Predictions

Iraq – How will we know if we’ve won?

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War opponents keep asking this question. One answer is that we will have won when we depose the Islamofascist governments of Syria and Iran, and perhaps some other countries, and Iraq is stable, and we no longer face a threat from Islamic radicalism and terror attacks because the Islamists are crushed and demoralized. But that’s perhaps too expansive and too vague an answer.

I was watching a TV news discussion on FOX tonight about positive recent developments in Iraq, and I realized that there’s an easy way to determine when we have won. We will know we have won when the leadership of the Democratic Party starts claiming credit for the war.

How can you people not appreciate my genius?

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Quick! Get Bertrand Russell, Linus Pauling and this guy and put them in a room together so they can solve the world’s problems.

There are reasons why people like this fellow are not running the country. “Everyone else is stupid” is not one of those reasons.

The interview is a good illustration of a life principle: most people, even very smart people, have limited competence in areas outside of their primary area of expertise (typically, what they do for a living). Usually, the farther afield they go, the less they know. Wiser people understand this. Some extremely smart, accomplished people do not. There is a lot of wisdom in William F. Buckley’s famous quip about how he would rather be governed by random people selected from the Boston telephone directory than by Harvard faculty members.

Quote of the Day

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Others make the mistake of endlessly re-fighting the past six years – who let al-Qaida grow?; who “lost” Osama bin Laden?; who fouled up postwar Iraq? – instead of concentrating on the storm ahead.
 
Before 2001, the excuse for American complacence and in-fighting was naivete. But what will be the reason for the next successful strike against us by the jihadists?

–Victor Davis Hanson

Michael Lewis on Disaster-Risk Trading

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This is an interesting and entertaining article, a bit long but worth reading. I’m not sure that Lewis completely understands some of the concepts here (or maybe I don’t understand them), and I think that he overpersonalizes his discussion by framing it as a narrative about mostly one person, which I suppose comes with the territory in journalism. It’s still quite a good article, however.

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Awaiting the Day

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My friend Robert has a thoughtful post about how the Miami Cuban-American community will greet news of Castro’s death.