contracts to its personal friends and seven-figure campaign donors? According this report by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), the answer is an unequivocal yes. Thanks to its impressive array of statistics, the CPI report got some very favorable coverage from the Washington Post and a lot of other leading newspapers.

However, that kind of coverage may have proven to be CPI's undoing. Curious about what CPI had to say, Dan Drezner decided to take a closer look at their work. What he found was a lot of bad math and false accusations.

Then, in this impressive post, Dan goes on to answer another big question on the reconstruction front -- Even if it's true that the Bush Administration awarded major contracts to firms that weren't friends or donors, don't the contracts given to KB&R and Halliburton show that favoritism still matters?

According to Dan, the answer is once again 'No'. It turns out that there were very good reasons behind the administration's decision to give major contracts to KB&R and Halliburton. Plus, those companies seem to do a very good job of what their hired for.

Dan does point out, however, that we still don't know enough about Pentagon outsourcing to pronounce it an unmitigated success. The fact is, there aren't that many companies ready to step up and perform the services that KB&R and Halliburton offer, so competitions remains dampened. But for the moment, it is safe to throw out some of the unsubstantiated charges that are casting suspicion on the American effort to rebuild Iraq.

UPDATE: MF points out that the WaPo ran this op-ed in response to the CPI report. It's by a Clinton Administration procurement officer who thinks the current administration isn't handling Iraq well at all. Still, he's 100% confident that there has been no cronyism or dishonesty in the process of awarding reconstruction contracts.

While MF is right that this op-ed balances the WaPo's coverage, one has to wonder why their initial coverage completely failed to uncover so much of the logic and evidence in this one op-ed. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:34 PM by David Adesnik  

ADVICE FROM A FRIEND: A pro-American Pole thinks the US should be doing more to show the Polish people that they are our peers, not our inferiors. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:15 PM by David Adesnik  

IRANIANS ARE NOT ARABS: I just thought the headline writers at the WaPo might like to know that. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:12 PM by David Adesnik  

ON THE MOVE: While my knowledge of economics consists largely of what I read in the papers, a couple of statistics in today's NYT struck me as fairly interesting. First, according to this very upbeat news analysis piece, there are 130.13 million individuals in the US workforce, representing 66.11 percent of the adult population. Then, in this even more upbeat op-ed column, it says that anywhere from 27 to 35 million old jobs disappear each year, ulitmatley to be replaced by approximately the same number of new jobs.

As such, one might infer that the average American changes jobs every few years -- a process that can be exhilirating or terrifying depending on one's perspective. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that the population is divided into two blocks of workers, one that changes jobs very frequently and one that doesn't. Thus, what I want to know is how long the average worker stays in the average job, as well as the average income of those workers who leave old jobs and take new ones. With that kind of data, one might be able to tell whether job loss is the curse of the lower-middle class, or the escalator to higher standards of living. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:55 PM by Patrick Belton  

DON'T ALWAYS BELIEVE WHAT YOU READ IN THE PAPER, NO. 3815: From the Guardian, May 15th:

[Jessica Lynch's] Iraqi guards had long fled [at the time of her rescue], she was being well cared for - and doctors had already tried to free her....

The doctors in Nassiriya say they provided the best treatment they could for Lynch in the midst of war. She was assigned the only specialist bed in the hospital, and one of only two nurses on the floor. "I was like a mother to her and she was like a daughter,"says Khalida Shinah....

[Lynch's] memory loss means that "researchers" have been called in to fill in the gaps...

Her rescue will go down as one of the most stunning pieces of news management yet conceived. It provides a remarkable insight into the real influence of Hollywood producers on the Pentagon's media managers, and has produced a template from which America hopes to present its future wars.

Their "daring" assault on enemy territory was captured by the military's night-vision camera.

Now from the Washington Post, November 6:

A new authorized biography of the soldier accurately cites medical records indicating Lynch was sexually assaulted, Stephen Goodwin said.

In the [recently released authorized biography] book, [Rick] Bragg writes: "The records do not tell whether her captors assaulted her almost lifeless, broken body after she was lifted from the wreckage, or if they assaulted her and then broke her bones into splinters until she was almost dead."

Gee, from the Guardian's reporting, I sure would've thought that Pfc Lynch was living in the lap of luxury, you know, like in some kind of (e.g., Hanoi) Hilton, and it was only the Straussian-Volvofitzian-media cabal which had pretended otherwise....

Note too the copious use of scare quotes in the May Guardian report. Perhaps I'll be forgiven if I follow their lead and begin systematically referring to the Guardian as a "news" source. Imitation is the best form of flattery, right? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:32 PM by Patrick Belton  

MORE ON THIS IN THE MORNING: But incredible kudos to the president for giving this speech today at NED outlining a coherent U.S. policy of democracy promotion. Initial coverage is in the NYT and WaPo. (Many thanks to our friend JG for bringing this speech to our attention, in a day otherwise occupied by pitying the fool naive enough to take on Perfessor Chafetz in an argument....)

A few significant quotes:

Some skeptics of democracy assert that the traditions of Islam are inhospitable to the representative government. This "cultural condescension," as Ronald Reagan termed it, has a long history. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, a so-called Japan expert asserted that democracy in that former empire would "never work." Another observer declared the prospects for democracy in post-Hitler Germany are, and I quote, "most uncertain at best" -- he made that claim in 1957. Seventy-four years ago, The Sunday London Times declared nine-tenths of the population of India to be "illiterates not caring a fig for politics." Yet when Indian democracy was imperiled in the 1970s, the Indian people showed their commitment to liberty in a national referendum that saved their form of government.

Time after time, observers have questioned whether this country, or that people, or this group, are "ready" for democracy -- as if freedom were a prize you win for meeting our own Western standards of progress. In fact, the daily work of democracy itself is the path of progress. It teaches cooperation, the free exchange of ideas, and the peaceful resolution of differences. As men and women are showing, from Bangladesh to Botswana, to Mongolia, it is the practice of democracy that makes a nation ready for democracy, and every nation can start on this path.

It should be clear to all that Islam -- the faith of one-fifth of humanity -- is consistent with democratic rule. Democratic progress is found in many predominantly Muslim countries -- in Turkey and Indonesia, and Senegal and Albania, Niger and Sierra Leone. Muslim men and women are good citizens of India and South Africa, of the nations of Western Europe, and of the United States of America.

More than half of all the Muslims in the world live in freedom under democratically constituted governments. They succeed in democratic societies, not in spite of their faith, but because of it. A religion that demands individual moral accountability, and encourages the encounter of the individual with God, is fully compatible with the rights and responsibilities of self-government.

and

This is a massive and difficult undertaking -- it is worth our effort, it is worth our sacrifice, because we know the stakes. The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world, increase dangers to the American people, and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region. Iraqi democracy will succeed -- and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran -- that freedom can be the future of every nation. The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.

and a personal favorite:

Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.

Therefore, the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results. As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace.

The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country. From the Fourteen Points to the Four Freedoms, to the Speech at Westminster, America has put our power at the service of principle. We believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty. And we believe that freedom -- the freedom we prize -- is not for us alone, it is the right and the capacity of all mankind.

Working for the spread of freedom can be hard. Yet, America has accomplished hard tasks before. Our nation is strong; we're strong of heart. And we're not alone. Freedom is finding allies in every country; freedom finds allies in every culture. And as we meet the terror and violence of the world, we can be certain the author of freedom is not indifferent to the fate of freedom.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:59 AM by Patrick Belton  

THANK GOD FOR SCIENTISTS:

Scientists have proved that even the most seemingly innocent chat with a woman can be enough to send male sex hormones soaring. A team from the University of Chicago paid students to come into their lab under the pretence of testing their saliva chemistry.
While there, the students got to chat to a young female research assistant. Saliva tests showed the brief interaction was enough to raise testosterone levels by as much as 30%. The more a man's hormone level shot up, the more attractive he later admitted to finding the research assistant. And perhaps more tellingly, the research assistant herself was able to identify those men who found her attractive. The men who she judged to be doing the most to try to impress her proved to be those who registered the biggest jump in testosterone levels.

Maybe I should considering withdrawing my objections to whether politics should be considered a science. (On multiple grounds. Incidentally, widely read politics blog seeks research assistant...apply in person, and do please just ignore all the saliva lying around our office) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:46 AM by David Adesnik  

CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER: Atrios and Luskin have decided to kiss and make up. So I ask: If there can be peace in the blogosphere, why can't there be peace in the Middle East? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:34 AM by David Adesnik  

ST. DAIACL HUTEEVS: Can't remember whether the Secretary of Commerice or the Secretary of Transportation comes first in the line of presidential succession? Then you need an acronym! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:22 AM by Patrick Belton  

SPANGLISH FINALLY GETTING ITS DUE: After living for a substantial period in Mexico, I came to nurse a lifelong affection not only for that beautiful country and its people, but also for the borderlands, and the people who occupy the at times creative, at times painful, space that corresponds to the tidy black line which on political maps neatly separates two countries and cultures.

I also became very fond of the language which is often spoken on that tidy black line, Spanglish. And for that reason I'm very pleased to note this underappreciated, amazingly versatile language is finally receiving its long-overdue literary recognition: this, namely, in a new book by Ilan Stavans, a Jewish Mexican who teaches at Amherst, and whose engaging earlier works include The Hispanic Condition and Tropical Synagogues. Particularly worth mentioning, the introductory essay of his book includes inter alia (Latinglish) his playful translation of a particularly significant passage from Iberian literature: “In un placete de la Mancha of which nombre no quiero remembrearme, vivía, not so long ago, uno de esos gentlemen who always tienen una lanza in the rack, una buckler antigua, a skinny caballo y un grayhound para el chase.” ¡Que viva la frontera! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:03 AM by David Adesnik  

CUBA LIBRE? A prominent dissident says free trade won't pry open the Castro dictatorship. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:56 AM by David Adesnik  

KERRY -- NO LONGER THE FRENCH CANDIDATE: Now that Howard Dean has characterized his remarks about the Confederate flag as "a big contretemps", John Kerry shouldn't take it for granted that he has the Francophile vote locked up. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:51 AM by David Adesnik  

SADDAM'S FINAL PEACE MISSION: The NYT has just put up a detailed investigative report about an apparent effort by Saddam to broker a last-minute deal with the United States. Basically, Saddam was offering the US the chance to conduct its own inspections.

According to Imad Hage, the Lebanese Christian intermediary who was running messages to the Pentagon for Iraq, the Iraqis "understand the days of manipulating the United States are over." I find that hard to believe. As far as I can tell, the Iraqis were playing for time at the last minute, hoping that further inspections might delay an American invasion until after the summer -- during which time either opposition to the war would mount or the US would find it impossible to keep 150,000 troops on the ground in the Middle East.

To the NYT's credit, correspondent James Risen states up front that Saddam's "overtures, after a decade of evasions and deceptions by Iraq, were ultimately rebuffed." While that kind of statement comes pretty close to editorializing in favor of the Bush Administration's position, it does balance the suggestion elsewhere in the article that the United States missed a valuable opportunity to avoid an unnecessary war. Although you have to wonder: if Saddam was so interested in peace, why did he invest so much effort in deceiving the UN inspectors? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:21 AM by David Adesnik  

LIB-HAWK TURF WAR: Winds of Change has compiled a comprehensive set of links to a recent discussion among liberal hawks about whether there is any hope for the Democratic party when it comes to national security. Before getting into the intricacies of the debate, let me state my position up front: I'm with Peter Beinart.

Beinart makes two basic points. First, the Democrats tend to confuse biography with ideology. They assume that a war hero like John Kerry or a general like Wesley Clark will have instant credibility on national security issues despite having no clear position on the most important issues of the day.

Second, the Democrats had a golden opportunity to present themselves as the party of responsible internationalism by saying that Bush's $87 billion plan for Iraq and Afghanistan was an admission that the Democrats had been right all along about the need to take nation-building seriously. Instead, the Democratic candidates for President began to offer evasive answers about whether they supported the plan, sometimes suggesting that the money might be better spent at home.

So, when Election Day 2004 rolls around, who will I vote for? Answer: I don't know. But what if things stay as they are now, with the Democratic candidates half-heartedly promising to rebuild Iraq while the Bush Administration says all the right things but only does half of them? And what if 20-30 soldiers a month are still falling prey to hostile fire while there is no clear progress toward the drawing up of an effective constitution?

Even then, I would find myself closer to the President's side. He has invested so much of his credibility in this issue that I think it will be all but impossible for him to declare victory and retreat, perhaps in concert with the United Nations. And part of me really believes that he is personally committed to seeing Iraq become democratic.

In my heart, I'm still hoping that the Democrats can put up a credible national security candidate. But Lieberman is a long shot. Gephardt seems solid on this front, but is a long shot as well. If Clark gets things together, perhaps it could be him. But in the end, I see myself forced into a situation where I may have to sacrifice my preferences on the domestic policy in order to ensure a responsible US approach to foreign affairs.

But enough about me. What are all the other lib-hawks and moderate Democrats saying? First, there's Zell Miller. It's not often that someone who voted for Adlai Stevenson twice comes out in favor of George W. Bush. Still, the explanation Miller gives for his change of heart is simplistic at best, disingenuous at worst. He says that the Democratic candidates

to varying degrees, want us to quit and get out of Iraq. They don't want us to stay the course in this fight between tyranny and freedom. This is our best chance to change the course of history in the Middle East. So I cannot vote for a candidate who wants us to cut and run with our shirttails at half-mast.

As Democratic partisan for over five decades, Miller must've confronted plenty of Republicans who charged his party with being the home of cowards and traitors. So how can he turn around now and say things that are so maddeningly similar?

Since that is what I think of Miller, you won't be surprised to hear that I disagree with Michael Totten's assertion that Miller's conversion is a reflection of a Democratic failure to come up with a serious foreign policy. By the same token, I don't put much stock in the significance of Roger Simon's assertion that

[The Democratic candidates] are one of the sleaziest collections of low-down opportunists I have ever seen on one stage together short of that crowd of tobacco executives who testified “No, sirree, I didn’t know that nicotine was addictive.”

If this election were about honesty and opportunism, I would not consider voting for four more years of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. I also disagree with Roger that the Democrats have failed to appreciate the stakes of our conflict with terrorism and dictatorship. I think they know what we're fighting for. They just aren't as clear about what it takes to win.

That said, I'd ask Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias to respond to Peter Beinart's arguments about the failures of Democratic foreign policy, instead of taking down the straw-man arguments that they associate with the Democrats-for-Bush camp.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go back to pretending that Harry Truman is still president.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:43 PM by Patrick Belton  

IT'S OFFICIAL: HAROLD KOH TO ASSUME the deanship of the Yale Law School, for our readers who are interested. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:35 PM by David Adesnik  

SERIOUS CHARGES: No, this isn't another post about Wesley Clark. Thank God. It's a post about a Canadian citizen whom the US deported to Syria on grounds of being a suspected terrorist. Released last month, Maher Arar said he was brutally tortured in Syria, something that American authorities knew would happen. While the facts aren't all, it certainly seems that Mr. Arar was the victim of unjust American actions that did nothing to advance the war on terror. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:16 PM by David Adesnik  

BREMER-OXBLOG TELEPATHIC LINK: So now it seems like Paul B. doesn't approve of the the paramilitary idea. He is simply "open" to it. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:13 AM by David Adesnik  

MASON-DIXON FOLLIES: "Former Vermont governor Howard Dean came under fierce attack Tuesday night from several Democratic rivals, who accused him of arrogance and insensitivity and demanded that he apologize for saying last week that he wanted to be the candidate for 'guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks...'" Don't ask. Just read. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:08 AM by David Adesnik  

BREMER'S SECRET POLICE: Under pressure to clamp down on Ba'athist insurgents, Paul Bremer has agreed to the training of an Iraqi paramilitary and intelligence-gathering force under the auspices of the Ministry of the Interior. Supposedly, the local knowledge of the Iraqi force will enable to track down insurgents more effectively.

To Bremer's credit, he is deeply worried about the implications of establishing such a force, initially opposed it, and wants to ensure that there will be a rigorous screening process so that the ranks of the new counterinsurgency force don't become filled with criminals in uniform. Bremer also wants the force to undergo police training, not military education.

Frankly, I don't think Bremer is going to get what he wants. The United States has never been good at teaching foreign military forces to respect civilian government, human rights or anything else. When we are successful at promoting democracy, we are successful because we side with the civilians against the military.

It is also worth pointing out that the US has a pretty bad record of training counterinsurgency forces, even if one leaves human rights issues aside. In El Salvador, for example, a massive of amount of American funding and manpower did little more than entrench the corruption and incompetence that plagued the Salvadoran military. Bottom line: On this one, I'm siding with the pessimists. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:03 PM by David Adesnik  

APPARENTLY, OXBLOG OWES CONDI AN APOLOGY: In a recent post, I criticized Wes Clark for saying that the Bush Administration's negligence was in part responsible for 9/11. As part of OxBlog's ongoing effort to be fair and balanced, I also criticized Condi Rice for saying that the Clinton administration was negligent with regard to Al Qaeda. But now it seems that Condi may not have said that at all.

As Pejman points out, the idea that Condi said what she said comes from this NYT article. As such, Pejman has some sharp words for Matt Yglesias, who blasted Condi for her one-sided accusations on the basis of what he read in the NYT. So I guess OxBlog ought to suffer some of Pejman's wrath as well.

FYI, the quotation I attributed to Condi (taken from an e-mail sent by one of our readers) is pretty much a verbatim repetition of what the NYT said, with just a few of the quotation marks moved around. Still, it should go without saying that I had an obligation to verify the quote before posting it on the web.

Btw, I'm still looking for a transcript of Condi's speech since it isn't up on the NSC website yet. (Even so, it's pretty clear from reading the NYT article that Condi's remarks were misrepresented.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:36 PM by David Adesnik  

STUDENTS FOR WAR: While Reihan suggests that it's a parody, I think that the SFW website is for real. Yes, the graphics on the SFW homepage are ridiculous. And agitating for war with North Korea is almost ridiculous. Still, SFW was a real organization with typical right-of-center views back in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

Anyhow, the reason I raise this issue is because the Campus Organizations section of the SFW site has a link to OxDem. To SFW's credit, it describes OxDem and the other student groups as "organizations supporting the cause of freedom". If SFW were a parody, I think it would have the decency to call us "young hegemonists" or something to that effect.

So, bottom line: Website real. In no way representative of OxDem's views. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:35 AM by David Adesnik  

"AMERICA WILL NOT RUN": The President has come out with one response to Sunday's tragic loss of life. Howard Dean has come out with another:

"[The attack] weakens the position of the president and my Democratic opponents," said Dr. Dean, a Democratic contender who, as one of the most vocal critics of the war, cited the attack on a Chinook helicopter that took the lives of 16 American soldiers on Sunday. "There are now almost 400 people dead who wouldn't be dead if that resolution hadn't been passed and we hadn't gone to war."

While Dean can argue with some validity that the war may have been a mistake given our failure to find a substantial cache of WMD, this sort of statement implies that because we made a mistake by going in, we should pull out right now regardless of the consequences. That is the kind of short-sighted thinking that makes it so hard for me to even consider supporting the Vermont governor's bid for Commander-in-Chief.

UPDATE: Brian Ulrich writes that this interpretation of what Dean said may be misleading. After all, Dean says on his website that

"That is, after all, now much more than a national security objective," he added. "It is a declaration of national purpose, written in the blood of our troops, and of the innocent on all sides who have perished."

His bullet point on American troops: "A democratic transition will take between 18 to 24 months, although troops should expect to be in Iraq for a longer period."

While Brian is right about Dean's official position, I think one gets a better sense of what Dean is about by listening to what he says in person. The pattern we tend to see with Howard Dean is that he says something embarrassing in person, e.g. his comment about "guessing" that Iraq is better off without Saddam, then has to correct himself by pointing out that his official position isn't what you would expect based on his prior statement. To me, this says a lot about his instincts on foreign policy. If Dean makes the transition from candidate to present, I think it is reasonable to expect that his instincts will be far more more important than his official positions.

Btw, it's probably worth pointing out that Dean's official statement is from April 9, which leads me to think that it isn't exactly the most important thing on his mind these days. So what I'm interested in seeing is whether Dean keeps talking about those-who-wouldn't-have-died while adjusting the 400 figure upwards as warranted. If so, it will become ever harder to believe that he is committed to rebuilding Iraq.

UPDATE: Brian has some comments on my response. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:01 AM by David Adesnik  

CLARK'S SPEECH -- HIS DEFENDERS RESPOND: OxBlog's vocal Democratic readers are up in arms about my criticism of Wesley Clark's attacks on George Bush. The remark at the center of the conroversy is my assertion that

If a Democratic candidate is going to attack Bush on this front, he will need nothing short of a smoking gun in order to persuade the American public that Osama bin Laden deserves anything less than 100% of the blame for the September 2001 attacks.

According to Mark Kleiman, my assertion constitutes nothing less an "abusive misinterpretation" of Clark's words. Specifically,

The idea of Bush's "letting 9-11 happen" is entirely Adesnik's fantasy, and that Adesnik converts Clark's well-reasoned rebuke of Bush -- for trying to blame the failure to notice that al-Qaeda had plans to use jetliners as missiles on lower-level intelligence personnel -- into the absurd assertion that Bush, rather than bin Laden was responsible for the crime. Having put absurd words into Clark's mouth, Adesnik is then stunned by their absurdity: Did he really say that?

In an e-mail response to Mark, I point out that Michael Tomasky of The American Prospect interpreted Clark's speech to mean exactly the same thing that I thought it meant. So, unless Clark's most avid partisans have fantasies identical to those of critics such as myself, I think it is fair to say that I am guilty of neither abuse nor misinterpretation. Still, Mark responds that

I read Tomasky. He and I agree both about the facts and about what Clark is saying. Bush, as President, is responsible for failures in the national security apparatus. There were failures that facilitated 9-11. So Bush can reasonably be held responsible for misfeasance. That isn't to say that "Bush let it happen" or that Bush is a criminal in any way comparable to bin Laden, only that Bush is responsible for the screw-ups and shouldn't be allowed to blame it on underlings in the intelligence agencies.

First of all, I never even came close to saying that Clark described Bush as being in any way comparable to Bin Laden. Rather, I clearly stated that Clark wants Bush to shoulder a small but significant proportion of the responsibility for the September 11 attacks. And that seems to be exactly what Mark Kleiman and Michael Tomasky want as well.

On a related note, AL writes in that

I think your recent blogpost obscures an important distinction between 'blame' and 'responsibility'-- responsibility in the slightly separate sense of the acts of a responsible person. There is no question that Osama gets 100% of the blame for 9/11...I don't think Gen. Clark is talking about blame. Gen. Clark
is suggesting, and it is not an unreasonable inference given the reluctance to the White House to divulge anything, that Bush had been *imprudent* and *irresponsible* in disregarding various warnings we might have received.

If I forget to lock my bicycle, the thief is 100% to blame. This doesn't mean I should get four more years of running the bicycle store.

In response, I'd have to say that there is a slight difference between bicycles and national security. If you ignore threats to the well-being of your bicycle, it's probably because you were thinking about something more important. If the President ignores threats to our national security, it's a matter of criminal negligence.

Moreover, the use of the bicycle analogy suggests that just a little more forethought on Bush's part might have prevented a major national disaster. If that is one's position, then one cannot say that one isn't trying to blame Bush. Think, perhaps, of a night watchman who is having a few drinks at the corner bar while burglars make off with everything in the company safe.

The problem here is that both Kleiman and AL want to have it both ways. They want voters to think of Bush as partially responsible for 9/11 without admitting that Clark's words constitute an attack or an accusation. In other words, they want to throw mud without getting it on their hands. (In contrast, Tomasky is up front about what he is doing.)

Now, notice what I'm not saying -- that Clark is wrong. If the Senate Intelligence Committee pries enough evidence from the deathgrip of the Administration, it may just find that Bush & Co. were criminally negligent when it came to Osama Bin Laden. Still, Clark's accusation struck as me as quite surprising because there was no indication that he knew of any such evidence.

I'd also like to add that I never intended to give Repubicans a free-ride on the 9/11 mudslinging front. As JG points out, Condi Rice tried to turn the tables on the Democrats two days after Clark's speech by saying that

"The Clinton and other past administrations had ignored evidence of growing terrorist threats and despite repeated attacks on American interests, until Sept. 11, the terrorists faced no sustained, systematic and global response from the United States. They became emboldened, and the result was more terror and more victims."

Given that the Bush Administration hasn't released any evidence to back up such charges, Rice's comments are pretty offensive. I'm guessing, however, that the President won't say this sort of thing, especially not on the campaign trail.

While I don't necessarily think that he's above it, it's an accusation that undermines the credibility of the attacker unless he has evidence to back himself up. That is why I was so surprised by Clark's statement. It just seemed like such a bad move. (For a good elaboration of that point, see this post from the Chicago Report.) Moreover, it was another bad move on the national security front from a candidate whose greatest strength is supposed to be military and foreign affairs.

Incidentally, I now have more information on Clark's speech, information provided by a someone who is in a position to know. While riding with Clark on his way to make the speech, my source watched the general make last-minute revisions to the text. Thus, the differences between the official text and what Clark actually said would seem to reflect a personal decision by the candidate to intensity his attacks on the President. Whether it was a good decision is what we don't yet know.

UPDATE: AL clarifies that he is accusing the Bush Administration of doing something very wrong. However, he is not accusing it of being evil or malign.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:41 PM by David Adesnik  

ANOTHER SAD DAY. Our thoughts are with the families of the dead and wounded. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:05 AM by Patrick Belton  

A HAPPY HALLOWEEN to all our readers! (Except, of course, to our Gaelic readers, to whom I should wish a happy Samhain instead).

And except in France, where, according to the always trustworthy Seattle paper, Halloween is apparently as much a relic of last year's fashion as pointy shoes. Tant pis. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:43 AM by Patrick Belton  

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER LETTER FROM KABUL: Here's the latest from OxBlog's intrepid, and hard-working, bureau chief:

Ramazan is well underway; thankfully, the days are cool and short. P.'s [note: still not me - ed.] and my decision to join the fast has been greeted with general incredulity and the sly question, "Ah yes, but what time do you get up for breakfast?" In P.'s case, the answer is generally, "Not at all." I tend to drowse awake at 4:00 a.m., munch a couple McVitie's biscuits, down a liter of water, and fall asleep again. Z. initially tried to muster us for a proper pre-dawn breakfast, but then started sleeping through the alarm herself. Regardless, by the time dusk rolls around, we're all famished and ready to pack away a grand iftar dinner. One of these days we're going to see if the food at the shuttered, formidable-looking Croatian dive across the street is as good as its reputation.

Tonight (Thursday) I ended up taking iftar at the home of logistics assistant Aziz Ahmad, after a long afternoon of driving around the city discussing American marriage customs and the shelling of West Kabul during the 1990s. Aziz lives with his parents and seven siblings on the western outskirts of Kabul, in a tight-packed
neighborhood of small walled compounds. He hustled me and the reluctant driver, Ainodeen, through the door and into a cozy, carpeted dining room with long floor cushions. After allowing me to give cursory salaams to his flustered sisters, Aziz ducked out and drew a curtain across the doorway; it was the last I saw of his
family, with the exception of his brother and six year-old sister, who periodically brought in more food. We sat cross-legged around a plastic tablecloth, tore off chunks of the diamond-shaped, corrugated flatbread that accompanies (or composes) most meals in Afghanistan, and tucked into heaps of mashed potatoes (deliciously heavy on the garlic, oregano, and pepper), curd, and still-liquid fried eggs. Over a dessert of lightly salted pomegranate seeds, Aziz ruefully discussed how his family's persistent association with foreigners has cut them off from their traditional community in the south. "My father was in the military, so when we went back to the village five years ago, they called us all Communists. Now that I work with French and US groups for a few years, they call me a foreigner."

It was all rather a contrast with last Thursday, which I spent entirely in the company of foreigners. We had dinner and drinks at the Mustafa Hotel (favorite haunt of expat journalists), whose slightly claustrophobic barroom offers glitzy mirror-mosaic decor, Beck and Guinness on tap, and a decent chicken tikka pizza. The bar is up a narrow flight of stairs, past several doors and a couple clusters of guards. A sign on the wall informs all concerned parties that under no circumstances will alcohol be served to Afghan citizens. When we left (the women shrugging their headscarves back on), we drove over to a compound inhabited by a haggard, hospitable Dane and a cheery Glaswegian Scot who invited everyone in sight to tomorrow's rugby game. About ten other young aid workers from all round Europe and Australia were hanging out on the couches, deconstructing music videos over screwdrivers and G&Ts. I added my American twang to the symphony of accents, and we whiled away a cheerful half hour in front of the TV.

Then began the remarkable quest for Thursday night parties in a city without addresses. In a country littered with mines and mujahidin, I think my life was most in danger that night, hurtling through the Kabul streets after dark with a tipsy, expostulating Scot as chauffeur: "Love the Afghans. Couldna find a kinder, more hospitable people. But get them behind the wheel of a car, and forget about it! Game over!" None of us quite knew where we were going, though as we trawled the area where the ICRC party was supposed to be, we encountered two or three other cars following the same rumor. Finally our little caravan arrived at the right street. As with most expat parties in Kabul, this one was marked by (1) a surreptitious X on the door of the compound, and (2) a couple dozen inconspicuous white SUVs with NGO logos and patient Afghan drivers parked along the roadside. We found the marked door and walked past the impassive guards into a different world. A sign by the entryway mandated a tequila shot for all comers (the three bottles were long empty). The house was packed with aid workers from all over the planet, drinking, dancing, talking shop. A long table held an international array of booze, from Australian wine to Latvian vodka to a particularly unpleasant ouzo. There was a bonfire in the backyard, and (as a surreal complement) someone had rigged a projector to shine the "Fire" animation from Windows MediaPlayer onto the ten feet of UNHCR-logo sheeting that topped the rear wall of the compound. We left an hour or so later, with our Aussie friend seeking directions on her mobile: "Yeh, we were just at that party, but it's a bit crap. Is the Bearing Point party on Flower Street? Is there room to park?"

It was loads of fun, and you can't deny all those hardworking expats a little festivity in a city as dry as Kabul. But the disconnect between the normal world of Kabul and the behind-heightened-walls party scene was striking; and naturally there are frictions. The UN has implored its staff to keep a lower party profile on a number of occasions. One of the previous hangouts was a pub established (brilliantly) across the street from a mosque, eventually forced to move due to bomb threats. As we were arriving last Thursday, a group of partygoers who missed the X on the door accidentally roused the unamused Afghan family across the street from their dinner. And the sight of the Afghan drivers waiting up til all hours to drive their drunken masters home was a bit distressing. Of course not everyone's comfortable walking home from parties (as P. and I ended up doing around 3 in the morning), but more efforts could be made to carpool.

Now, one similarity between expat life and Afghan life is that both are generally lived behind high walls -- which I found interesting, having heard plenty of criticisms in other countries of the comfortable "gated communities" in which aid workers isolate themselves. But in a culture as modesty-conscious as Afghanistan's, the gated compound is the norm, and mutual isolation in private life is a powerful social principle (though I hasten to add that hospitality and kinship are even stronger ones). Driving out of the city, I was struck by the walls everywhere -- high, narrow barriers of packed mud along field boundaries, brick walls parceling off empty blocks of mountainside. I commented that barbed wire would surely be a more effective way to keep the sheep out. "Sure," a friend responded, "but you want to be able to send the women to work in the fields. They can't do that effectively in a burqa." The daily trip from home enclosure to work enclosure isn't only an expat routine.

Our trip north of Kabul also brought the effects of the war into full focus. As we drove through the arid, misnamed Dih Sabz wasteland ("Sabz" means "green"), we kept passing the rusted wreckage of Soviet tanks and troop transports. Slowly the desert gave way to trees, walled fields and homes... with large white checkmarks painted on the mud walls, and lines of white stones along the roadside. "White means the deminers have been through here," a friend explained. "If you see red stones, stay the hell on the road. If you don't see any color stones, stay the hell on the road. If you see white stones, ask yourself seriously whether you have a reason to leave the road." As we turned onto the Bagram airbase road, our driver Basyir informed us that this had been the line of control between Ahmad Shah Massoud and the Taliban after the latter conquered Kabul. Both sides of the road were beautifully green, and clearly good farmland; both had been mined into uninhabitability by the rival armies over the years, and were only now recovering. In a bleakly appropriate coda, just as we finished discussing the rehabilitation of mined lands, a one-legged man on a bicycle pedaled gamely past our car.

But more than the mined farmland in the Shomali Plain, West Kabul is by far the saddest thing I've seen in the country. It was literally caught in the crossfire when the mujahidin began killing each other after driving out the Soviets; Aziz and Ainodeen laconically pointed out the specific surrounding mountains from which Gulbuddin, Massoud, and Dostum shelled each other and the city below. Thousands of civilians died. Hundreds of homes were leveled. And today, even after years of reconstruction, West Kabul is still a skeleton of a city. The giant Soviet-built grain silos on the highway have great scorched dents on the side where the shells hit them. The walls left from the bad old days are plasterless, pocked with bullet holes and shrapnel scars. The road in front of Kabul University has been fixed up a bit, but most of the other streets are still deeply pitted from bombs and barricades.

In Kabul it's common to see big metal shipping containers lined up by the side of the road; people keep them after shipments are delivered (perhaps because they choose to, perhaps because there's just not much to ship out of Kabul) and use them as shops or even homes. Along the main roads in West Kabul, you see bullet-riddled containers everywhere, and some are warped, convex, with jagged blast holes. I assumed they had all been used as barricades in the bloody street fighting of the civil war. Today I was told that the warlords had packed the latter containers full of prisoners and fired rockets into them -- execution, not war. Every time I begin to think my imagination is adequate to what happened here, I'm proved wrong again.

In general, please don't imagine that my mostly car's eye view (no pun intended) [ed: get it, Karzai? Joel shares the OxBloggers' taste for kabbalistically obscure puns...] of Kabul is adequate to the reality. There's more going on here than I could possibly pick up in a few weeks. I'll end with one of the things I saw in West Kabul that I found poignantly hopeful: a completely gutted warehouse whose ground level (extending for half a city block) was being used to store new bricks, stacked from floor to ceiling. The city is rebuilding. Kids are going to school in droves, including cute little headscarved girls. The only guns I've seen on the street have been carried by police and soldiers.

But it's clear from all reports that Kabul's relative stability and recovery aren't shared throughout Afghanistan, and Afghans continue to seek refuge in the capital for that reason. The ISAF armed forces here have been key to Kabul's recovery (notwithstanding the disgruntled banner hung from a wall near the heavily barricaded US Embassy: "Honorable International Societies! Have you come to Kabul to block our crossroads and roads?"). The sooner NATO achieves its stated goal of extending ISAF to the major regional cities -- not just Kunduz, though that's a good start -- the better.

And the sooner I get to bed, the better... it's only a few hours till breakfast...

For earlier Letters from Kabul from our worthy Afghanistan correspondent, see if you will here and here. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:51 PM by David Adesnik  

CLARK'S SPEECH: A POLITICAL MASTERSTROKE? Matt Yglesias' boss is arguing that Wes Clark's attack on George Bush's pre-9/11 record was not just intentional, but also the first shot in a well-planned campaign strategy. As Tomasky puts it,

[Clark] will apparently seek in the coming weeks and months to convince Americans that a failure of presidential leadership before 9-11 may have been partly responsible for the disaster's occurrence in the first place.

I'm going to have to call that wishful thinking. If Clark actually had such a clear strategy, why was his prepared text so equivocal on the issue of Bush's responsibility? And if this specific attack on Bush was such an important part of Clark's overall message on national security, why did he resort to ad libbing?

Now, Tomasky may be right that Bush is more vulnerable to criticism on the pre-9/11 front than widely thought. The Kean Commission may well expose an embarrassing degree of unpreparedness in the White House. And Tomasky may even be right that Clark's "surely has his own sources in the U.S. intelligence world". Still, if a Democratic candidate is going to attack Bush on this fron, he will need nothing short of a smoking gun in order to persuade the American public that Osama bin Laden deserves anything less than 100% of the blame for the September 2001 attacks.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:23 PM by David Adesnik  

CLARK'S SPEECH, A FIRST-HAND ACCOUNT: Alex Massie was there, and he reports that Clark really did say that Bush was personally responsible for 9/11.

Alex also notes that the specific wording of the accusation was pretty much an ad lib and that transcripts handed out at the event match the one posted on Clark's website.

On a related note, Alex links to this Josh Marshall post which argues that Clark's campaign is in complete disarray and headed for failure. Rightly, Alex takes Josh to task for focusing on organziational issues and ignoring the most important reason that Clark is running into serious trouble: he keeps changing his opinion on the most important issue of the day -- Iraq -- while insisting that his views haven't changed at all. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:45 AM by Patrick Belton  

A LAST FINAL BOW FOR FRANCO CORELLI, TENOR: One of the great tenors of the twentieth century, Franco Corelli, has passed away from us, perchance to sing with the angels.

Rachel and I were, somewhat poignantly, listening entirely by chance to Corelli's Songs and Arias disc at the precise moment he died. (This has made me somewhat cautious in use of my CD player...though were I a substantially less benevolent and well-meaning sort to all, I could note I've been listening quite a bit to the Dixie Chicks today, without demonstrable effect.)

Corelli's Metropolitan Opera debut formed one of the legendary nights to occur in that house, when both he and Leontyne Price both made their debut on the same night in Il Trovatore. The ovations at the end of the performance carried on for nearly an hour. In an anecdote which I recall, from the oral tradition of my own music coaches and relatives not too distant from his (and Rossini's) natal port town of Ancona on Italy's east coast, was that Corelli initially worked in the docks of his port town, following in his father's profession as a naval engineer. Friends noticed his singing on the docks, guided only by old 78's of Caruso, Gigli, and Lauri-Volpi, and encouraged him to study voice professionally. He received what seems in retrospect to have been quite bad instruction at the hands of Rita Pavoni in the Conservatory of Pesaro, and gained the distinction of being compared to a glass - "whenever he went up," Italian oral tradition records the contemporary assessment, "he broke." Returning to the ports, his friends convinced him once again to leave to pursue his vocal gifts, and receiving mildly better instruction from Arturo Melocchi (who was known, however, as a "throat-wrecker"), and a quite productive apprenticeship under Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, he deputed in 1951 as Don Jose in Carmen, singing with Maria Callas in 1953, deputing at La Scala with her in 1954, and taking Tosca to London in 1957. He retired in the year of my birth, 1976. If there be Neapolitan gondoliers in the heavens, he has surely taken his place there among them. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:31 PM by David Adesnik  

DID HE REALLY JUST SAY THAT? (PART TWO): Did Wes Clark actually accuse Bush of letting 9/11 happen? Or did the NYT imagine it?

Josh Marshall, who heard Clark deliver the speech, didn't mention anything about Clark's accusation. That surprised me, since Josh isn't one to miss a big story.

As such, I decided to figure things out for myself by getting a transcript of Clark's speech, which is available on the Clark04 website.

After reading the speech, I'm even more confused. There are some passages that are very similar to the ones reported in the NYT, but which have a fundamentally different meaning. According to the Times,

Gen. Wesley K. Clark said on Tuesday that the administration could not "walk away from its responsibilities for 9/11."

"You can't blame something like this on lower-level intelligence officers, however badly they communicated in memos with each other," said the retired general, the latest entrant in the Democratic presidential field. "It goes back to what our great president Harry Truman said with the sign on his desk: `The buck stops here.' And it sure is clear to me that when it comes to our nation's national security, the buck rests with the commander in chief, right on George W. Bush's desk."

According to the Clark website, the General said

And then there is 9/11. There is no way this administration can walk away from its responsibilities. This wasn't something that could be blamed on lower level intelligence officers. Our great Democratic President Harry Truman said, the "buck stops here." And when it comes to our nation's foreign policy, the buck sits on George W. Bush's desk. And we must say it again and again until the American people understand it. National security, next to upholding the Constitution, is the most important duty of any President.

Reading the Clark transcript, it's hard to figure out exactly what the General is saying. What is Clark referring to when he says that "This" wasn't something that can be blamed on lower-level intelligence officers? Is he referring to 9/11 or to the absence of WMD in Iraq?

From the NYT version of Clark's speech, however, it is absolutely clear that Clark is talking about 9/11. Well, that's all I have for the moment. I'll let you know what I find.

UPDATE: The AP has quotations almost identical to those in the NYT. TNR also has Clark saying the same thing, although Frank Foer doesn't think Clark meant to say what he said. Which leaves me wondering: Did Clark just completely mangle his prepared text?

UPDATE: There's nothing on Clark's sppech over at the Weekly Standard, but it does have a scathing review of Clark's ever-changing position on the war. The Corner has a link to the NYT article.

UPDATE: I just sent the following e-mail to the contact address given on the Clark '04 website:

Dear Clark '04 Staff,

Good luck with your work -- I know you've probably been putting in a lot of 16 hour days lately.

At the moment, I have a question about Gen. Clark's speech to the "New American Strategies for Security and Peace" conference. According to the New York Times and the Associated Press, Gen. Clark held President Bush personally responsible for the intelligence failures that led to 9/11. However, the quotations to that effect that appear in the NYT and AP stories do not appear in the transcript of General Clark's speech posted on your website. In that transcript, Gen. Clark makes statements superficially similar to the ones reported by the NYT and AP, but which have a fundamentally different meaning. Could you please explain this discrepancy?

Best,
David

UPDATE: I was hoping to settle the issue of what Clark said by watching the webcast of his speech, but I'm having trouble connecting.

UPDATE: Having slept on it, I think it's probably fair to conclude that the media reported Clark's statements accurately. However, the Clark campaign may simply have posted an earlier draft of the speech rather than the final product. Alternately, Clark may have mangled the text. Ultimately, the best indicator of what happened may be whether or not Clark decides to disavow his comments -- but even then it would be hard to know if he were backtracking from an accident or from a major rhetorical blunder. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:51 PM by David Adesnik  

DID HE REALLY JUST SAY THAT? Wes Clark seems to be blaming Bush for 9/11. No, not Iraq. 9/11. While the Administration has hardly been forthright about the intelligence failures that contributed to the attack, Clark really seems to be going out on a limb.

My best guess is that Clark thinks he can steal Dean's thunder by ramping us his attacks on the President. Or maybe Clark really has no idea how serious such accusations are. To figure out what was really on Clark's mind we may have to ask Matt Yglesias -- because The American Prospect sponsored the conference at which Clark delivered his speech (via satellite).

NB: Matt seems to have gone back to the pessimist side in the Iraq debate. Serves me right for outing him as a tentative optimist back in mid-October.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:33 PM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG AGREES WITH NYT: Putin's a lying thug. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:19 PM by David Adesnik  

STICKING IT TO THE JEWS: OxBlog has never hidden its respect for the Jewish people. We are always ready to stand up for Israel and against anti-Semitism. But as an insider, let me tell you that sometimes the Jewish people really need to be taken down a notch. Through mantra-like repetition of assorted myths, we sometimes persuade ourselves to believe in our own delusions of grandeur.

Case in point: The supposed invincibility of the Israeli military. Long frustrated by stereotypical images of Jews (and especially Jewish males) as pale, thin and cowardly, Jews the world over now insist that Israeli soldiers are the bravest and most capable in the world. How else to explain the overwhelming victories of 1948, 1956 and 1967, as well as the death-defying come-from-behind triumph of 1973?

But what about 1991? According to Prof. Eliot Cohen -- best known as the author of Supreme Command -- the US military lost much of the respect it had for the Israelis as a result of the first Persian Gulf War. It turns out that this development had nothing to do with Saddam's ability to get in a few shots at Tel Aviv before pulling out of Kuwait. Rather, after their nonchalant devastation of the finest Arab military in existence, the Americans became much less impressed with Israeli victories over adversaries who were even less competent.

Prof. Cohen raised this point in response to a question that was asked after his lecture today on Israeli military strategy and culture in comparative perspective. In the course of his lecture, Prof. Cohen exposed the emptiness of the cherished myths that well-meaning Jewish teachers pass on to countless students in Hebrew schools across the nation.

As a survivor of 13 years of Jewish education, let me tell you that you cannot go to a Jewish school without having myths of Israeli prowess drummed into your head at every turn. And if you went to an Orthodox school like mine, chances are you were taught that Israeli victories were literal miracles, visible signs of God bestowing favors on his chosen people. (What I could never figure out was whether the Almighty just started being nice to the Jews in 1945, or whether the Israeli military's success was some sort of compensation for all of the terrible things that He let happen to us beforehand.)

Suffice it to say that the overwhelmingly Jewish audience at Prof. Cohen's talk was deeply unhappy with what he had to say. With one exception, every question thrown at him demanded to know how he could reconcile this or that Israeli achievement with his insistence that the Israeli military is nothing special. Some of the questions were fairly intelligent. For example, one man wanted to know how Israel established a competent military force in its first heady days as an independent state. As it turns out, David Ben Gurion wisely recognized that the fastest way to build up the armed forces was to take advantage of many Israelis' experience serving in the British and other European militaries.

Among the less thoughtful questions was how Cohen could fail to recognize that Israeli pilots are the best in the world, especially when behind the controls of their F-16s. Somewhat sarcastically, Cohen asked his interlocutor whether the Israelis built the F-16s and taught themselves how to fly, or whether the Americans had something to do with it. However, before Cohen could finish what he was saying, an old Israeli woman asked him how many MiGs the American air force had shot down. (Answer: Enough.)

What really surprised me about the audience was its unwillingness even to accept that lsrael might have the second best military in the world, after that of the American juggernaut. It sort of reminded of the debates I used to have with some of my friends in junior high school. We genearlly assumed that America was stronger than Israel because its military was bigger. But a lot of us argued that, man for man, the Israel military was better. While this view generally prevailed, some dissenters insisted that the American army was better man for man, but only because it could afford to spend so much more on each soldier's training and equipment.

With these adolescent debates as a backdrop, it was especially interesting to hear Prof. Cohen explain that the Israeli military, historically, has valued quality less than quantity. Little known is the fact that in 1948 the Israelis outnumbered their opponents. And thanks to its extensive system of conscription and reserves, Israel maintains one of the last mass armies in the age of the professional soldier.

Prof. Cohen also argued that despite prevalent images of Jews as intellectuals, Israel has one of the least intellectual armies in the world. Unlike the American army and many of its European counterparts, the Israeli armed forces produces few substantive works of military theory and history.

Now, lest one think that Prof. Cohen's entire lecture was an effort at Socratic subversion of Jewish egomania, it is important to recognize that such exercises have tremendous practical value. After all, Israel's most devastating losses on the battlefield -- in the Sinai in October 1973 -- were a direct result of the stubborn hubris that had set in after the Six Day War.

In addition, unloading all of this mythical baggage enables one to appreciate what may be Israel's greatest accomplishment on the military front: the establishment of the only democracy in the Middle East thanks to David Ben Gurion's aggressive efforts to undermine the political influence of senior generals and ensure the subordination of the military to civilian authorities.

At a time when many Israelis considered themselves to be revolutionaries and kept portraits of Stalin above their desks, it was hardly a foregone conclusion that Israel would become both a Jewish state and a democracy. For that, we ought to be thankful. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:20 PM by David Adesnik  

WHERE DOES THE WaPo STAND? This masthead editorial praises President Bush for his iron-willed resolve and says we are making progress in Iraq. Yet this column by editorial page editor Fred Hiatt says that defeat and failure are very real possibilities if we don't get the security situation under control. Has the tide begun to turn? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:04 PM by David Adesnik  

ARAB LEADERS DENOUNCE KILLING OF INNOCENT IRAQIS: Oh, that Greg Djerejian. He has quite an imagination. Today he invents a hypothetical world in which concern for innocent Arab life motivates Arab heads of state to condemn the cold-blooded murder of dozens of Muslim Arabs in Iraq.

Of course, Greg is a sensible fellow, so he doesn't confuse such hypotheticals with real-life reality. He knows that Arab dictators are self-serving cowards whose lip service to Arab nationalism and Islamic values never gets in the way of their lust for power.

But don't worry, Greg. The day will come when Mubarak and Assad and Abdallah speak out forcefully on behalf of the sanctity of Arab life. It will the be day after an American bomb goes astray and kills a dozen Iraqis.

UPDATE: If the victims in this story turn out to be innocent bystanders, Mubarak et al. may have their chance to lambast the Americans. Frankly, though, I think the Arab leadership will keep quiet unless something egregious happens, like the wedding-party bombing in Afghanistan. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:46 PM by Patrick Belton  

SYLVIA PLATH, DEFENDED FROM HER DETRACTORS: As we're having something of a poetic day today, it seems appropriate to link to Meghan O'Rourke's excellent essay on Sylvia Plath on Slate. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:34 PM by Patrick Belton  

TORY SHAKE-UP: As of several minutes ago, Ian Duncan Smith is no more, at least as leader of the Conservative Party. (See BBC, Guardian, Telegraph, Conservative Party website). The instant frontrunner to replace him has been shadow chancellor Michael Howard. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:43 AM by Patrick Belton  

A VISIT FROM FATHER PAUL:
"Beannacht De ar an obair,"
-- "The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants," from Quoof, (1983)

As a brief, personal comment, one of the side compensations of becoming grievously overeducated in universities such as this one, as well as of serving time as a foreign policy hand in Washington and New York, is that you accumulate frequent opportunities to meet, and I quote, "Great Men." And so, in the last several years, like many of my friends, I have duly been able to meet a number of the United States's and Britain's leading scholars, chief legislators and public servants of the U.S. executive branch, and even, last week, HM the Queen. This is obviously due to coincidences of shared place rather than through any personal merit whatsoever, and I only make the point at all because I have never before yesterday had the opportunity to exchange words with anyone for whom I have for so long nursed such deep intellectual and personal admiration as I do for Paul Muldoon, our professor of poetry.

Along with Josh, Josh, and Rachel, we ended up brushing up against him before the lecture and having a quite nice chat with him. He's an amazingly nice man, and half-embarrassedly shook all of our hands and introduced himself to all of us as "Paul." I muttered off some Irish to him and must have in so doing by equal parts scared and amused him, so he very kindly talked with us until it was time for his lecture.

During which, some nutter blew a long whistle roughly 20 lines into Paul's prefatory reading of Dover Beach (ironically enough, right around the line about "there is no silence, no peace" &c), and stood up, while carrying a stuffed sheep, and shouted out seven or eight lines in verse, which segued into a denunciation of Jews and Tony Blair (who, as we learned, is the first PM not to be British, as he's Zionist), and ending with the memorable line "the Jews are the real separatists." He was finally convinced to leave, announcing that he was taking his friend, Larry the stuffed sheep, with him. After which our professor poetry announced, admirably without missing a beat, that coincidentally the election for the next Professor of Poetry would be in March of 2004, and that those who said Oxford was being a boring, quiet place would perhaps find themselves mistaken.

Josh and I may disagree slightly over whether it is he or Heaney should be classed the foremost poet currently composing in English. But it is the similarities between the two that amaze: both Heaney and Muldoon were born, obviously, in the North (Muldoon in Armagh, Heaney in Derry) they both attended Queen's University, Belfast; they both passed portions of their youth in the BBC's Northern Ireland bureau. Heaney is dedicant of Muldoon's "The Briefcase" (1990). They have both held Oxford's professorship of poetry.

The poetic output of the North in our generation has been prodigious: though, as Kinsella rightly points out, the Northern phenomenon is 'largely a journalistic entity' rather than a school in any real sense, that Heaney, Muldoon, and their too-neglected colleagues Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, and Derek Mahon would all hail from a beleaguered, traditionally philistine province simply astounds. This is a province, and a country, that poetically punches above its weight. Of contemporary poets in the Republic, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill was reared in the Kerry Gaeltacht and composes in Irish at the highest levels that language has known, and Thomas Kinsella's corpus, including his verse translation of The Tain (1969), one of the starting points of the Gaelic literary tradition, are worth noting. Though they straddle an international boundary, all these contemporary Irish poets, whether from the Republic or North, betray great density of local reference. They all follow Kavanagh's dictum, in the sonnet "Epic," "I made the Iliad from such / A local row."

It is in his playful erudition, at times giving way to moments of haunting epic vision, and in his skillful knitting together of intertextual elements from an English-language literary tradition of which he is undisputed master that Muldoon distinguishes himself from the other poets of our day. He combines the incredible humour and inventiveness of, say, "A Half Door Near Cluny" (1998) (which has the appearance of a crossword puzzle), or of [Ptolemy] and [Euclid] in "Madoc: a Mystery" (1990), with the erudition and gift for textual allusion that he displays in the pyrotechnics of To Ireland, I. It is really only Muldoon who could compose a lengthy poem entirely in haiku: witness, "Hopewell Haiku" (1998). He takes, as their citizen, the Gaelic and English literary traditions seriously, but himself as an object he does not, permitting a tremendous sense of fun to run down across Muldoon's lines.

I also must confess here a small personal bias: he is, after all, to my knowledge the only poet who for accidents of natural circumstance links the social and geographic worlds that are also mine: Gaelic Ireland, Britain, the Judaism he comes to through his wife, and the American northeast and the New Jersey Turnpike which have been his residence since 1987. And these worlds are woven together in the spaces between his verses. Following Kavanagh, as he does in his A to Zed of the Irish literary tradition presented in To Ireland, I (based on his Clarendon Lectures in English, 1998), he could not do anything else.

I'll be attempting in the coming months to summon up the guts to invite our professor of poetry out, next term, for a pint with a group of Irish students and others sharing an interest in his work. And in the meantime, I will be off to buy my stuffed sheep. We all do need friends, after all.

UPDATE: For opening her blog with a quote from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and for linking to Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Sheila O'Malley wins the highly coveted OxBabe "Blogosphere Babe of the Week" award. (Prior illustrious winners include Yalediva, and, of course, my lovely Rachel for the brief period she was posting on Nathan Hale). Also, Sheila might even go on a date with you, provided you live in New York and have an air conditioner.

Elsewhere, Josh Cherniss also comments on l'affaire sheep. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:05 AM by David Adesnik  

ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA, PART 2: If you want to learn a lot about Chinese foreign policy, read this excellent essay in the new issue of Foreign Affairs. One of the co-authors is Taylor Fravel, a colleague of mine at the Olin Institute who got his doctorate from Stanford last year and just presented a paper at Olin's National Security Seminar that won more praise than any other paper presented so far this year. Taylor also happens to be an Oxford graduate. If he weren't so busy, I guess we'd have to ask him to blog.

Anyhow, this post isn't really about Chinese foreign policy. As I mentioned yesterday, I'm not in a foreign policy frame of mind at the moment. Thus, those of you who would prefer to think about substantive political matters rather than the films of Jet Li (the actual subject of this post) should go and give Taylor's article a thorough read. There are a lot of subtle points in it, so do not forget that there is often an iron fist inside the velvet glove.

Now, back to Jet Li. Last night, I saw -- for the first time -- Once Upon a Time in China, Part 2 (OUTC-2). The opening scene is one of the absolute funniest I have ever seen. It is 1895 in Southern China, and Wong Fei-hung (Jet Li) is in the midst of a railroad journey from Fushan to Canton. A practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, Wong happens to be not all familiar either with railroads or Western customs. However, his wordly aunt is familiar with both.

When the three protagonists sit down in the dining car, Wong and his apprentice stare in disbelief at the slab of meat on their plate. Wong's aunt informs him that this is a "steak". Wong and his apprentice then begin to struggle with the knife and fork they have been given. Both of them try to imitate Aunt Yee, but wind up pushing the steak around their plate rather than eating it.

Then suddenly, Foon the apprentice pushes down with his knife and fork, sending his steak hurtling toward the window. Ever the Kung Fu master, Wong catches it in his hand just before it is lost forever. Wong then haughtily admonishes Foon to eat properly, but proceeds to send his steak flying into Aunt Yee's face, from which it rebounds back onto the table.

So you're probably not laughing right now. Whether because it is intrinsically hard or because I lack the necessary talent, describing slapstick humor in prose form is not a simple matter. But don't worry. The scene is so funny that you will laugh even if you know exactly what is coming, so you haven't lost anything by reading this post.

Another reason you might not be laughing is that this sort of reverse cultural humor has finally begun to get an audience in the United States thanks to Jackie Chan. But after all the Americans-with-chopsticks humor around, this is still a very amusing alternative.

Of course, there is a lot more to OUTC-2 than just slapstick. First of all, there's kung fu. The action choreographer for the film was Yuen Woo-Ping, now famous in the West as the creative genius behind the fight scenes in all three Matrix films. (At the risk of ruffling some feathers, I'll say that the action in OUTC-2 is far better than it is in the Matrix.)

However, both the slapstick and kung fu are ultimately part of a story, and a good story at that. Coincidentally, it is a story about a foreign policy, even though I said that I wasn't going to write about foreign policy today. More importantly, it is a story about inter-cultural relationships, or what we Americans might refer to as "diversity".

While 'diversity' has become a provocative code word in the American political lexicon, OUTC-2 provides a compelling reminder of what a compelling concept diversity is when removed from its domestic political context. After all, I'm willing to guess that the overwhelming majority of readers on this site enjoy traveling abroad and learning about foreign cultures.

Yet even in such contexts, we often assume that those who think about diversity are Americans/Westerners coming into contact with other cultures. Yet as OUTC-2 demonsrates, Hong Kong can offer us a very different perspective on what it means to navigate cultural differences and cultural divides.

Above all, OUTC-2 reminds us that diversity in no way entails unquestioning acceptance of the other. The primary message of the film is that China must overcome its entrenched legacies of authoriatrian and xenophobic violence. If it can do so, it will then be in a position to both share its unique heritage with the West as well as benefit from all that the West has to offer.

Another fundamental aspect of the film's message is that there is an inextricable link between diversity and democracy. In American political discourse, advocates of diversity often find it hard to make a forceful case for the universality of democracy and human rights, since the universality of anything suggests that diversity only has value within a very narrow set of limits.

However, the message of OUTC-2 is that the benefits of diversity are only possible within a democratic political order. In Hollywood, a movie with a message as serious and sophisticated as that would dispense with all the kung fu and slapstick humor. But not in Hong Kong, where one can still be an intelligent film goer and want to enjoy a good laugh and a good fight. Now that's diversity.

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# Posted 9:08 PM by David Adesnik  

MUCKRAKING ON THE RIGHT: David Brooks slams greed-driven lobbyists and the hypocritical GOP legislators in their pockets. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:40 PM by David Adesnik  

A LYING THUG: You know who I mean. Oh, and he's also an anti-Semite. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:35 PM by David Adesnik  

CLOUDS VS. LININGS: A mixed report from Mazar-e-Sharif. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:32 PM by David Adesnik  

DECADES OF GOOD DEEDS PROVIDE NO ARMOR: An apt headline for today's WaPo update on the Red Cross bombing. According to the Red Cross, the "attacker used what looked like a Red Cross/Red Crescent ambulance to deliver the device." (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:22 AM by Patrick Belton  

SCRIBBLING BENEATH THE VEIL: The New York Times reviews "The Storyteller's Daughter," the wide-ranging literary exploration of Aghanistan just accomplished by Saira Shah, an Afghan-Kent native of Parsee and Afghan stock. (The title refers to the author's father, celebrated Afghan Sufi writer Idries Shah.) Ms Shah has certainly come of age in her own right, and what's more, has done so twice over: she is also the narrator of Channel 4's haunting documentary Beneath the Veil, filmed under the late unmissed Taliban regime. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:19 AM by Patrick Belton  

FOR ANY OF OUR READERS WHO ARE IN OXFORD: You really should go see Paul Muldoon tonight, if you're not already. Not only is he the most significant living poet writing in English, he's also the professor of poetry we're lucky enough to share with Princeton. What's more, you've got two chances: once at 5, at Schools (where he's lecturing on Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach and the end of the poem), and again at 7:45 in the more intimate surroundings of the music room at Corpus. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:35 PM by David Adesnik  

CHANGING THE SUBJECT: There is more to say about Iraq, but not today. So I will change the subject to something that is no less depressing but still different: the devastation of inner-city America. My interest in this subject is more personal than political. Growing up in a metropolis, the issues of race and poverty were never far from my mind, even as a child.

In New York City, if a child is old enough to leave the house by himself, he is also old enough to instinctively sense the unspoken divide between white, black and Latin. Sometimes, that divide becomes more explicit. The Crown Heights riots were one such moment.

It is precisely because I have such vivid but clouded memories of New York's past that I was fascinated by Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. With incredible detail, it evoked the confusion and fear of upper-middle class white New York.

However, Wolfe does not tell us much about poor, black New York. I believe that this decision is a reflection of Wolfe's honesty as an author. He will not write about that which he does not know. There is artistic value to this decision as well, since less impressive sections might have marred the exquisite observational writing that fills the rest of the book.

Still, being curious about that which I do not know, I decided to purchase of a copy of Code of the Street, by UPenn sociologist Elijah Anderson.

When browsing the shelves at the Harvard Bookstore, I didn't recognize the connection between Wolfe's writing and Anderson's. When I browse, I mostly look at those books that have been remaindered, since I am not inclined to pay full price for my casual reading. I suspect that because of this haphazard approach to book-buying, I didn't even notice what an impressive and surprising array of authors had chosen to publish their praise on the jacket of Prof. Anderson's book. A partial list includes Cornel West, George Will, Marian Wright Edelman and William Julius Wilson.

Having now read half of the book, I think I can see why it appeals to such a broad swathe of the political spectrum. Anderson's work is richly descriptive but subtly analytical. As the author explains, his purpose was to produce an ethnography of inner-city life. He seeks to document what is, rather than focusing on why it is so or how it should be. While one cannot charge Anderson with ignoring such issues, he certainly does not place them in the foreground.

In short, I think it would be best to place Anderson's work in the 'culture of poverty' tradition. Although I am not familiar with the classics of that canon, I believe that they emphasize how the greatest barrier to the advancement of the poor are not purely economic or structural, but are rather the product of a culture that they themselves embrace.

As such, it isn't hard to see why this tradition has considerable appeal for conservatives. If ethical failures are responsible for the perpetuation of poverty, than one can argue persuasively that increased welfare funding and expanded affirmative action programs are not the answer.

However, one can also argue -- and Prof. Anderson often seems to do so -- that increased funding or greater racial justice might be able to break the hold that the culture of the inner city has on its inhabitants. Even so, such sentiments comprise an undercurrent in Anderson's book, rather than its main stream.

As someone almost completely unfamiliar with the academic analysis of urban poverty, I must say that I have been profoundly shocked by what I have read. What Anderson describes is nothing short of a culture that glorifies uncontrolled violence and conspicuous consumption while forcefully disparaging the virtues of responsibility, modesty, and compromise.

Anderson says time and again that it is not wrong to fear a young black man walking towards you with a North Face jacket, Timberland boots and an unwelcoming expression. And it is not just white America that fears him. Decent black America fears him. Other young black men may fear him. And perhaps most disturbing of all, this is exactly the reaction that the young man in question wants to provoke.

Frankly, if this book didn't have endorsements given by West, Edelman and Wilson, I would not believe a word it says. How, in the absence of first-hand knowledge, could I possibly conclude that so many black men (and women) subscribe to a set of principles that I (and most black Americans) believe to be nothing short of perverse? How, in the absence of first-hand knowledge, could I accept a version of reality that seems designed to validate an extreme political agenda?

The most heartbreaking section of Prof. Anderson's book concerns inner-city attitudes toward parenting. For the young men Anderson describes, persuading the mother of your child to accept your total abdication of responsibility for its welfare is an achievement, a demonstration of masculine bravado. In contrast, supporting one's child -- either financially or through marriage -- is considered a weakness.

I found this so heartbreaking because it seems to go against the most fundamental source of human compassion, the parental bond. I found it so heartbreaking because the victims of this insanity are innocent children.

While disapproving of it, I understand why many young black women and women denigrate academic achievement, denigrate respect for the law, and denigrate respect for their elders. But to destroy one's own children is more than I can comprehend.

I am still afraid that someone will respond to this post and point out a glaring flaw with Anderson's work that I have missed. A flaw I did not detect because of my own ideological blinders. A flaw exposing a willingness to believe the worst, a willingness that is analytically indistinguishable from racism. But for the moment I am persuaded that this is real.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:43 PM by David Adesnik  

A MODEST PROPOSAL: Tom Friedman makes Jonathan Swift seem like a madman. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:20 PM by David Adesnik  

A SAD DAY: Our hearts go out to the families of those who lost their lives today in Baghdad.

But more than lives have been lost. For more than a hundred years, the Red Cross has been a symbol of mankind's desire to lessen the carnage of even the most brutal war. In countless conflicts, the Red Cross has navigated treacherous political waters, succesfully establishing its neutral status so that it could minister to the fallen on all sides. But now, we must confront the sort of mindless cruelty that sees even the humanitarian aspirations of the Red Cross as a threat to its savage agenda. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:26 AM by Patrick Belton  

FEZES AND PIG LATIN IN GREENWICH: While I dodge for the moment making my own stab at truth, I wanted to draw attention to by far the best part of the story David linked to yesterday:

Cole [a prominent local opponent to the U.N. locating in Greenwich, Connecticut] boasted years later of hiring two men to pretend they were Syrians. Each man donned a fez and walked through downtown Greenwich with surveyor tools, chattering away in pig Latin and spooking the shopkeepers.

"The anti-U.N. folks raised a ton of money," Udain recalled, "and they began spreading rumors that camels would walk down the streets."

Atthay isway ettypray arnday unnyfay. Osethay illysay Ushesbay!

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# Posted 6:54 PM by David Adesnik  

CHICKEN HAWK UNDER FIRE: Whatever your opinion of Paul Wolfowitz, you can't say that he's afraid to put his life on the line for policies that he believes in. As the WaPo points out,

The attack [on the al-Rashid] demonstrated how resistance fighters are increasingly using explosive projectiles -- rockets and mortars -- to pierce supposedly secure American facilities. On Friday, two soldiers were killed and four were wounded in a mortar strike a military base north of Baghdad. Thirteen soldiers were wounded in another mortar attack on Thursday night.

So is this bad news? Well, it certainly isn't good news. But the WaPo's correspondents think that we have to keep things in perspective:

The attacks marred a day when two events brought life in Baghdad closer to normal: the reopening of a major bridge across the Tigris River and the lifting of the nighttime curfew clamped on the capital since U.S. forces toppled Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

The NYT article on the attack also mentioned the reopening of the bridge and the lifting of the curfew, but preserved its correspondents' sense of detachment and objectivity by having an American general describe those events' significance. For those in a charitable frame of mind, the NYT correspondents' professionalism is something to be admired. Those of a more cynical cast might suggest, however, that NYT correspondents maintain an admirable commitment to professional norms precisely when doing favors their interpretation of events on the ground. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:26 PM by David Adesnik  

WHAT IS TRUTH? Ex-blogger Mark Butterworth is taking a very creative approach to the issue of accuracy and balance in the media. He is simply asking journalists to provide their personal answer to the age old question of "What is truth?" Mark is also asking a number of bloggers to answer this question, myself included.

While I answered Mark's question the best I could given my lack of philosophical training, I thought it would be a good idea to get some more feedback from what I wrote, which is as follows:

Briefly, I'd say that the simplest kind of truth is factual truth. Much of it is directly observational. This is a table. This a chair. Water is blue.

But, of course, water isn't blue. We just honestly perceive it to be that way. And even tables and chairs aren't really tables and chairs. Those are just made up names we give to loose categories of objects.

Even so, there tends to be so much basic agreement on these loose categories that only philosophers bother to contest them. The NY Times and the National Review, George Bush and Osama bin Laden, can all agree on what is a table and what is a chair.

The utility of this principle extends rather far, enabling us to describe historical events. Germany did invade the Soviet Union in 1941. All of the nouns in the sentence can be endlessly broken down into fragments. The verb "invade" is especially problematic since it is impossible to describe an "action", which doesn't really exist. There was an infinite sequence of lesser actions, each of which can be characterized in many ways. Thus, higher-level verb contain much generalization and interpretation.

Actually, the same is true of nouns. One could substitute "the Nazis", "the fascists" or "Hitler" for the word Germany in the above sentence. Each gives a distinct coloration to its meaning. Even so, those who object to that coloration tend to accept what they perceive as the basic fact of the matter and consciously object to its coloration.

So what does all this have to say about the truth of the news that we read daily? What's very good about it is that you can usually deduce a set of accepted facts even from articles which one believes to be biased.

But you never can know what's being left out. And casual readers tend to be far more influenced by coloration than by "facts". Non-blogging friends of mine tend to see the occupation of Iraq as a catastrophic failure. Yet because they are casual readers, they can't cite the facts on which this observation is based. Rather, the interpretive cues
that appear in almost every NYT article suggest to them a certain interpretation of the matter.

Finally, on top of all this, you have add the complications that come from ethical/ideological disagreements that have nothing to do with what is "true". So the whole situation is something of a mess. But I think the "truthfulness" of the media could be signficantly imporved if journalists were more conscious/honest about the ways in which the presentation of small truths influences our perception of larger ones.

How that's for starters? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:08 PM by David Adesnik  

GRANDPAPPY BUSH VS. THE UNITED NATIONS: It turns out that this feud goes back a couple of generations. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion