Month: January 2009

The Economist unloads on Bush. His was a presidency rooted in three core beliefs: "partisanship, politicisation and incompetence."

Matt Yglesias:

If John Yoo walked down Pennsylvania Avenue and shot a guy in the head, we wouldn’t say “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” even though it would be as true as ever that it’s important to look forward. And more than one person has died as a result of Bush-era torture policies.

A reader writes:

In your post "The Biggest Spin" you mention that we may be in "a lull before another hot phase of a civil war [between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq] that goes back centuries". While the current divide between Sunni and Shia Arabs in Iraq is real, I think that stating that this conflict "goes back centuries" is misleading much in the way as Bill Clinton’s characterising the 1990’s conflicts in the Caucasus and Balkans as caused by "ancient hatreds".

 

Yes, Sunni and Shia factions have quarreled for centuries, especially in Iraq. The Shia Imam Husayn was himself killed at the Battle of Karbala in 680. And yes, southern Iraq has been an important center of Shiism since that time. However, many Iraqi Arabs are much more recent converts to Shiism, dating from the late Ottoman Period. Sunni and Shia traditions among Iraq’s Arabs have much more to do with Iranian and Ottoman power politics and cultural influence than any deep-seated ancient hatreds. Shias have often identified firstly as Iraqi Arabs (even if Sunnis are slightly skeptical of their credentials), and have expressed their identity as such through a myriad of tribal loyalites and political ideologies, from Ba’athism to Communism to the parties that we see today. Furthermore, there is as much violent competition among Shia groups (such as the Badr brigades, Dawa, and the former SCIRI party) as between the Shia and Sunni. Imagining that the violence in Iraq centers on a society split primarily between Sunnis and Shia, locked in eternal combat, is just plain wrong. Worse, it’s the kind of vision of Iraq that al-Qaeda espouses.

 

Iraq is a much more complicated place than that. Failing to realise this is precisely what got us into this mess in the first place.

Still life, with bullet:

(Hat tip: Robbie Cooper)

Buzz kill.

Drezner weighs in on the miraculous Hudson river landing:

While most birds probably wish to peacefully coexist with humans, it is becoming increasingly clear that a small group of radicalized avians are hell-bent on destroying our way of life.  This can not stand.

I, for one, look forward to President Bush’s declaration of a War on Birds.  Unfortunately, this will last only four days, after which President Obama will no doubt appoint this guy as special envoy to the avian community.

I, for one, blame Canada.

A noun for the bloody goo that remains of birds after making their way through a jet engine.

Why do the geese hate us?

I immediately thought of Mike Kinsley’s old column, "What The Helga?", but TNR doesn’t have it online. But searching for it did produce this little 1987 gem from Bob Hughes. Money quote:

The time is past when one could dismiss Wyeth as nothing more that a sentimental illustrator, as critics irked by his popular appeal regularly did a decade or more ago. True, his work is grounded in illustration and often fails to transcend it. Not a few of the images of Helga lying naked on a bed or tramping resolutely through the snow in her Loden coat have the banal neatness of things done for a women’s magazine. Some of them, like the technically impressive watercolor In the Orchard, 1974, are as deadly in their "sensitiveness" as greeting cards. But there are some fine drawings here, moments of vision caught with attentiveness and precision, that have a lot more visual oomph than the more laboriously finished works. And two or three of the paintings are marvels of iconic condensation. Like a good second-rate novelist who can rise to first-rate episodes, Wyeth can surprise you.

(Photo: Long Limb, by Wyeth.)

"No U.S. president can justify a policy that fails to achieve its intended results by pointing to the purity and rectitude of his intentions," – Paul Wolfowitz, "Statesmanship in the New Century," in Kagan, R. and Kristol, W, eds. Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy, San Francisco, 2000, p. 335.