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When is somebody going to give Matt and Spencer a book deal to write The Case Against Marty Peretz?
Side question: Why do my ideas for stuff that should be written about always start with "The Case Against..."?
(While on this subject, my JSTOR access is acting up right now, but allow me to tell you that certain passages in this piece are debilitatingly funny.)
It's tragic that a certified member of the Coalition of the Willing has descended into civil unrest.
I think we'll all agree that this is a grave threat to global security and we'll need to send some nation builders over there, posthaste.
For a pretty straightforward view of how propaganda works, view this Iranian dramatization of the treatment of Muslims at Gitmo. It strips away the delusion that it doesn't matter whether America is perceived as holding to principles and the rule of law.
Apropos of the effort I blogged about below to sneak Mrs. Gerecht into a plum public diplomacy appointment in Brussels, here's AFSA chief J. Anthony Holmes' cri de coeur (.pdf) in response.
In the same issue of the Foreign Service Journal, the FSOs are treated to a particularly incisive treatment (.pdf) of the notions of "failed states" and "nation building."
Peter Galbraith makes it, debating Reuel Marc Gerecht:
You believe the U.S. military presence is containing the civil war, but I see no evidence that this is so. But, even if you were right, we would then have to be peacekeepers in Iraq forever, as the Iraqi police and army cannot take over the role of neutral guarantor of public security. They are either Shia or Sunni--and therefore combatants in the civil war. And, since the Shia dominate both the army and police, U.S. training may actually hasten the Sunni defeat with all the consequences you describe.
Emphasis mine.
I've got a piece in today's Examiner on the new bipartisan consensus that Nuri al-Maliki is to blame for Iraq's problems. On two unrelated topics:
