Is The Middle East Irrelevant?

Is the Middle East more irrelevant than the role it currently plays in our geostrategic approach? Philip E. Auerswald argues as much in the latest issue of the American Interest (subscriber only to access the full article, I'm afraid). This strikes me as a fairly clever bit of counterintuitive thinking as well as an exercise in contrarianism. Nonetheless, the article is at least worth reading. The latest issue is on newstands now, so it is probably worth picking up if this sort of thing interests you. And it should.

Northern Ireland, Peace, and the South African Example

There is probably no better major newspaper in America when it comes to the issue of Northern Ireland than The Boston Globe. That probably should come as no surprise given Boston's affinity for and association with the Irish. The Globe's editorial this past week on the ongoing transitions in Northern Ireland, in which the lion has laid down with the lamb, or at least Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party have gotten the provincial legislature off the ground at Stormont, is perceptive. Here is the money excerpt:

Milestones toward peace in Northern Ireland seem to arrive every six months, but until now they have not produced the breakthrough that would bring tranquility to the six counties. This time, however, the amity between Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party seemed genuine as they re-started the provincial government Tuesday. If these old adversaries can get along with no more than the usual friction among coalition partners, the conflict really is over.

Some might raise eyebrows over where the Globe gives credit:

Credit for reconciling the extreme wing of Irish nationalism to nonviolent politics goes to Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, his chief lieutenant and deputy first minister in the provincial government. They were among the leaders of the Irish Republican Army (Adams denies this but few believe him), and they realized more than two decades ago that the IRA could not win the war against unionism and Britain.

Despite its potentially controversial implications, this last point is worth emphasizing: The IRA could not win the war, a war, against the British. But I am reminded of the circumstances in South Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s when most observers were well aware that the ANC could not win a war against the South African Defense Forces, the South African Police, and the other elements of the security apparatus. But there was a flip side to that coin: Neither could the South Africans completely crush the opposition movement. And so stasis led to change. Similarly in Northern Ireland, the British were never going to be able to crush entirely the IRA and its affiliated allies. And so stasis led to change. The analogy is not perfect of course -- historical analogies rarely are -- and yet its broad contours ring true. It will be easy to be warily cynical about the peace process in Northern Ireland, and yet if ever a time existed for optimism, however cautious, to trump pessimism, this seems to be it.

Randy Moss and the Patriots

Patriots fans are thrilled with the offseason our team has had, and justiofiably so. But Ron Borges sounds a cautionary note about Randy Moss, as is his wont.

The gist of the article is that we might well be getting the petulant, half-committed Moss of the last two or three years, and not the guy who was a surefire first-ballot Hall of Famer a few years ago. There is little new or surprising in the interpretation, but Borges does a pretty good job of getting some inside insights.

I think the simplest way to conceive things, however, is that the Patriots, from management, to Belichick and the coaching staff, and especially down to the players simply will not put up with the bullshit that Moss can shovel. The first time he tries to pull a TO on Brady I can forecast ten guys grinding him into the turf and Belichick cracking down on Moss when all is said and done.

I hate seeing New England fans get too cocky about the offseason, but one thing for sure is true: New England ain't Oakland, nor is it Minnesota. If Moss cannot get it done physically anymore, we and he will have to adjust. But if the problem is one of attitude, that will be smacked out of him by the first week of camp.

Baseball Disparity in the New York Times?

Want a sense of the baseball hierarchy in New York?

The New York Times has a baseball blog, "Bats," that they update fairly regularly. As of this morning the Mets have one of the five best records in baseball. They are in second place behind a resurgent Braves team. The Mets are exciting. They are certainly the best baseball team in New York right now. The Yankees, meanwhile, have been playing better of late than they had through April, going 6-4 in their last ten games. But they are still a game below .500. And they are, depending on if you are a glass empty or glass full type (and on which side of the fence you sit with regards to the Yankees) tied for the 15th best or 15th worst record in the league. Up to this point in the still-young season they pretty much epitomize mediocrity. That mediocrity may well not last, and given that lineup and their bad luck so far with health I suspect that it will not.

Despite the disparity in on-field performance for the two New York baseball teams, the writers for "Bats" have fifteen posts currently on the front page. Ten are on the Yankees. Four cover the Mets. And one is a general baseball post. What do you think that says about the baseball culture at the Times

Colon v. Wang: Headline Writer's Dream Confrontation

As the folks at Fire Joe Morgan argue, "It's Early... but the contest is over. This is the absolute best headline of 2007: Royals To Get A Taste Of Angels' Colon. Sort of hard to disagree, though as I pointed out yesterday, we may at least need to acknowledge that "Yankees Wang Hit Hard by Rangers" is going to get some votes.

Let's face it -- both Wang and Colon represent the low-hanging fruit for headline writers. And I say "Amen" to that.

South Africa Blog

Over at the Foreign Policy Association's South Africa Blog I have been tackling a host of issues, including the possibility of a sporting boycott against Zimbabwe, Bill Clinton's foundation helping to provide generic drugs to AIDS victims in Africa, the US Africa Command, Helen Zille's ascension to the top spot in the opposition Democratic Alliance, and much more.

Tom's Diary

Over at Tom's Diary he has a nice series of photos plus he makes reference to a pretty good dcat discussion going on down below that you might have missed.

Juvenile Titters From Headline of the Week

The official Yankee fan of dcat (Though my friend KO'C also qualifies), Holmes, wrote the following email to me this afternoon: "Call me immature, but this is making me laugh my arse off:" "Yankees' Wang hit hard by Rangers"

Amen, brother.

Sir Charles Speaks

Charles Barkley might be the most larger-than-life figure in sports. He is outspoken and smart and in many ways courageous. He is the linchpin for TNT's fabulous NBA studio show. And he has long talked about running for political office, most likely governor of Alabama. Over at TNR, Isaac Chotiner has a riveting interview with Sir Charles that shows some of the reasons why he is so compelling. But the interview also reveals why he may not be the ideal candidate. His emphasis on class divisions certainly will raise some eyebrows -- he may well be right, but gaining traction on such issues will be difficult. He also has things to say about race in America that will probably lose him support from the Jackson-Sharpton axis -- not that doing so is a bad thing. In all, it's fascinating stuff.

Victor Davis Hanson and the Search For Untruth

It has been apparent for some time that Victor Davis Hanson's ultimate goal is to be the rootinest, tootinest, toughest hombre ever to sit before a word processor. The short, direct sentences! The Hemingwayesque phrasing! The muscular assertions! Don't support the war? You are an effete lefty pussy. Probably a liar as well. You wouldn't last one minute at the OK Corral that is the Hoover Institute's Palo Alto, where men like their whiskey straight, their six-shooters drawn fast, and their women swooning.

Unfortunately, there is an almost direct inverse relationship between Hanson's Landisesque testosterone infusion over the last five years and his fatuousness. His latest article is a case in point. So it's time for a long overdue dcat parsing. Let's see how well Hanson holds up to scrutiny. I'll place Hanson's words in quotation marks and will precede mine with *** . And away we go:

"'This war is lost,' Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid recently proclaimed.

That pessimism about Iraq is now widely shared by his Democratic colleagues. But many of these converted doves aren't being quite honest about why they've radically changed their views of the war."

*** An accusation of dishonesty is pretty ballsy from someone who has already framed the discussion so dishonestly, isn't it? Who among the candidates of whom he speaks qualifies as a dove? A dove would oppose most or all wars. So Hanson has a pretty immense burden -- it is incumbent upon him to prove dishonesty, and also to prove that opposing a bungled Iraq War qualifies as "dovish." I'll trust that he will do so.

"Most of the serious Democratic presidential candidates -- Sens. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Christopher Dodd, and former Sen. Jonathan Edwards -- once voted, along with Reid, to authorize the war. Sen. Barack Obama didn't. But, then, he wasn't in the Senate at the time."

*** This is fine as far as it goes. But surely a historian is not going to ignore that things change over time. He is not going to pretend that the last four-plus years never happened. Is he?

"Now these former supporters of Iraq find themselves under assault by a Democratic base that demands apologies. Only Edwards has said he is sorry for his vote of support.

But if the Democratic Party is now almost uniformly anti-war, it is also understandable why it can't field a single major presidential candidate who was in Congress when it counted and tried to stop the invasion."

*** Yup. That's precisely what he is going to do. I'll give him credit for cajones not only for making such a brazenly intellectually dishonest argument, but for doing so seconds after framing the issue as one of fundamental dishonesty on the part of the Democratic candidates. When you write like the Marlboro Man you can pooh pooh niceties such as intellectual integrity. That shit's for vegans and stay-at-home dads.

"After all, responsible Democrats in national office had been convinced by Bill Clinton for eight years and then George W. Bush for two that Saddam's Iraq was both a conventional and terrorist threat to the United States and its regional allies."

*** And "responsible Republicans" cried foul every single time Clinton used even a hint of force against Saddam Hussein throughout the 1990s. And Saddam Hussein was neither the only nor was he the most significant threat in the post-9/11 world. So Hanson is raising a glib red herring. (And Hussein would not have been a threat had George W. Bush removed him from power when ther opportunity was before him, but that would not fit the partisan trope, so we'll ignore it.)

"Most in Congress accepted that Saddam was a genocidal mass murderer. They knew he used his petrodollars to acquire dangerous weapons. And they felt his savagery was intolerable in a post-9/11 world. There was no debate that Saddam gave money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers or offered sanctuary to terrorists like Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal. And few Democrats questioned whether the al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist group Ansar al-Islam was in Kurdistan."

*** Absolutely. No one denied that then. No one denies it now. Which is why its assertion here and now means fuckall. That Saddam was a potential threat did not mean that we had to go to war in March of 2003, and it did not mean that we had to handle that war incompetently at every point, and it does not mean that we have to line up behind incompetence now. I frankly believe we need to stay in Iraq now, but to imply that not following this administration's chosen course is to coddle Hussein is about as brazenly dishonest as an argument can get.

"In other words, Democrats, like most others, wanted Saddam taken out for a variety of reasons beyond fears of WMD. Moreover, it was the Clinton-appointed CIA director George Tenet who supplied both Democrats and Republicans in Congress with much of the intelligence they would later cite in deciding to attack Saddam."

*** And it was the Bush administration that manipulated intelligence and heard only what they wanted to hear while ignoring countervailing information. George Tenet does not have the power to declare war. Only in a partisan screed would Tenet's appointment by Clinton be necessary to invoke.

"When both congressional Democrats and Republicans cast their votes to go along with President Bush, they even crafted 23 formal causes for war. So far only the writ concerning the fear of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction has in hindsight proven false."

*** Fair enough. But of those 23 a good number were predicated on the threat Saddam posed then based on WMD's and such. The Democrats were dumb to endorse what amounted to a blank check. And we've been over this before -- in the hierarchy of reasons the administration put forward, WMD's were first, second, and third among equals. To conflate these all as being of equal value is absurd.

"But we no longer hear much about these various reasons why the Democrats understandably supported the removal of Saddam Hussein. Instead, they now most often plead they were hoodwinked by sneaky warmongering neocons or sexed-up partisan intelligence reports."

*** "They" do? Who, exactly? Let's see some evidence that a single one of the Democratic candidates have this simplistic a stance. Hanson is brilliant at creating straw men, knocking them down, and then claiming some sort of heroic victory. Straw men, after all, do not fight back. It's a simple question, really: Does Hanson think that absent the WMD claims the Democrats would have voted to go to war with Iraq? Is there evidence for this counterfactual? It is a shame that the pre-war intelligence got mucked up as badly as it did, but given that the Democrats were not in power in either Congress or the executive, Hanson's argument sounds remarkebly like passing the buck.

"There is nothing wrong with changing your mind, especially in matters as serious as war -- but the public at least deserves a sincere explanation for this radical about-face."

*** Hanson is being ironic, right? He's winking at us through the smoky prose? He must be. Because surely he is not making an argument about being honest to the American people and aiming it at Democrats. Is he?

"So why not come clean about their changes of heart?"

*** Once again -- an assertion absent evidence to make a fairly brazen accusation.

"Many Democrats apparently think that claiming they were victimized by Bush and the neocons is more palatable than confessing to their own demoralization with the news from the front."

*** Wait a second: did you not lead off your article -- this one, the one we are all so enjoying, the one that is providing so much insight and entertainment, the one with the swagger and panache that makes weak men cower, with the following lines?: "'This war is lost,' Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid recently proclaimed.
That pessimism about Iraq is now widely shared by his Democratic colleagues." Why, yes, you did. So what you seem to mean by Democrats being unwilling to confess to their own demoralization actually is "The Democrats are so clear about their demoralization that I am going to lead my article off with what I believe is a telling quotation about that demoralization." My version is not as testeronalicious, I know, but it is honest and -- wait for this one -- fair.

"Others may fear that admitting publicly that a disheartened America should not or cannot finish a conflict would send a dangerous message to our enemies. So while these Democrats accuse President Bush of being hardheaded and unwavering on Iraq, they are still afraid that their own mea culpas would send an equally dangerous message of inconsistency abroad."

*** You are predicating this all on an argument you concocted in the mean streets of Palo Alto: that the Democrats actually want to apologize but are too dishonest to do so. And yet Occam's Razor might lead us to another conclusion: that knowing what they knew and when they knew it, they authorized the president to use force. They now believe, based on four years of incompetence, that it was a mistake. You want them to come shamefaced before you based on nothing other than a fantasy you have concocted that will fit in nicely with your views of Democrats. It's cute and clever and all, but it ignores a recent history that tells us a lot more than this paper-thin scenario you have created out of whole cloth.

"Democrats need to admit the truth: that removing a dangerous Saddam Hussein and promoting democracy in his place seemed a good idea to them in 2003-4 when the cost appeared tolerable. Now, in 2007, with over 3,000 American lives lost in Iraq, they feel differently."

*** This is the most reasonable thing you have written thus far, which is why it does not follow from everything else in the article. And it is still pretty inane. There is more to any anti-war argument, even the worst of them -- and there are lots of bad ones -- than "3000 American lives lost in Iraq." The reductionist cant is getting to be too much. I hope the article is almost finished.

"In other words, Democrats could argue that somewhere along the line -- whether it was after Fallujah or the start of sectarian Sunni-Shiite violence -- they either lost confidence in the United States' very ability to stabilize Iraq, or felt that even if we could, it was no longer worth the tab in American blood and treasure."
*** Yes, because these are the only options. Nothing to do with mishandling of the war. Nothing to do with torture. And of course Democrats do in fact make both arguments that you claim they are unwilling to make. But they do so in a way more sophisticated than your simplistic approach allows, so reduce away! No complexity! Complexity is for the tofu and birkenstocks crowd. No surrender!

"That confession could, of course, be nuanced with exculpatory arguments about the mistakes made by those in the Bush administration, such as: 'Our necessary war that I voted for to remove Saddam worked; your optional one to stay on to promote democracy didn't.'"

*** If you're wondering if he just created words to put in the mouths of the Democrats to make the Democrats look bad and the Republicans to look good, he did. Clever!

"Such an explanation of turnabout would be transparent and invite a public discussion. And it would certainly be more legitimate that the current protestations of 'the neo-cons made me do it.'"

*** It's sort of embarassing to have to tell a respected senior professor this, especially one with such a visible platform in the punditocracy, but quotation marks actually have a purpose. When you create a quotation that no one actually has said, and when you ascribe it to people who think differently from you, that is intellectually dishonest. It is sloppy. No one in the Democratic Party has ever uttered those words. Again, the irony would be staggering given the theme of the argument, but hairy-chested Old Spice men such as Victor Davis Hanson sneer at irony -- that shit is for metrosexual English professors.

"With America still engaged in a tough war, that kind of excuse-making just doesn't cut it."

*** Leave it to Hanson and his ilk to remind us that we are in a war. I still have no idea what excuse-making he is referring to, as he has asserted but not shown as much, but I am glad he closed with such a vibrant example of the Hanson style.

There are arguments for and against the war, there are arguments for and against the surge, there are arguments for and against troop withdrawal. Hanson manages to make absolutely zero of these arguments in this piece. Intellectual honesty really is not a sign of weakness. It's too bad that too many folks on both sides of the debate have not picked up on this reality.

Baseball's 50 Most Valuable Players?

Over at SI.com Nate Silver of the incomparable Baseball Prospectus (which has brought us, among other things, the projection system known as PECOTA) has a lengthy piece that might arouse some debate. His premise is simple: "If you were starting a team from scratch, which players would you build around?" The list goes from 50 to 1. Enjoy. (My own issues? Lots of them. I know BP's stock in trade is projection of young players, but there are an awful lot of young guys on this list who have accomplished bupkes, many rated in the top 10 or 20. There are others who are very early on in what might be fine careers who similarly get placed far too high. He overrates David Wright, for example. CC Sabathia too. And whither Manny?)

More Misc.

Three recent New York Times articles have caught my attention:
Fifty years after the Little Rock integration crisis shrouded the city in infamy that it has never entirely cast aside, the city is again dealing with political divisions in which race plays a role. But the divisions are not quite along the lines of what you might suspect.

Clark Kent Ervin, the former inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, current director of the Homeland Security Initiative at the Aspen Institute and the author of Open Target: Where America Is Vulnerable to Attack, jumps out of his phone booth (get it? Heh.) in time to help try to rescue us from a future terrorist attack. The recommendations range from the commonsensical to the insightful, but it is always worth keeping these sorts of suggestions on the table. The threat is still out there, and if we can depoliticize the terrorism question, maybe we can even implement some of his ideas.

Finally, Colum McCann, a professor of creative writing at Hunter College and Dublin native uses personal experience to urge measured optimism about the recent advances in the always ongoing Northern Ireland peace process. Still, the Troubles once seemed every bit as intractable as the conflicts in the Middle East. There certainly is room for hope, but in geopolitics, hope must always be guarded.

I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar!

Apparently I am the Goddess Sekhemet.

Which God or Goddess are you like? Your Result: Goddess Sekhemet   You are Sekhemet. You are loving and caring, but when need be, you are fierce and protective. You love the color red and you are no vegetarian. Your feirce nature makes you somewhat like a rebel, but you like it that way. Congratulations!! You are Goddess!!
Budha
You are your own God or Goddess
Satan
Goddess Bast
God Zeus
The Christian God
Jesus
Which God or Goddess are you like? Make Your Own Quiz

I find that odd.

Miscelleny

A handful of quick hits while I try to catch up on life:

Over at Open University Casey Blake addresses Barack Obama's recent invocation of Reinhold Neibuhr (much to the delight of David Brooks) and shows why Obama's usage of the author of, inter alia, Moral Man and Immoral Society is both refreshing and problematic. Neibuhr played such an interesting role as an intellectual model to the Civil Rights Movement that it is always nice to see him discussed in the public sphere.

Over at Cliopatria Tim Burke presents a spirited defense against on of the silly tropes that conservatives love to invoke about African independence. Burke's argument is a bit roundabout, but is smart and provides an example of why people who know about Africa need to talk about it in the public sphere.

Also at Cliopatria, Rebecca Anne Goetz argues that the AHA's policies on gender tokenism are stupid.

At TNR Jonathan Chait is curious as to why Republicans get the, to quote Carla Tortelli, screaming thigh sweats over tough-talkers.

And, with a Hat Tip to Ralph at Clio (obviously you may just want to go over and see what's been going on at Cliopatria these days), I'd like to provide you with David Noon's "Conservative Sob Stories," a spirited takedown of the Mark Moyer's (or at least of some of those who have claimed to be his defenders') claims that he has gone unhired because he is conservative. I believe in intellectual and political diversity in the academy and I buy into the idea that one way that such diversification might happen would be to return military, diplomatic, and political history to their rightful place at the table. But there is no bigger line of bullshit than when someone tells you they were rejected for a job because of their politics. Now they may well have been rejected for that reason -- but the person so rejected has no idea if that is the case. Because if you are a historian working in the 20th century, no matter your subfields, you competed against anywhere between 75 and 500 people for that one job slot. And no search committee that has ever rejected me or that I have sat on that rejected others has given any indication of why I or others did not receive the job. And yet these assertions are presented as fact because there are conservatives who are willing to accept such accusations in order to bolster larger arguments about a supposedly leftist academy bent on shoving their politics down people's throats. (Funny how conservatives do not want us to probe deeply into the politics of engineering or business professors.)

The reality is that politics rank way down the line of things almost any search committee even has time to consider and on the two occasions in my own admittedly limited experience on the search committee side of the table when anything even approaching someone's politics came up, in the first case a senior professor said "let's not even go there. It's none of our business." In the other case we looked to defend a potentially conservative candidate who was our first choice (and who ultimately never ended up at the job). And these cases happened at two different schools with very different cultures. I'm not naive enough to say that the politicization of search committees never happens, but I will assert that it is one of these snuff fantasies that conservatives have about the academy that are out of all proportion to reality.

The Mountains, The Mountains, We Greet Them With a Song!

Every year at Williams there was that guy who had graduated the year before but who stuck around Williamstown doing God knows what. They were not quite pathetic, but they also weren't not pathetic, if you know what I mean. After I graduated I went backa few times, but I was always wary of returning too often. I did not want to be that guy, or his close relative, the guy who came back every weekend.

And yet Williams and Williamstown continues to possess a strong hold on its alums, and once a few years have passed and none of the current students were there when you were there, the appeal to move back becomes too strong. A piece in this past weekend's travel section tells of the drawing power of Williamstown and how many second home owners there are in town, and what a high percentage of those are Williams alums. The prices sound a bit ghastly, but who knows? I could certainly see myself wanting to have a little place to visit for a few weeks at a time not far from where Route 2 intersects Spring Street.

Dirty Water: Sox Talk With the Thunderstick

Here is this week's edition of Dirty Water. The big news is certainly the return of Roger Clemens to New York, but before that, the Sox played a few games.

Thunderstick: Alright--another week into the season and the big news this week doesn't focus on the Sox, but on Clemens’ return to the Yanks which I guess we should address, but first, a quick nod to the Sox this week as they had two against Oakland, 1 with Seattle and then 3 in Minnesota and went 4-2 on this stretch. As we've always said, you take 2 of 3 from the lousy teams, split with the good teams and you'll win 92-95 games and be in position to get to the playoffs. The Sox are 20-10, so they are taking 2 of 3 from everyone right now, so I don't think there's a lot be upset with. DiceK has had some control problems and Drew is slumping and that's about all I see. Even Tavarez is keeping us in games against Cy Young winners. We catch a break this week as we have three more with Toronto, but won't see Halladay or a third time and won't see Burnett as well, so we should be able to take 2 of 3 here. However tomorrow does start a stretch of 16 straight days with games and while the middle 10 are at home, there is also a 10 game stretch against Detroit, Atlanta and the Yanks. May is the second toughest month for the Sox and this is the toughest stretch of May and it's often 2 week periods like this where seasons can turn, so even though the Sox are 20-10 right now, I'm looking for them to get through this at 30-16 by the time it is done and to somehow go 10-6 over this stretch.

As for Clemens, well, he's still a tool. That said, look, I can't say the Yanks made a bad move here. If the Sox wanted to pony up the cash for him and he wanted to come back, I'd be all for that too. I do think he'll help the Yanks out and help them out a lot. But I think anyone who thinks that Clemens is going to anchor that rotation as a #1 guy is fooling themselves. People forget that when he left the Yanks, he just wasn't that frightening anymore. Now, he's gone to the NL for three years and put up great numbers against the NL and especially the NL Central but does anyone think he's putting up a 2.50 ERA in the AL? I'd be willing to bet good money that Clemens's ERA is over 4.50 at the end of the year. Is it an upgrade of Igawa or Karstens or Wright or whoever is pitching in the 4 or 5 hole for the Yanks? Absolutely, just as I'd have been happy to slot him in at 4 or 5 ahead of either or both of Taverez and Wakefield with the Sox (although Waker is mounting his own early Cy Young campaign right now). But at the same time, the #1 guy needs to be able to stop slides and I don't know if I feel 100% in a Clemens that is going to turn, what, 45 this year, doing that. So he's an upgrade but in no way am I afraid of him as a Sox fan. Let's put it this way--in 2003, when the Sox were 5 outs and a Grady Little blunder away from beating the Yanks and going to the world series, the four man rotation NY brought out for that playoff series was Pettite, Mussina, Clemens and Wells. They got by the Sox and Pedro, Lowe and Wakefield and then got dismantled by Beckett in the Series and then when it was over, all we heard about was how the Yanks rotation had gotten too old and they needed to get younger and that as good as these guys had been, they just weren't that formidable anymore. If the Yanks make the playoffs this year, their rotation will likely be Mussina, Pettite, Clemens and Wang, with three of those guys now 4 years older than when the Yanks had decided they were too old and not that formidable anymore.

One other note about Clemens: I thought Red Sox fans were great to him in 2003. After all the booing and hard feelings towards him for going to the Yanks, when he pitched for the last time in the regular season, the Sox fans gave him a rousing ovation when he was done as if to say "look, we get it, we understand what you did, we didn't like it but now that it's over we appreciate your career and what you did in Boston." It was really a great moment. But now that he's come back four years later, I hope he doesn't expect the same kind of send off at the end of the year whenever the last start in Fenway might be. He had his going away party and he better not whine about how much he loved his time in Boston and all that when he gets booed from the first time he steps on the rubber in Fenway until his final walkoff the field this year whenever it may be. Now he's just a Yankee who we want to see fail (although we want to see him fail more than other Yankees).

dcat: There is a fine line between sour grapes and rational thought. Would it have been nice to have added Clemens to our rotation? Sure. But right now, over which of our guys can we be guaranteed that he would be an upgrade? Given a regular slot and a predictable schedule Tavarez has been better than we ever could have imagined. Wakefield has been consistently great. Schilling has been Schilling. Dice-K has struggled a bit with his control and with that one bad inning every outing but no serious person would trade him for Clemens even for this season. Beckett has to be the early frontrunner to start the All Star Game.

Meanwhile, in the season when Roger turns 45, returns to the American League East (where everybody can actually hit a baseball), is trying to pull it all off in another unorthodox fashion with all of the attention and pressure that will be on him, and with all of that within the context of the fact that the Yankees are seriously struggling? Well, color me sleptical that the success of the Red Sox 2007 season is going to hitch on that right arm of his. I'm going to assert that the Red Sox will be able to wait for things to shake out and if they need anything as the trade deadline approaches in July they will be well positioned to do so.

The Sox had a good week. As you say, they went 4-2 and won the series they should have won. I'm a bit perplexed by their early week performances this season, to be honest -- I jsut went through the schedule, and so far they are 2-5 on Mondays and Tuesdays and, oddly, 2-3 on Saturdays, and are 16-2 the other days of the week, a trend that I assume means nothing, but that still is perplexing. It's as if they expend so much energy to win these series, and given their saturday performances they have to win on Sunday to take any given series, that there is a letdown either after an off day or on Mondays. Again, there is probably nothing to this, but I also know that neither of us would be surprised to see them come out flat against Toronto tomorrow.

In all, it's good to be a Red Sox fan right now. The Yankees have begun to rebound a bit, and I fully expect the dynamic in the east to begin to take its form by the end of the month, and I expect that the Yankees will be in that mix. But I'll tell you, not only am I not afraid of Clemens, I cannot wait for the first time we face him in a game of any consequence, which, of course, describes every Sox-Yanks clash as long as both teams are in the hunt.

The New Yorker on Manny

Last week's New Yorker had a fantastic article on Manny Ramirez. Ben McGrath addresses Manny's quirks in the context of a richer portrait than you are ever likely to get from the majority of Boston sportswriters who are content to dabble in cliche and cheap shots. This is a must-read for Sox fans and really for anyone who loves sports. Plus Manny hit two bombs last night to lift the Sox to a win over the Mariners.

Self Indulgence Alert: FPA Article: "South Africa's Regional Superpower Dilemma"

The Foreign Policy Association has just published my first "Great Decisions Analysis," an article titled "South Africa's Regional Superpower Dilemma." Enjoy!

Do They Speak French?: A Guest Editorial

One of the finest students I have ever had in class took my terrorism course this semester. His name is Steve Dunkley and he is a non-traditional student. Not only is he more mature (in both senses of the word) than most of my students, he also is British, which made him doubly exotic to the mass of my students. After the semester ended, he shared something that he wrote in a communications course that he hoped would see the light of day. I am thus sharing his witty, smart, and telling piece with dcat's readers. Enjoy.

Do They Speak French?
Shortly after starting a new job, my beautifully modulated English accent attracted this question, “My Grandmother has promised me a trip to England if I graduate this year, do they speak French there?” More than a little confused I reconciled this by thinking, “Hey, this was an aberrant brain fry, no danger of a widespread misapprehension.” Sadly, just one day later a gentleman in his mid twenties remarked on my accent, “Man”, he said with a wistful look, “I’d love to go to England, but don’t they speak French there?” “Pardonez moi, je veux fixin’ to get out of here,” I muttered as I fled home to my Maison (Chez Limey) in Midland, Texas, nowhere near the rest of the world.

Let’s get one thing very clear: I love Americans and America; after all I married one and I have no regrets at all about moving to Texas after my wife and I lived and worked in England for the first six years of our marriage.

There is however no mistaking, once I start talking, that I am not from “these parts”. For two years I have been telling everybody that I am from Jackson, Mississippi, but after this caused a choking seizure to a Big Spring resident on a Southwest flight from Dallas I have been more selective in my victims. Just recently I have been telling people that I am in the United States doing TV commercials for Geiko, “Let’s not delve into the private life, love”.

There is a more serious side to this piece and that reflects a desire to want to see Americans and America become more familiar with what really goes on in the rest of the world. Sorry guys but many of you appear to have no idea what goes on outside of the United States and those that do have ideas – well many of your ideas are kind of, well –wrong!

Here are some prime examples but first let me tell you that many of these remarks came from both educated and professional people – all were sincere questions or observations.

“What do you mean you don’t have Republican and Democratic parties in England?”

“68 Euros, What’s that in real money?”

From a United States guest who stayed with us in England. “Do the people that live here have refrigerators and washing machines?”

From an El Paso CPA, “I noticed that Mexicans have a different culture to Americans, are you guys pretty much the same as us?”

Observed in a small town in England when a United States tourist wanted to buy a newspaper using a twenty dollar bill, “Don’t you people respect the United States dollar?” – imagine offering a British pound at the 7-11 in Small Town, Texas.

A visitor from Chicago overheard at the historic Windsor castle which is close by Heathrow Airport, “Why did they build the castle so close the airport, it’s so noisy?”

“Who’s your President, is it still Winston Churchill?”

Heard on the Dave Ramsey Show: “America has the best electoral system in the world; no other country in the world has elections so fair”.

From a local newspaper editorial “…No country in the world accepts the change of leadership as well as Americans because it’s the people that make those changes.”

Take it from me that there are many other countries in the world whose people are rightfully proud of their country. There are dozens of other countries that are highly sophisticated, with a thoroughly educated population and technologically advanced infrastructures. Few of these countries have elections decided by politically motivated judges in Florida – Whoops, just kidding!

Why is it that the most economically advanced country in the world has a population that is largely unfamiliar with the rest of the world? First and foremost it is education, American schoolchildren are just not taught about other countries, not their beliefs and aspirations, not their cultures, not their religion and not their economies. When America played Ghana in last year’s Soccer World Cup, I was shocked to find how many people had no idea where Ghana was located. No, it is not in the Caribbean. Most well-educated Europeans, Scandinavians, Australians and Asians can discourse knowledgeably about other nations and cultures.

A close, second reason is media. International news is largely ignored in provincial newspapers unless it directly involves the United States or has some anecdotal or humorous element. Worse still, almost all foreign news is “ethnically rewritten” by the news agencies so that American readers will be able to relate to it. As an exercise in supercilious condescension this “dumbing-down” is surely an insult to the intelligence of this nation. The policy infers that the people of the United States are genetically incapable of understanding anything unless it’s related to Uncle Sam and apple pie. All types of media indulge in this practice. Just as an unimportant example I saw a report about a controversial incident in the world of cricket a few months back. I can’t recall the network but very little of the controversy was discussed. In fact most of the effort was directed at poking fun at cricket in general and comparing it unfavorably to baseball. The point here is that the controversy (which was the story) was glossed over and the piece ethnically rewritten to reinforce the baseball culture of the United States. Anyone who wanted to hear more details of the issue in question would have been disappointed.

By the way, how come it’s called the World Series when only teams from America participate?

Does any of this really matter? Well the cricket and the baseball issue does not matter in the slightest but in a society that is irretrievably part of the “Global Village” the serious issues matter very much.

Unless the people and government of the United States gain more knowledge of the rest of the world and generate some sensitivity and understanding about other nations, peoples and religions, the tension so much in evidence today can only get worse. Is the Land of the Free any freer than the land of the Swedes or the French or the British? Are the electoral processes in Australasia, Canada and Europe less honest than that of the United States? If America is the best country in the world, does that mean that all other countries are inferior? If you can answer yes to all these questions – “there’s your sign”.

At a university course here in Texas the media communication instructor said that all writing for media should be composed at an 8th grade level. I thought that was pretty insulting until I heard that press releases for media publication should be written at 6th grade level – then I began to laugh. Does that mean when one form of media talks to another form of media they spell out the letters in play-dough and alphabet spaghetti or draw pictures on a board?

What is my point? I have absolutely no idea other than I feel that the education system and many media institutions are guilty of a genuine disservice to the American people. The World does not consist of The United States and those poor people that live in other places. The World is a rich tapestry of sophisticated cultures, aspiring peoples and unmitigated screwballs – sound familiar? The vast majority of this planet’s populations do not wake up in the morning worried about what the people of the USA are thinking or doing and neither do they routinely think that America or Americans are superior to them.

As a final thought, a fellow returning student said to me last year, “I know America is the best country in the world for the same reasons I know the Baptist Church is the best way to worship.” I guess I can’t argue with logic like that. And by the way they built Windsor Castle near to the airport so that the nice American tourists wouldn’t have too far to travel.

Book Banning in Burlingame

Longtime reader Greg sends in a story about the latest controversy surrounding the use of South African writer Mark Mathabane's memoir Kaffir Boy in a middle school classroom at Burlingame Intermediate School. Mathabane's book has aroused controversy before, most notably based on parental objections to a brief hint at boys willing to peform sexual acts on older men in order to feed themselves. This passage, hardly at the center of a book about growing up black in apartheid South Africa in the 1970s, recently caused the superintendent of Northern California's Burlingame School District to abruptly withdraw the book from an 8th grade class after a parent complained about the supposedly offending passage. To his credit, Burlingame Intermediate School principal Ted Barone reacted by inviting Mathabane, who now lives in Oregon, to speak to his school, and many local parents were disquieted by the fact that Superintendent Sonny Da Marto unilaterally caved in to censorship.

Children, especially tweens and early teens, are smarter and more capable of handling sensitive issues than most adults would ever give them credit for. The acts of sodomy that Mathabane implies are nowhere near as offensive as the conditions that created the desperation to carry out those acts to begin with. Aaprtheid is the affront in this situation, and yet I would hope that we will never reach a point where we begin banning and censoring books because we fear that the historical situations they depict might make kids uncomfortable. education, at least in part, should be about shifting comfort zones and exposing people to reality in a generally open and questioning environment.