Kagan must be read

POST: The Pernicious Myth of "Human Nature", Democratic Core, September 21, 2008

A very interesting post about Kagan's latest book, which I didn't like either, as much as I enjoy his writing and owe him a great debt of gratitude for writing Dangerous Nation, the inspiration, in many ways, for Great Powers.

The post simply reaffirms the reality that, like him or not, Kagan must be read, if for no other reason that to learn from the clarity of his writing.

The next Petraeus plan

IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN: "Petraeus' next war: After success in Iraq, can America's favourite general win in Afghanistan?" The Economist, 4 October 2008.

ASIA: "Talking to the Taliban: In the battle for hearts and minds, the Taliban are compromising core principles," The Economist, 4 October 2008.

ARTICLE: "As Fears Ease, Baghdad Sees Walls Tumble," by Alissa J. Rubin, Stephen Farrell and Erica Goode, New York Times, 10 October 2008.

Top article spurred me to finally write something on the Woodward book, which I liked primarily for its clear vindication of my March Esquire piece.

Second piece explores what it means to talk with the Taliban in an attempt to disconnect them from Al Qaeda. The Taliban, not feeling that successful itself, "is adapting to broaden its popular appeal."

Bans on music, TV, kite flying and dog fighting are lightening or just plain lifting. Guys can shave beards and not get in trouble. Instead of immediately executing government personnel they capture, they now offer amnesty.

A longtime Taliban chief says about half the Taliban are just God-fearing folk and the other half are opportunistic robbers and those who just want to kill.

Upshot? The Taliban seem to be losing their Islamic way, rendering them as just another tribal militia.

Opportunity knocks, it would seem.

Looking back on Petreaus' efforts in Iraq, neat to see how quickly the controversial walls are coming down. Not exactly the timeline of the Berlin Wall, suggesting, as I've often said, that Americans are good at sitting on walls and so we shouldn't be afraid to use them more often—especially if we get turnarounds like this.

You do have to worry, though, with the drop in the price of oil, WRT to Iraqi finances.

Whither globalization in Latin America now?

THE AMERICAS: Keeping their fingers crossed: In Latin America, the most trenchant opponents of globalised finance look most likely to suffer at its hands," The Economist, 4 October 2008.

Interesting argument that says Latin America will do better than average with the global credit squeeze because they haven't availed themselves of mortgage debt instruments and—in general—don't rely on foreign equity that much. Of course, all will suffer a drop in commodity prices.

Worst off? Venezuela. Chavez can't rule easily when austerity is called for, because he's primarily a populist who bribes the public by having them eat the economy's seed corn. Ah, but plenty of arrests happening of "foreign imperialist plotters." Good show for a while.

The "well-behaved countries like Chile (which sensibly banks profits when copper is high), Mexico (which is fiiiiiiiinally opening up slowly to FDI in its energy sector), Brazil, Colombia and Peru, things won't get too bad.

Salvo in Crusader debate

POST: One Crusader’s View, SWJ Blog, October 20, 2008

Smart and worth reading if you're following this debate. Donnelly's always interesting and the linkages here to TR intrigue me greatly. Agree this is all about defining America's role in the world.

Hamilton wins again and Jefferson loses again

ARTICLE: China's Communist Party Approves Rural Land Reform, AP, October 20, 2008

"Widely anticipated" indeed. Big and necessary step that says the post-Moist CCP is "all in" on the great Deng bet that has become "rising China."

(Thanks: Rob Johnson)

Eye to eye

POST: The Unwind, By Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, 31 Oct 2008

Andrew Sullivan linked I choose The Economist and Obama, picking up on Tom's unwinding language in his title.

Native Americans are just Asians--thousands of years removed

As we remain on the list to adopt a baby girl from Kyrgyzstan, Vonne and I spend a lot of time studying that region (I did originally at Harvard for my masters) and Mongols in particular, because there's a very strong chance the child will be of Mongolian descent.

Recently, we watched the Russian film, "Mongol," on the rise of Temugdin (or Temujin or Temujian), aka Genghiz Khan. It concerns his youth and early years before his famous rule and empire. What fascinated me about the film was how it was such a Native American pre-American Western film. It has elements of "Gladiator," "Braveheart" and even "300." As for historical accuracy, I'll need a good bio to check that (a future project, as I read the latest John Lennon bio--an advance proof stolen from Warren's office).

Anyway, I hope he does a sequel, because it was a fabulous film.

All the faces in the film, like those encountered during my trip to Central Asia last year (where you often hear the locals make the strong connections to Native Americans), reminded me of how Vonne Mei, whenever we travel, is often perceived as a local, whether it's among the Akoma in the southwest or Hawaiians on the islands. She can pass for so many racial backgrounds, it's unreal.

But that just emphasizes the racial linkages between Asia and America, which actually go back much further than this continent's racial ties with Europe. Native Americans are just Asians who came here about ten thousand years ago across the Bering land bridge.

So Columbus did find what he was looking for--sort of.

Along those lines, I have never understood the notion that going interracial dumbs you down somehow (the whole miscegenation notion). I view it as the exact opposite, however you achieve the mix (adoption, marriage, whatever). Few things encourage horizontal thinking better.

I admire both McCain (for adopting) and Obama (for simply being) in this manner.

As for all such things "transgressing" the will of God. That's just too goofy to rebut, whether you're talking theology, history, biology or spiritualism in general. I am glad to see that sort of bias fading. When I was young it was huge; now it's far more muted and isolated.

The hyphen versus en-dash versus em-dash

Finding some hyphenated phrases with en-dashes in the text, but then feeling ignorant of when that's appropriate.

I say, pre-WWI and that seems pretty obviously a hyphen.

I say, the American System--cum--globalization and that's presented as an en-dash (here, two hyphens).

You create a concluding beat at the end of a sentence---the clincher. And that seems like the obvious em-dash (here represented by three hyphens).

It's the rules that separate hyphens from en-dashes and en-dashes from em-dashes that I feel ignorant of.

Feel like I've really abused em-dashes in places in the book, which may strike some as a stylistic issue, but that's where my evolution as a writer places me right now.

I simply want to get those details down in my head.

And so I struggle and learn.

I should probably read that punctuation book that was so popular a while back, but I really feel like taking an advanced English grammar course.

Column 126

Postponing the 'end times'

The doom-and-gloomers own the field right now with this global financial panic -- no surprise there. But gleeful proclamations about the "death" of globalization, capitalism, the West, America, America's superpower status, and so on are a bit much. A lot of celebrated experts, starting with Karl Marx, have made such claims before.

When you separate out the anti-American voices emanating from countries already feuding with us, you find the bulk of this end-of-the-American-world-ism springs from our closest friends and not from those countries or regions that have recently been fortunate enough to be "enslaved" by our international "empire."

Read on at KnoxNews.
Read on at Scripps Howard.

The repetition of repetition

Yesterday, after the corrections perusal of Thursday, I got through the Front Matter and the Preface (The Shape of Things to Come) and Chapters One (The Seven Deadly Sins of Bush-Cheney) and Two (A Twelve-Step Recovery Program For American Grand Strategy). That got me to page 72.

That was pretty good considering I spent most of the morning digging out our extensive Halloween decorations and setting that all up (pumpkins carved Thursday night after pumpkins prepped Wednesday). The big draws for us are the animatronic figures Vonne has collected: a life-sized Frankenstein (I displayed a pic of him last year); our singing, life-size pirate skeleton (who goes out front and has his picture taken about 20 times each year with kids), a six-plus-foot mummy who does not move, except his bloodshot eyes (but lights up nicely), and our big hit this year, a scary bum who lifts his head out of his neck (with bloody-like lights flashing in both directions--from the neck up and from the head down). A new one for us this year was also a severed head hung over a bucket of fake blood that had a special pump that recirculated the blood out of the bucket and back down through the severed neck stump.

We did four pumpkins--very Pirates of the Caribbean heavy. I complimented them with tons of fog from my hidden machine.

I actually had numerous young tykes run back to their parents in near tears, only to be carried back by Mom or Dad and the magic revealed by yours truly.

I really love scaring the hell out of little kids. It spices up their Halloween. You can tell, because they always go away laughing, wiping away the tears, bragging about what they saw.

Anyway, lost the evening to all that, plus the put away.

To me, Halloween is almost the perfect holiday: short, sweet and perfectly timed. Last night was perfect here, due to a return of warm weather, which brings out the bugs in one last gasp, which I hate.

This could be our last Halloween in this house. We're considering selling it and moving to a rental in order to facilitate our eventual move back east in 2010. We're sort of radical in that way.

Will have to see what the market can bear. I know it's bad, but we're in a special category because of the custom build, so we need to work with agents who are linked into executive relocation situations. Trust me, this house was built to sell.

Still, expect it to be hard, thus the willingness to stretch out the timing and not expect to pull everything off in one fell swoop. After what would be three years of living in this very cool but big house, the restlessness that naturally exists in Vonne and I triggers the need for some "campaign." Slimming down as packing stuff off in PODs would be such a campaign--a sense of progress.

I will miss this house though, even as I want to use the knowledge I got in building this one on the next one.

Today I read three and a half chapters, or 200 pages.

Yesterday I spent a ton of time making one new paragraph happen in the Preface. Much back and forth with Warren and Nyren.

Today I spent a ton of time revamping one paragraph in the middle of the book. It was just suddenly very old with the election hours away. The para ran 879 characters and spaces, so I fiddled until the changes resulted in the same 879 total.

Everything else I entered in was small stuff. Really working the nits this time.

So today I got through chapters 3 (The American Trajectory: Of Great Men and Great Powers), 4 (The Economic Realignment: Racing to the Bottom of the Pyramid), 5 (The Diplomatic Realignment: Rebranding the Team of Rivals), and halfway through 6 (The Security Realignment: Rediscovering Diplomacy, Defense, and Development).

Tomorrow I nail the final 200 pages through the endnotes, and hopefully am on the horn with Warren by 2000.

Monday is Yale, and Tuesday is West Point, so the road show beckons ....

Oh, almost forgot my funny bit: Reading the chapters today, I can't help this funny feeling that I've repeated myself disastrously in certain chunks--as in, word for word.

I actually did that when writing: using the same sequence in two chapters written weeks apart (I guess I really loved that sequence!).

Well, what had happened was this: when I did the quick scan of the book on WRT all the corrections, I covered a lot of ground. Rereading certain sections over the past two days kept giving this sinking feeling I had screwed up, but every time I tried to find the repeated section, I couldn't, and it was haunting me!

Eventually I figured out the problem: I had forgotten the corrections scan and thus was simply bumping into text I had just studied a day or two earlier.

I will definitely take that extra hour tonight. In fact, it arrives officially in 20 mins.

Single party dynamic

EDITORIAL: Can One Party Rule?, Washington Post, October 30, 2008; Page A22

The one-party rule argument is a wise one. The Dems will have two years in which they better not f--k it up. I expect they will enough for one of the two houses to fall in Congress. Obama's performance is important in a larger sense, but somewhat unrelated to that dynamic.

Still, he better move to the middle once sworn-in, or he'll be wildly ineffective.

Same as it ever was: Russia

OP-ED: Behind the Bluster, Russia Is Collapsing, By Murray Feshbach, Washington PostOctober 5, 2008; B03

Feshbach was a legend in the field of Soviet studies all the way back to when I was in grad school. He has been sounding these sorts of alarms for many years. His analysis goes a long way to explaining the Soviet Union's collapse, Russia's difficulties in the 1990s, and now why we shouldn't get too bent out of shape over Georgia and hyperbolic descriptions of "petrocracy."

What Feshbach says about Russia, much the same can be said about another oil dictatorship that we're supposed to freak out about--Iran (birth dearth, brain drain, etc.).

Truth is, whenever you pull back the curtain on these alleged scary monsters, you find a lot of weakness being hidden and abetted by the oil money, which is a "curse" in terms of its distorting effect virtually everywhere it goes--including the dreaded "Dutch disease."

Again, supply does not define power in globalization. Demand does.

(Thanks: Mohamed Ibn Guadi)

Read it and don't weep.

OP-ED: "Brace Yourselves: Power's Shifting, But Not in the Way You Expect," By Bill Emmott, Washington Post, October 19, 2008; Page B01

Good sensible stuff from an Economist writer that let a lot of air out of the post-American visions we're currently being sold.

(Thanks: Jarrod Myrick)