Noted

Hoping We Fail: Who loses and who wins in the high-stakes poker in Iraq?
"All this hysteria and unrest should come as no surprise given the ambition of our endeavor, which is no less than a war of civilization to end both terrorism and the culture and politics that foster it. Still, let us ignore the self-interest of contemporary parties and reflect on the very scope of American audacity. In little more than three weeks, and coming on the heels of an amazing victory in Afghanistan, the American military defeated the worst fascist in the Middle East. Surrounded by enemies, and forced simultaneously to conduct the war against terrorism in dozens of countries and restore calm on the West Bank, the United States nevertheless sought to create consensual government and order under legal auspices in weeks — rather than the decades that were necessary in Japan and Germany, where elections took years and soldiers remain posted still. The real story is not that the news from Iraq is sometimes discouraging and depressing, but that it so often not — and that after two major-theater wars we have lost fewer people than on that disastrous day in Beirut 20 years ago, and less than 10 percent of the number that perished on September 11.

"It is no wonder that we have almost no explicit voices of support. Most nations and institutions will see themselves as losers should we succeed. And the array of politicians, opportunists, and hedging pundits find pessimism and demoralization the safer gambit than disinterested reporting or even optimism — given the sheer scope of the challenge of transforming Afghanistan and Iraq from terrorist enclaves and rogue regimes into liberal and humane states."
-- Victor Davis Hanson

The Utterly Admirable Goals of 2Blowhards:
"Two beyond-first-rate articles that Denis Dutton, the editor of Arts and Letters Daily, has written for the Oxford Handbook for Aesthetics are now online: "Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology" (here), and "Authenticity in Art" (here). One of our goals here at 2Blowhards is to help people who are eager to ditch the modernist/po-mo/decon straitjacket find threads that are more comfy, useful and sensible -- hence our championing of thinkers like Michael Oakeshott, Christopher Alexander and Nikos Salingaros, Michael Polanyi, Ellen Dissanayake, Frederick Turner, Steven Pinker, V. S. Ramachandran and others. Dutton's at the top of this list, both with articles like these and with ALD itself."
-- 2 Blowhards

"Cruz Bustamante" sounds like a porn star name
-- Bitter Sanity

Jane Galt on Tom Friedman's linguistic anomalies:
[Begin Friedman]"Let's start with mentality. We are not "rebuilding" Iraq. We are "building" a new Iraq — from scratch. Not only has Saddam Hussein's army, party and bureaucracy collapsed, but so, too, has the internal balance between Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, which was held together by Saddam's iron fist. Also, the reporting on Iraq under Saddam rarely conveyed how poor and rundown Saddam had made it. Iraq today is the Arab Liberia. In short, Iraq is not a vase that we broke to remove the rancid water inside, and now we just need to glue it back together. We have to build a whole new vase. We have to dig the clay, mix it, shape it, harden it and paint it. (This is going to cost so much more than President Bush has told us.) [End Friedman]

Behind this metaphor, we suspect, is the ghost of some well-meaning but incoherent sixth grade composition teacher. "Be original!" she proclaimed, and when the children bombarded her with their original, if somewhat inapt metaphors, she beamed like the sun rising over the silver-white beaches of Honolulu on a verdant spring morn.

Original it certainly is, but what does it mean? It gives us uncomfortable visions of what happens in the Friedman household when the flowers have finally gone where the woodbine twineth: there is Thomas, preparing to smash yet another wedding present on the flagstone floor (which has just been installed at great expense); there is his wife, pleading. "Tom," she says, with a voice worn hoarse by years of steady sorrow, "Tom, we don't have to break the vase. We could just pour out the water through the hole in the top."
-- Asymmetrical Information

Roger Simon is getting hungry for the good old Demonstration Days:
"I've been living in California a long time and the recent dust up about Cruz Bustamente and MECHA takes me back to the days when we were all marching for La Raza on Brooklyn (now Cesar Chavez) Avenue with Corky Gonzales and the Brown Berets and Cheech Marin was smoking some "heavy shit, man." Good times and not particularly scary times. The Chicano community was on the side of the angels and the Brown Berets never seemed as extreme as the Panthers for some reason. Maybe it was those East LA tamales (you can get great ones now at Juanito's, although some prefer La Mascota on Whittier Blvd.)"
-- Roger Simon Private Eye Scribe

Posted by Van der Leun at August 29, 2003 9:21 AM | TrackBack