Month: October 2007

A Great Find

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Blogfriend Eddie (who credited Abu Muqawama) sent in a link to a Mother Jones issue that has a veritable roundtable of experts commenting on withdrawing from Iraq. I was very impressed with their selection; below are a few links to some of the experts who would be of the most interest to the readers here:

Colonel T.X. Hammes
Colonel H.R. McMaster
Lt. Colonel John Nagl
Dr. Andrew Bacevich
Dr. Bary Posen
Dr. John Pike
General Anthony Zinni
Dr. Anthony Cordesman
Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski

Give it a look.

Cross-posted at Zenpundit

Neo-Neocon on the family that eats together

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Neo-neocon concludes her post on family dinners:

My family had its share of problems, and our meals sometimes ended in yelling and/or tears. But mealtime was the time when we most felt like a family, and just as often there was a lot of laughter. Come to think of it, sometimes political discussions would happen at the dinner table as well, perhaps fostering the development of the future blogger in me—one had to learn to defend one’s position with a certain amount of logic and grace

The importance of this tradition can not, I suspect, be overestimated. My experience, too, was not always positive in my childhood (if it is the one time a family comes together to talk, it can also be one time the family comes together to fight). But as far as building a sense of the familial, the importance of nurturing of both ideas and bodies, little comes close. Lee Harris discusses this more philosophically and Carmen Strache more lyrically (both quoted in this old post).

Kilcullen on TV

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Kilcullen, the Australian adviser to Col. Petraeus, has been mentioned several times here. His television appearances lately include an interview with Charlie Rose and a panel discussion with Ali Allawi (former Iraqi Minister of Defense and author of “The Occupation of Iraq”), Jon Lee Anderson (“The Fall of Baghdad”), Phebe Marr (“The Modern History of Iraq”), and George Packer (“The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq”) at the New Yorker Festival. Played twice this weekend on C-Span, it will be repeated tomorrow morning at 6:00 EST. Packer’s profile of Kilcullen demonstrates the New Yorker‘s encouragement of a certain interesting style and its willingness to give a writer space. Earlier references from the extraordinarily knowledgeable Zenpundit: Cutting Edge Military Theory: A Primer (Part I.) and Colonel Kilcullen, the “Surge” and The Guardian

Crab

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(Click the image to see a larger version in a new window.)
 
UPDATE: See also here.
 

What are You Going to Do About It?

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David Foster’s post got me to thinking about the ex-Mayor of Bogota. Unfortunately, my real world experiences are closer to this guy’s observations than what happened in Bogota. In general, I like the Mockus approach to re-establishing an atmosphere of intolerance for incivility. Being a libertarian, I prefer to rely on social opprobrium to discourage behavior that I think is fairly negative, but not negative enough to warrant giving the government more power to regulate.

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