Month: April 2007

This ABC News report from Baghdad was easily the most hopeful report I’ve seen in a long while. The surge may be working in a few Baghdad districts with sufficient man-power – finally! – to restore some kind of order. But at the same time we read that

21 Shia market workers were ambushed, bound and shot dead north of the capital. The victims came from the Baghdad market visited the previous day by John McCain, the US presidential candidate, who said that an American security plan in the capital was starting to show signs of progress.

The Times of London story also contains gruesome details of a truck bomb that killed many children at an elementary school in Kirkuk. The best judgment I can make right now is that a real counter-insurgency plan can and will make a difference where it is actually implemented – as long as it is pursued for an indefinite period with sufficient troop levels. For Iraq as a whole, we’re talking 200,000 or more troops for at least five more years. No one in this administration has ever been honest about this, or ever asked for the sacrifices it would entail. And I seriously doubt now whether there will ever be anything close to an American consensus in favor of that – and the expenditure of life and money it would require. What we may be finding out now, in other words, is that this was not an impossible dream. It was simply made impossible by the execution. Which makes the signs of failure and of success all the more excruciating.

There’s a big debate in Britain over them. Essentially, the editor of the Lancet has gone nuclear on Blair, turning a highly respected scientific journal into a political weapon. But he has a factual point. The Johns Hopkins study that estimated a human toll of 650,000 Iraqi casualties since the invasion was apparently backed up by Blair’s own government scientists, but the prime minister ignored them. I find the number implausible on its face, but I’m not an expert in these things, and no one can doubt that the reality of Iraq is opaque at best. Here’s some science-bloggy reax – here, and here.

Just a million behind Clinton, with a much larger small-donor potential and much wider national appeal: Obama is the Democratic front-runner now. He has even managed the expectations game better than his rival. She panicked and bragged to Drudge. He kept his cool and will now have his own news cycle bump. Obama so far has proven himself a very smooth operator. He doesn’t look like the freshman. She does.

(Photo: Jeff Haynes/AFP/Getty.)

Frank Fukuyama sees the EU, not America, as the model for humanity’s future:

The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organisation. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU’s attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans’ continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.

Finally, I never linked the global emergence of democracy to American agency, and particularly not to the exercise of American military power. Democratic transitions need to be driven by societies that want democracy, and since the latter requires institutions, it is usually a fairly long and drawn out process.

Well, that headline should get some Google traffic. But there’s an Ohio State University study of who hooks up with whom in an anonymous high school, and the results don’t look like an adult network. Money quote:

For the first time, sociologists have mapped the romantic and sexual relationships of an entire high school over 18 months, providing evidence that these adolescent networks may be structured differently than researchers previously thought.

The results showed that, unlike many adult networks, there was no core group of very sexually active people at the high school. There were not many students who had many partners and who provided links to the rest of the community.

Instead, the romantic and sexual network at the school created long chains of connections that spread out through the community, with few places where students directly shared the same partners with each other. But they were indirectly linked, partner to partner to partner. One component of the network linked 288 students – more than half of those who were romantically active at the school – in one long chain.

You really are sleeping with everyone else your hook-up may have slept with. The lack of any hub makes intervention to prevent STD spread much harder. You have to come up with a general message rather than targeting a small group first. Why so few gays? It’s high school, I guess. And all of this is based on reported hook-ups, so who knows what the reality truly is.

London, England, 1 pm.

"I know my position on anti-war protestors a few years back- they were to be mocked, derided, ignored, out-protested, or countered with ‘facts’ (the facts, in many cases, did not turn out to be on my side, but at least I was arguing from what I thought was an honest position). Nowhere did I even begin to imagine we would arrest people and have them interrogated by secret government units.

But the smelly dirty hippies were expecting it, and once again, this administration has proved them right," – John Cole, Balloon Juice.

Can you be bigoted against homosexuals and Muslims at the same time?

"I favor redistribution from the rich to the poor.  It will make the poor better off for a few decades, but no more. After that point, the poor are worse off, forever, and by more each year," – Tyler Cowen, mouthing off again. Commenters at Reason have various calves here. Ezra Klein has a heifer.

Free peanuts! No warts! What’s not to like? I love the drug companies.