November 2006 Archives
Saturday, 04 November 2006
Like Fine Grains Of Sand Separated By Miles
Chris Dillows says it: Blair is a philistine.
Despite being given every opportunity to do so, Blair never says that science as an aesthetic experience, or that the progress of knowledge is a vital part of human growth, or that science, properly done, is an expression of rationality. For him, it’s just money-grubbing.
Never mind that Blair was a not-very successful lawyer himself, and that his Prime Ministerial salary (far more than I earn, I admit) isn’t so much compared to proper plutocrats (or even successful businessmen like George Bush’s father, or intelligent lawyers like Malcolm Rifkind), he loves lucre.
One of the stranger facts I wasn’t aware of until recently is summarised by Greg Laughlin (quoted by Centauri Dreams).
Indeed, the great Andromeda Galaxy, M31, subtends an angle larger than the full Moon in the sky, and it is literally almost directly overhead right now (9:36 PM, Dec 3, latitude 36.97 deg N). The storms from earlier this week have blown through. The sky sparkles with brilliant clarity. Yet when I step outside and look up, I can’t see the Andromeda Galaxy at all. It’s too faint. In a 1:10,000,000,000,000 scale model of M31, the stars are like fine grains of sand separated by miles. Our Galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, and the Sombrero Galaxy are all essentially just empty space. To zeroth, to first, to second approximation, a galaxy is nothing at all.
I grew up thinking that Andromeda was a sort of nebulous star. When, even though it’s very far away, it’s enormous (IIRC smaller than our own galaxy, though we used to think it was bigger). I suppose Blair is impressed by the sales Stephen Hawking’s books have enjoyed. Yet what possible use is the study of black holes? Even in principle, Hawking’s work is very far removed from British industry. So why did his books sell well? Partly intellectual snobbery, doubtless. But a lot of people are interested in, are moved by the aesthetic experience. If you ask ’Why are we here’ (and who hasn’t?) are you satisfied with any answer less than the best society can give? Blair is: God did it. God made Iraq so we might bomb it.
Annoyingly, Steve Jones has a good piece but not online in the Torygraph on the application of biology to the web (treating it as a complex system, which biologists study). Some abstruse fields have uses after all.
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Returning Heroes
Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me?
Seymour Hersh says There has never been an American army as violent and murderous as the one in Iraq:
He described one video in which American soldiers massacre a group of people playing soccer.
Three U.S. armed vehicles, eight soldiers in each, are driving through a village, passing candy out to kids,he began.Suddenly the first vehicle explodes, and there are soldiers screaming. Sixteen soldiers come out of the other vehicles, and they do what they’re told to do, which is look for running people.
Never mind that the bomb was detonated by remote control,Hersh continued.[The soldiers] open up fire; [the] cameras show it was a soccer game.
About ten minutes later, [the soldiers] begin dragging bodies together, and they drop weapons there. It was reported as 20 or 30 insurgents killed that day,he said.If Americans knew the full extent of U.S. criminal conduct, they would receive returning Iraqi veterans as they did Vietnam veterans, Hersh said.
In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation,he said.It isn’t happening now, but I will tell you – there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq.
In other news American soldier refused to torture, committed suicide.
To brighten things up, a joke. What’s the difference between Vietnam era USA and the Third Reich? Nazi soldiers weren’t welcomed as baby killers. Hooray for the USA. Bush = Hitler, people.
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Tuesday, 07 November 2006
Iraq Is Now The Foreign Policy Version Of Katrina
Via teh Editors. Did I ever tell that I love Andrew Sullivan? I’ll get over it, I know.
And everyone blames everyone else in perhaps the greatest Balloon Juice post of all time.
Don’t forget the Powertools. As Glenn Greenwald has spotted here’s Paul (one of the ones who isn’t Assrocket) in April this year.
David Ignatius in the Washington Post supplies something that has been lacking in the MSM -- an acknowledgement that the selection of Jawad al-Maliki to be Iraq’s prime minister is good news. As a bonus, Ignatius explains why the selection enhances the chances of national unity. For one thing, al-Maliki represents "a modest declaration of independence from Iran." And by resisting Iranian pressure to back Ibrahim al-Jafari, Shiite leaders "stood up for a unified Iraq."
Note that though he quotes Ignatius it is because Ignatius agrees with his position, not because he has convinced him. The MSM, unlike Ignatius (er, writing in the MSM) has not acknowledged what was obvious to the ’Tools: "the selection of Jawad al-Maliki to be Iraq’s prime minister is good news".
Yet, not even six months later ’Paul’ thinks:
The Iraqis failed to do this when they voted in the Shia-militia-friendly Maliki government, thereby making it difficult, if not impossible, for the U.S. to work with the current government to curb sectarian violence.
Those stupid Iraqis! How could anyone have thought that "the selection of Jawad al-Maliki to be Iraq’s prime minister is good news". I mean, it’s almost retarded!
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Wednesday, 08 November 2006
Wha-Hoo!
Democrats seize control of House. Predictable but good. Also predictable, but not so good, Lieberman scraped back in. Still, Lindsay thought there was something fishy about his campaign. Maybe it’ll come back to bite him.
I’m not counting on winning the Senate.
And just in on my RSS reader, Janet Daley in the Torygraph says The Democratic victory was not as sweeping as it might have been.
So defending the war became the only story that Bush had to tell: his adherence to the Rumsfeld-Cheney strategy came to look like a pathological state of denial rather than courageous consistency.
Which is exactly what Andrew Sullivan said too. Bush has to defend the war on two fronts: whether it was morally right and his execution of it. Warbloggers have only the first of those. I really can’t see how Bush can survive any scruntiny of his leadership.
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Things Get Better
The BBC front page just flashed up that the Dems have won Montana, giving them 50 seats. And Glenn Greenwald has great fun at the expense of barking neocon Michael Ledeen.
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Joy Unconfined
O Happy Day! -- according, that is to Snowmail which just arrived in my inbox.
As I write, reports are rife that Donald Rumsfeld is stepping down.
He was the architect and agent of almost everything that has crashed in American Iraq policy. I can’t tell if he has been sacked or resigned, but this place has gone mad.
Mark my words, this is a day in modern political history.
A political party who fought a campaign of no great distinction or identity, levered away at one issue the war, without any proposals for dealing with it and they have brought down a man who Bush said would remain for the next two years only five days ago.
We are 10 minutes away from Bush conference as he reacts to the political coup that has befallen him in the US.
By political coup I mean coup because this has been a single issue campaign - the war on Iraq.
An extraordinary message has been sent to the president by the US people and once you have stripped out all the business of Republican and Democrat, you reach the inescapable conclusion that voters believed the president had to be told to change course on Iraq.
Of course, Rumsfeld should not be sacked. He should be tied to the back of a chariot and dragged round the perimeter of Washington for 24 hours and his still live corpse dumped in a kennel of well fed rottweilers. But that’s too much to ask.
I just checked Google News which led a search for ’Rumseld’ with a story from Fox which denied he was leaving. Ahem: (updated in the last few minutes) Donald Rumsfeld Resigning as Defense Secretary. Should have gone years ago. Should never have been in that position.
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Friday, 10 November 2006
I Am The Walrus, Not!
John Bolton is set to lose his job.
Mr Bolton was appointed in August 2005 during a Congressional recess.
This was a procedural manoeuvre which avoided the need for him to be confirmed until the end of this year.
The president has formally asked for that confirmation during the final session of the outgoing Senate.
But the senators who opposed Mr Bolton last time, including one Republican, are refusing to change their minds.
Dear god, what does he expect? You sneak a candidate in, of course he’s going to get booted. Bush demonstrates his unique foresight. Dur, I thought that if we delayed the sentencing of Saddam until the most opportune moment, they’d love us again.
Reading the Power Tools and Atlas Flashes Her Tits is going to be fun.
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Norman On Retreat
Norman Black Wednesday
Lamont writes unequivocally in the Torygraph this morning that America and Britain should quit Iraq as soon as possible. He starts with a confusing paragraph - too much is packed in, and it doesn’t convince. He also ends lamely with an ill-considered joke.
The American voters have punished George W. Bush. Quite rightly, there should be a penalty for taking your country into a failed war. But even before the mid-term elections, there were signs of American preparation for withdrawal from Iraq, and, with the departure of Donald Rumsfeld from the Pentagon, we can be sure there will be more now. The Iraq Study Group, on ice before the elections, apparently considers different exit strategies. Whatever America decides, no doubt Britain will slavishly follow. But will America remember to tell Tony Blair when it leaves?
I think his facts are largely correct, but even given Bush’s legendary incompetence, surely the Pentagon considered exit strategies before preparing to withdraw? As Alex keeps pointing out, withdrawal from Iraq will be damn difficult: most troops will have to leave via Kuwait, which means a retreat along the length of the country.
But then Lamont warms up, criticising the point of the war: if the number of American soldiers had been twice as large, the results would probably have been much the same
, the new regime Iraq has held elections, but no longer has an effective government
. And that’s just the warm-up.
Once the initial welcome for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein had passed, any prolonged occupation by alien troops was always going to be an increasing cause of resentment.
The real danger in the Middle East is that the situation in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iran could converge into an even bigger crisis. The problem is the inability of America to see anything from anyone else’s point of view, whether it be Palestine or Iran.
Sadly, the West is perceived as having a long history of imposing its will on the Middle East to protect its own interests. The first attempts at democracy in Iran were quashed by America and Britain in order to protect their oil investments. In politics, as in Newtonian physics, every action produces its reaction. The overthrow of Moussadeq produced the autocracy of the Shah, which in turn produced the Iranian revolution. Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal today seems a fairly predictable piece of Third World economic nationalism, but it led to a Franco-British invasion and drove Arab nationalists further into the arms of the Soviets. Eden, like George W. Bush, mistook
the enemyfor a new form of fascism.
I bet Nick Cohen, who uses fascist
for anyone he doesn’t like, will really appreciate being compared to Eden.
Voting Tory gets less and less painful.
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Like A Witch Doctor In Stocks
I’ve just finished Norman Mailer’s The Fight. My copy, from Cardiff’s New Central Library (the temporary building, just across from Callaghan - as in Jim -Square, is an improvement on the brutalist St David’s Centre eyesore), had a better cover, with a photo from the match itself, which shows Foreman landing a punch.
The ring apron at Nsele was six feet above the floor - thus another example of technology in Zaire: a fighter falling through these ropes could fracture his skull on the drop to the floor - Ali sat on this apron, his legs dangling, and Bundini stood in front. It looked like Ali was sitting on his shoulders. So Bundini’s head, rotund as a ball, close cropped and bald in the middle, rose in a protuberance between Ali’s legs. While he spoke, Ali put his hands on Bundini’s head as if a crystal ball (a black crystal ball!) were in his palms; each time he would pat Bundini’s bald spot for emphasis, Bundini would glare at the reporters like a witch doctor in stocks.
To the press I say this,said Ali.I fought twenty ranked contenders before Foreman had his first fight!Ali sneered. How could the press in its ignorance comprehend such boxing culture?Now, let Angelo read the list of Foreman’s fights.As the names went by, Ali did not stop making faces.Don Waldheim.A nobody.Fred Askew.A nobody.Sylvester Dullaire.A nobody.Chuck Wepner.Nobody.John Carroll.Nobody.Cookie Wallace.Nobody.Vernon Clay,said Dundee. Ali hesitated.Vernon Clay - he might be good.The press laughed. They laughed again at Ali’s comment for GaryHoboWilder -a tramp.. Now came a few more callednobody.Ali said in disgust,If I fought these bums, you people would put me outside the fight game.Abruptly Bundini shouted,Next week, we be Champ again.Shut up,said Ali, slapping him on the head,it’s my show.... WIth all the pride if having worked up a legal brief well organized adn well delivered, Ali now addressed the jury.
I’m a boxing scholar. I’m a boxing scientist - this is scientific evidence. You ignore it at your peril if you forget that I am a dancing master, a great artist.
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,shouted Bundini.
Shut up,said Ali, slapping Bundini’s bald spot. Then he looked hard at the press.You are ignorant of boxing. You are ignorant men. You are impressed with George Foreman because he is so big and his muscles seem so big.
They ain’t,rumbled Budini,they ain’t.
Shut up,said Ali, rapping him.
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What The Hell Is The Bnp For?
The Magistrate and Mike Power agree. My reaction when I heard that BNP leader [Nick Griffin was] cleared of race hate was What the hell is the BNP for, then?
If the nation’s #1 racist party can’t even spread some racial hate, what is this country coming to?
Both my fellow bloggers - rightly - object to Gordon Brown (as quoted by the BBC).
Speaking to the BBC after the acquittal, Chancellor Gordon Brown said race laws may have to be tightened.
He said: "I think any preaching of religious or racial hatred will offend mainstream opinion in this country and I think we’ve got to do whatever we can to root it out from whatever quarter it comes.
"And if that means we’ve got to look at the laws again I think we will have to do so".
First: a jury acquitted the two men. A jury ought to be composed of a cross-section of the British public, and they should represent mainstream opinion
. Perhaps they did, and the case, and the evidence used, was flawed. Brown does not appear to consider that possibility. Second: if any preaching of religious ... hatred
worries Brown - how many times do I have to say this? - Ian Paisley, Gordon. That bigot is in the House of Commons. Third: tighten up the laws and then where’s John Reid? Or is that the point?
Fourth: if it offends mainstream opinion, do we even need laws?
Brown is, I’m sorry to say, even more authoritarian than Blair, and unelectable.
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Biting The Dust
Torygraph: Toothsome finding shakes human family tree.
A new method that can reveal what our distant ancestors ate over the seasons has shown that a two million year old relative had a far more diverse diet than once believed, dispelling the common idea that it was driven to extinction by its picky eating habits.
... Because of its facial and dental architecture, Paranthropus was thought to be a
chewing machinespecialising in tough, low-quality vegetation. The new study shows that over the seasons it had a diverse diet ranging from fruits and nuts to sedges, grasses, seeds and perhaps even animals.What we did not know until this new study was the extent of variability in any one individual, from season to season and year to year. The scale of dietary shifts astonished us. It is this that confirms that they were flexible hominins, not dyed in the wool specialists,said Prof Lee-Thorp.
I suspect that dyed in the wool specialists
may be rarer than Prof Lee-Thorp thinks. Pigs and rats are omnivores. All the cats I’ve known have had fetishes for some plant or other. We presumably evolved from fish which lived on other fish. Some ancestor must have broken the specialist chain. Bloody hell, what is Prof Lee-Thorp comparing Paranthropus to - domestic cattle? If you’re starving and it has more nutrition than gravel you eat it.
Prof Stanley Ambrose of the University of Illinois, who is using another method to study teeth, commented that the lifestyle of P. robustus is the subject of much speculation.
Their hands were apparently designed for tool use, very much like ours, including strong wide fingertip bones for a firm precise grip and very strong thumbs for grasping. They walked on two legs, with hands free for tool use. They were very closely related to the first stone tool-making hominids, so there is every reason to believe they could and did use tools.
So tool use came before thumbs? So what about that obelisk and the bone-smashing thing? Seriously, I used to subscribe to the Raymond Dart/Robert Ardrey idea that our ancestors were vegetarian until we developed tools.
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Monday, 13 November 2006
It Is Complex For People To Comprehend
Strange news, indeed, from tehgrauniad: UK seeks help of Iraq’s neighbours.
Des Browne, the defence secretary, today urged Iran and Syria to help stabilise Iraq, as Tony Blair prepared to deliver a keynote speech on future UK strategy on the war tonight.
The prime minister is poised to announce an "evolution" in the government strategy on Iraq, which will see greater cooperation with its neighbours Syria and Iran in a talk at the Guildhall.
See
is a very strange word here. Syria and Iran could scarely be less co-operative at present. After all, they back and supply the various insurgents. But wasn’t the one of the points of the invasion to destabilise Iran and Syria as the BBC reported in 2003?
A secret State Department report quoted recently by the Los Angeles Times said of the region [Iraq]:
Liberal democracy will be difficult to achieve.Indeed it warned that anti-Americanism was so pervasive that elections could actually produce militant Islamic controlled governments.
This runs counter to the views of people like Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defence Secretary who has said that Iraq as the
first Arab democracywouldcast a very large shadow, starting with Syria and Iran, across the whole Arab world.Certainly, Washington wants change in Syria and Iran, just as it does in North Korea, which along with Iran and Iraq was named by President Bush’s as part of the
axis of evil.The US Undersecretary for International Security John Bolton has already said:
We are hopeful that a number of regimes will draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq that the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is not in their national interest.
The lesson they appear to have learned from Iraq is - we come begging for help sooner or later. And ew’re led by clueless idiots. Mr Wolfowitz and Mr Bolton seem not to have foreseen this.
Sam Leith in the Torygraph
Of Donald Rumsfeld, I think we can say that nothing so became him as the fact of his going. But I will miss his peculiar oratorical gift. Here, verbatim, is his tribute to George Bush on his resignation:
The great respect that I have for your leadership, Mr President, in this little understood, unfamiliar war - the first war of the 21st century. Er. [Long pause] It is not well known. It was not well understood. It is complex for people to comprehend. And I know, with certain certainty, that over time, the contributions you have made will be recorded by history.
He’s right there. I don’t comprehend it at all.
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Like Al Capone
Jackie Ashley is in denial. There’s no other word.
The cash-for-peerages scandal is feeding a rancid cynicism about parliament. Brown must set a new example
Ms Ashley seems concerned about the rancid cynicism
, but the important word is feeding
. New Labour, with the help of the Guardian, started it: Cash for questions
, Jonathan Aiken and so on. They meant to hit the Tories, but even then it was hard to tell the parties apart.
Behind all this is a political backstory that is murkier still. There’s no doubt now that the Blair camp thinks John Reid can beat Gordon Brown for the leadership, and that Reid is making quiet preparations. There are still plenty of ministers, caught between their dislike of the chancellor and fear of him, to swing either way. Yet the Blairites think a Reid challenge is only plausible if the contest is delayed until the second half of next year. They need the Labour party to have its second thoughts before the leadership election. This means they need Tony Blair to stay in position until the summer, or even the early autumn.
And cash for peerages threatens all that. The police are getting rather more help with their inquiries, it seems, than anyone had expected. The questioning of the cabinet and of Blair’s closest staff about their knowledge of loans to the party that might have been followed with recommendations for peerages is unprecedented in modern times. There is a momentum here. Either Blair somehow manages to halt it, or it will overwhelm him.
But many of us don’t want John Reid to be the next leader. I can’t think of anyone worse. If cash for peerages threatens Reid’s chances - good. But Ms Ashley wants Blair’s hide for a different crime.
In the end I cannot help thinking that cash for peerages is the wrong issue for Blair to be skewered on. Yes, it shows up the deep flaws in his way of government. But look across the Atlantic. Bush has just been smacked across the face, at last, for the Great Disaster: Iraq. That has been a cleansing moment for America. And here? It’s all loans for ermine and a deputy leadership contest, without a whiff of any great debate or change of direction. This autumn’s cash-for-honours blockbuster is another symptom of political failure, not political renewal.
Who cares what he is skewered on as long as he is skewered? Once he’s gone, blame for the Iraq fiasco will fall on him, for the dodgy dossier at least - and on Brown for not doing more, and the rest of them. As long as Blair goes in disgrace and humiliation, I no longer care.
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Thursday, 16 November 2006
An Invitation To Look Foolish
Torygraph: ’An invitation to look foolish’ or a window into the future? on New Scientist’s 50th birthday issue which asked leading boffins
what they think the world will look like in 50 years time.
Only Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University emerges with any credit whatsoever.
I absolutely refuse even to pretend to guess about how I might speculate about what, hypothetically, could be the biggest breakthrough of the next 50 years.
It’s not fair to compare actual scientists with a science-fiction writer, but here’s some fun with Robert A Heinlein. If you’ve read Starship Troopers you might give Heinlein an extra half point for predicting John Reid:
Mr Reid also announced plans - detailed in a Home Office consultation paper published today - which would mean parents could have to pay fines if their children committed yobbish behaviour.
Heinlein’s idea of a good society, assuming Starship Troopers was not intended - like the movie - to be satirical, was nuts.
Bonus prediction from Pete Townshend (not a nut).
What would you tell the Pete Townshend of 40 years ago? What would he say to you today?
This is a staple part of a 12-week workshop in a book called "The Artist’s Way." So I did this a while ago when trying to find a way to get past a perceived "block" while in fact I was still very prolific. I think in my letter to young Pete I told myself that I shouldn’t worry. There would be no nuclear holocaust. The planet would not become so polluted that we would all have to live in suits like they do in "Dune." I think young Pete told this old fart to mind my own business. I think he was right.
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A Last Big Push
Or, George Bush not up for re-election shock
. tehgrauniad: US plans last big push in Iraq. Simon Tisdall must be engaged in some sort of office bet. That, or he’s a half-wit.
... sources familiar with the administration’s internal deliberations [???] ... coming in the teeth of ... [ooh, missus!] ... Mr Bush will draw a line in the sand [he won’t you know] ...
Apparently Bush wants an extra 20,000 troops - a compromise, a fudge, a flip and a flop between Rumsfeld (who didn’t want any more) and McCain (who wanted a lot more).
Gregory Djerejian has a far more nuanced analysis and some fun with Glenn Reynolds. I propose a new byline for Instapundit: A flip-flop can be half way around the world before the reality based Defeatocrats have their boots on
.
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Saturday, 25 November 2006
Two For The Price Of One
It’s the season of Books of the Year. Make sure you have a bucket and a packet of tissues close at hand.
Ellis being Ellis isn’t impressed by the New Statesman’s recommendations.
Billy Bragg is inspired by Christopher Hitchens.
Is he? Let’s hope that it’s not Tom Paine’s Rights of Man (via Chris Brooke). Some of that review is worth quoting.
Quite right too; and if any radical, misled by George Galloway’s description of Hitchens as
a drink-soaked former Trotskyite popinjay, should suggest that this book was written out of vanity, he would surely be mistaken. A vain man would have taken care to write a better book than this: more original, more accurate, less damaging to his own estimation of himself, less somniferously inert. The press release accompanying the book led me to expect something much livelier; Hitchens, it exclaims,marvelsat the forethought of Rights of Man, andrevelsin its contentiousness. There is a bit of marvelling and revelling here and there, but it is as routine as everything else in this book, which reads like the work of a tired man.Too tired, to begin with, to check his facts. Rights of Man (not The Rights of Man, as Hitchens persistently calls it) was written as an answer to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Hitchens tells us that among others who wrote replies to Burke, along with Joseph Priestley and Mary Wollstonecraft, was William Godwin, which he wasn’t. He says that, unlike Paine, Wollstonecraft advocated votes for women, which she didn’t. Paine himself, Hitchens says, was not discouraged from writing Part One of Rights of Man by the rough treatment he received at the hands of a Parisian crowd following Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes. Nor should he have been, for Part One was published several months before the king fled and Paine was manhandled. According to Hitchens, Part Two was produced partly to explain to Dr Johnson the need for a written constitution, and partly to endorse Ricardo’s views on commerce and free trade, but when it was written Johnson had been dead for seven years and Ricardo, not yet 20, had published no views that required endorsing.
Even more curiously, Billy Bragg is followed immediately by Christoper Bray who recommends:
David Cannadine’s Mellon: an American life (Allen Lane) is a model life, sketching in economic and cultural background detail with a few deft strokes and making the story of the miserable millionaire tug like a thriller.
This is odd because a Christopher Bray reviews the same book in the Torygraph (not online yet).
Mellon is a long, long book, but there is no denying the shortage of drama once Nora is out of the picture.
I was thinking of quoting this anyway.
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Wednesday, 29 November 2006
No Seeming Of Reality
This post is nothing but a rip-off (mature poets steal) of Ioz. But who could have thought that the table of contents of The National Review Online would be this good? If I merely said it, you probably wouldn’t believe it. Put that drink down now.
TRB: To the Brink by Peter Beinart: A final gamble for securing Iraq.
Save Whomever We Can by George Packer
Send More Troops by Robert Kagan
Admit It’s Over by Richard A. Clarke
Bring the Troops Home by David Rieff
Divide Iraq by Peter W. Galbraith
Keep It Whole by Reza Aslan
Force Everyone to the Table by Anne-Marie Slaughter
Ally with the Sunnis by Josef Joffe
Crush the Sunnis by James Kurth
Try Anything by Leon Wieseltier
Ignore James Baker by Martin Peretz
Deal With the Sunnis by Larry Diamond
Talk, Talk, Talk by Michael Walzer
Bribe the Insurgents by Niall Ferguson
WASHINGTON DIARIST: The Troops and Us by Lawrence F. Kaplan
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