Month: November 2006

Political Dialogue

by

What follows are the edited contents of an email exchange Lex and I had Friday.

———————–

Jonathan:

Republicans are in the mid-twenties on Intrade. The sour sentiment on the Internet is so thick you can cut it with a knife. Everyone on blogs seems to hate W and the Republicans, including Republicans. I think the sentiment is overdone. It is way beyond rational. Could be there is going to be a blowout favoring the Democrats. Sabato seems to think so. Or maybe there will be some opinion retracement favoring the Republicans, over the weekend, but that’s speculation on my part. Should be interesting. Not good for the country, I think. The Internet seems to help the Democrats as well as the Republicans, and the press have basically sold their souls for the Dems.

Lex:

That 20 only means that there is an 80% chance that the Ds will have a majority of one or more. That seems likely to me, too.

The blogosphere is anything but representative of the normal world. It is a bunch of political junkies. And the “conservatives” are really politically unreasonable libertarians. The GOP base will turn out pretty well, and it will not be a blowout. There is only a blowout when the election is nationalized on some issue. The country may be mad about Iraq, but the Ds have offered no affirmative reason to vote for them. So, there may be some protest voting and sitting-it-out, but no groundswell for the Ds. I think they’ll end up with a majority of five or fewer seats.

Read more

Books That Should Exist, But Don’t: The South African Military

by

Millions and millions of books. Even in the history field, thousands and thousands. Usually monographs on pretty narrow topics. But amidst all that, despite the numbers, you sometimes find that a book you want just does not exist.

I got thinking about South Africa recently, due to a perusal of Ralph Peters’ remarkable essay The Lion and the Snake, hat tip Eddie. And it occurred to me that I knew less about the South African military than I’d like. It is a remote corner of the Anglosphere which I’d like to know more about, and being me, I wanted to start from the military angle. I went looking for something like Granatstein’s history of the Canadian Army, or this essay collection on the military history of Ireland. I found remarkably little. There are unit histories, and an official (or semi-official) history of South Africa in the Second World War, and some books about the South African Army from the 1980s, and a few other odds and ends, such as this short essay, and this interesting list of books (click on “literature”). So there is a fair amount of material out there, but nothing comprehensive. I want someone else to do the research, the heavy lifting, and put the whole thing together for me, with an nice annotated bibliography.

Despite substantial searching, I am forced to conclude with regret that there is no one volume history of the South African armed forces, or military history of South Africa. I think we are too close to the transition from the apartheid regime to the successor regime. Old wounds are still open.

Still, too bad. It would be a very fascinating story, told as a continuous narrative. Lots of military, political, cultural and racial drama. The Dutch settlement, the British capture of the Cape, the Zulu Wars, the Boer War, South African expeditionary forces in both world wars, the Cold War era struggles against guerillas in adjacent countries, The military’s involvement in sustaining the apartheid regime, the clandestine nuclear program, the current ambiguous situation, including the virtual privatization of important segments of the South African Army into mercenary bands for hire, and some predictions and guesses about what the future might hold. What a tale. Even if it covered only the 20th century, starting with independence, after the Boer War, it is a story which would certainly have a lot of interest and lessons. It belongs in one volume. I hope someone writes it.

I close by opening the floor to our readers: Do you have any book recommendations about South Africa, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, etc., not necessarily limited to the military angle.

Small Hopes

by

Taranto is generally entertaining and often merely partisan. Tonight he concludes with a fact that radiates. It comes amidst a time that has been compared to Tet by those of different opinions about both Tet & Iraq. Whatever optimism Iraqi elections had brought, the apparent chaos & increasing death toll seem a cold front moving in. But maybe we aren’t reading the clouds well. In his “Births of a Nation”, Taranto notes:

“In the face of relentless violence, political chaos, economic uncertainty and nightly curfews, Iraq’s maternity wards are experiencing an unlikely baby boom,” the Washington Times reports from Baghdad:

Despite the obstacles, the birthrate in Iraq actually has increased since the U.S.-led invasion 43 months ago, according to the country’s Health Ministry. The rate of births in the country has jumped from 29 births per 1,000 people in 2003 to 37 per 1,000 last year, according to government figures.

In neighboring Iran, the birthrate is half that–21 per 1,000 population, while the average birthrate in the Middle East is 25, according to the World Bank.

As the 19th-century Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore observed, “Every time a child is born, it brings with it the hope that God is not yet disappointed with man.” It seems the Man upstairs isn’t yet ready to cut and run from Iraq.

As I think many of us find the failure of Europe to both reproduce and defend itself as deeply & sadly important; perhaps the Iraqis, otoh, are building a desire to defend as well as reproduce themselves.

Read more

Oopsie Dixit

by

This little piece is by someone who not only takes John Kerry’s side, but thinks he really may have had a point in the first place. Maybe it wasn’t a blooper.

Troops With No Choice; An Opinion Piece From Air America on John Kerry’s Comments about Education and Serving in the Military; By JACKIE GUERRA [excerpt]

Serving our country in the military is a great service, one which we all admire and revere, but it’s more than that. It’s also a job.

And it’s a job that many Americans sign up for not only out of a sense of patriotic duty, but also because it often seems the best of few options.

At high schools like these across the country, inner-city and rural students, often from communities of color but almost always poor, do not have many options in George Bush’s America.

The Boston Globe, Kerry’s best buddies, didn’t even go as far as that; they characterized his efforts as dumb. This is the newspaper that helped Kerry finesse his promise to release his full military service records by letting one of their reporters look at them. The report on them was very carefully hedged; it made no mention, for example, of why his honorable discharge was granted by a review panel during the Carter administration, or whether his original discharge, which should have taken place years earlier, may not have been an honorable one, or whether he needed replacement medals in 1985 because he had been stripped of them.

Kerry is sort of a hothouse flower. He grew and bloomed in the controlled environment of Massachusetts. Kerry may thrive in a micro-climate designed to maintain his ideal growing conditions, but not in the harsh world outside; this was despite the efforts of the friendly national media to shelter him. The real mistake was when the Democrats decided to nominate him.