WhirledView

Thinking Blogger Awards

Some long time ago, the Armchair Generalist named WhirledView as a blog that makes him think and gave us a Thinking Blogger award. Now Blog O'Gnosis has also sent the award our way.

We're very grateful to those two bloggers, and to all our readers. Further, we've found some new and excellent blogs from those "Thinking Blogger" posts.

So now we have to name five blogs that make us think. The hard part was excluding several that should be on this list. Here are just five, in alphabetical order.

Bouphonia

Erkan's Field Diary

Jahane Rumi

Phronesisaical

ZenPundit

Tuesday Penstemon Blogging

by CKR

There are two sorts of penstemons blooming in my yard. These are almost finished blooming.

These are at the height of their bloom.

Note the claret cup hedgehog cactus (Echinocereus triglochidiatus) in the background and the rapidly growing prickly pear in the foreground. There will be a cactus post in the future, probably when the prickly pears are blooming.

The first, earlier-blooming penstemon has dull grayish leaves, probably covered with hairs or wax to seal in the moisture from our drying climate. I tried transplanting some into a flower bed, and they're not doing very well. The little gray leaves are everywhere in the yard, but only a few bloomed this year.

The second is doing very well indeed. Its leaves are smooth (although you can see hairs on the flower stalk in the closeup. The plant itself looks a bit like the Rocky Mountain penstemon (Penstemon strictus) I bought at a local nursery, but the flowers are a lighter color and a rounder shape. The nursery-bought plant isn't blooming yet either, but that could just be because of its bizarre history in a greenhouse. Could be a different subspecies.

Here's a website with a number of penstemon species identified. I don't see any like mine, though.

Infowar!

by CKR

The New York Times today documents a new front in the world of war.

Estonia has been under attack for the past month. Denial of service attack, that is, from bots scattered around the world. On-link banking was shut down for a time, along with government offices and newspapers.

It can't be proved that the perpetrator was Russia, but instructions were distributed widely through discussion boards and the like, there seems to have been a fair amount of money behind the campaign, and a few Russian government IPs showed up in the melee.

It's the continuing Russian campaign against Estonia, heightened by Estonia's removal of a Soviet war memorial from smoggy Tallinn traffic to a green and flowery war cemetery.

Estonia is a particular threat to Russia: it's doing the best economically of the former Soviet Republics, and its electronic infrastructure is ahead of many other countries, including America. The last time I was on Aeroflot (still has a hammer and sickle in its insigne), they served Estonian butter. And the airplanes for over the water were Boeing.

The Moscow Times had an article last week that may explain part of the animus, too. It seems that Vladimir Putin's father had to spend time under water in an Estonian bog in the Great Patriotic War, sucking air through a reed, to escape the Nazis, who the locals had put on his trail. You might think that this would give him some empathy for the Estonians who spent time under water in bogs, sucking air through reeds, to escape both the Nazis and the Soviets, but no. It was all the fault of those nasty, Nazi Estonians.

Things seem to be getting back to electronic normal in Estonia. Postimees and Päevaleht are available again, expanding on the NYT story today.

Meanwhile, Russia is making life difficult for homosexuals, Brits in particular. Could this have anything to do with Britain's request for extradition of a key suspect in the polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko?

And another random thought: those thuggish young men who seem to appear and disappear conveniently in the Russian streets to beat up and terrorize the Brits and Estonia's ambassador are called Naši, Nashi, meaning "ours" in Russian. But I couldn't help noticing the resemblance to the organization some other conveniently available street thugs belonged to in the 1930s. (I know, I know, Godwin's law, but Putin did it first!)

Northern Ireland, Israel and the U.S.: Of Diehards and Honest Brokers

By PLS

When I decided to take an afternoon off to see the film The Wind that Shakes the Barley, I never expected that arch enemies Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness would be forming a government for Northern Ireland within the next few days. No. I mainly wanted a little eye candy—a desert-dweller's chance to look at a lush green landscape and (why not?) the pleasure of watching the light play on Cillian Murphy’s cheekbones. Plus—let’s get serious here!—I wanted to see the film’s take on terrorism Irish-style.

Little did I also know that I’d pretty soon be picking up a copy of The Atlantic. I found myself reading a very long article by David Samuels entitled "Grand Illusions." The pejorative refers to the mind set that governs the tragic interaction between US Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice—to say nothing of her boss—and the people of Israel, Lebanon and Palestine. As it turned out, the film and the article illuminated one another in ways I certainly hadn’t expected.

I then went to a dinner session addressed by the current Syrian Ambassador to the United States. He was on a friend-making expedition to the hinterland. He gave a slickly-rehearsed, entertaining and highly professional pep talk of the sort one always takes with a considerable grain of salt, but what he said also tallied with the Samuels article. Interesting.

Too Much Talk?

Unlike many film critics, I don’t see Barley as an action film compromised by too much jabbering. These are Irish people, for heaven’s sake! But levity aside, without the debate, the action would have been meaningless. The characters would have been mere psychopaths and sadists.

If you are going to overthrow a government of any kind, indigenous or colonial, you’d better have a pretty good idea of what kind of governance you’re going to set in its place—and why. If you have a political goal whose attainment may involve violence, you need to have a fairly clear notion of how means may compromise ends (a lesson the Bush administration consistently ignores, with ongoing dismal consequences). And, if you want an end to the fighting, ever, you need to integrate your dream of the ideal with a notion of the attainable, the workable, the doable, the bedrock acceptable. Oh, yes! How about economic systems? (Who deserves what and how much?) How about power relations and justice? (Who controls the controllers, for instance?) And in the end, the hardest gesture of all perhaps, you must be willing to bury pain, anger, resentment—and the past, the latter with a noble memorial, perhaps. That’s what the supposedly dull dialog in Barley is all about: the deep and difficult brain- and soul-searching that the Bush neo-cons, to our great cost, disdained when they invaded Iraq.

A Rough Nuclear Threat Assessment for the United States

by CKR

It must be something in the air. Or maybe it’s that the Subcommittee on Water and Energy Development (of the House Committee on Appropriations) just scratched the funding for the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program. That’s no guarantee that the funding won’t be put back in at some point on the appropriations bill’s journey through congress, but it got some people’s attention.*

Both Scientific American and a former colleague who calls himself Dr. Strangelove have proposed a debate, preferably on their blogs, on nuclear weapons. I’m not impressed with what they’ve got so far.

If you’re going to discuss the need for nuclear weapons or their possible missions, you should start out with a threat assessment. It’s also possible to begin with your druthers, but not particularly reality-oriented. So I’ll continue from my outline for a threat assessment.

I’ve done my own threat assessment of sorts. It’s developed over a period of years, and I suspect it’s as good as anything that might be done by others with more time and access to more information. I’m open to changing it if better information appears, but that information has to be reliably supported, not just suppositions about terrible things that might happen.

Here is my unofficial nuclear threat assessment for the United States. Note that this is a nuclear threat assessment, not an overall threat assessment. There are still some dangers out there; I am focusing on those that might use nuclear weapons against the United States or in some other way provoke nuclear retaliation by the United States.

Bernard Fall: Memories of a Soldier-Scholar - book review essay

By PHK

In the preface to Dorothy Fall’s Bernard Fall: Memories of a Soldier-Scholar, (Potomac, 2006) the late David Halberstam recounted his admiration for his friend Bernard Fall. Fall’s classic book Hell in a Very Small Place which recounted and explained the French defeat at the hands of Ho Chi Minh’s Viet-Minh in 1954 is, wrote Halberstam, “a great, great book, one of the most important nonfiction books of the last fifty years, a stirring bit of history and a cautionary tale for American presidents. (What, one wonders, would have happened had the architects of the second Iraq intervention read it?)” asked Halberstam although Colin Powell, Dorothy Fall tells us later in her text, had read the book twice.

Bernard Fall, for those of us old enough to remember the Vietnam War, was a scholar-soldier-writer, who began his “bad” love affair with Vietnam (or as he would write it Viet-Nam) summer 1953. Because of his French background and citizenship – he had become an American citizen before his untimely death - as well as his own participation as a guerilla fighter in the French underground during World War II, it’s perhaps only natural that Viet-Nam became his life’s work and passion. Or that he understood it and could explain the country and its struggle for independence so well.

I first learned of Bernard Fall in February 1967 when I was a graduate student in political science at Syracuse’s Maxwell School although, unfortunately, I never had a chance to meet him or hear him speak. Fall had just been killed in a booby-trap in Vietnam while accompanying American troops on a mission along “The Street without Joy” as a part of his research on the deepening American
involvement in the country and the evolving course of the war.

This was Fall's sixth and final research visit to Vietnam. His own American experience began as a Fulbright scholar in that same political science department where numerous faculty still remembered him reverently for his intellect, his realism, the quality of his on-the-ground, in-depth research, his trustworthiness, his productivity and a dissertation on Vietnam that encompassed over 900 pages.

A year or so later, I came across Fall’s file in the department office when I was an administrative assistant and still working on courses for my PhD. In that file, I found and read his hand written letters to one of his former professors. One letter detailed an interview he had had with Ho Chi Minh in 1962. By then, of course, Fall was on the faculty of Washington, DC’s Howard University.

His research, its implications and his willingness to speak out made him unpopular with Kennedy and Johnson administrations because he had long questioned – with good reason – the administrations’ fundamental policy decisions based on too rosy assessments of the course of that ill-begotten war and what superior American fire-power could bring to this anti-Communist crusade.

Fall was a political realist who understood all too well the staying power of guerilla warfare: he was not anti-American as the powers that be in Washington at the time tried to paint him. He was anti-Communist, anti- Nazi, and he was no French agent.

FBI targeted the wrong man

The Latest IAEA Report on Iran is Out

by CKR

It can be found here, courtesy of David Albright's ISIS. The bottom line seems to be that they detected no sign that Iran is working on weapons, but Iran wasn't totally forthcoming either.

I'm giving a talk on Iran and North Korea tomorrow and have to spend some time in preparation. So here's news and commentary on the report from others:

Washington Post

Los Angeles Times

The Guardian

"Iran 'three to eight years' away from nuclear weapon" is the Guardian headline. I've been wondering lately why it takes so long to build stuff in today's world. There are lots of possible reasons: limited funding, greater complexity, more bureaucratic requirements, eking out all the profit possible on defense contracts. The Iranians are hardly alone in these stretched-out timetables.

The United States, in World War II, developed an enormous production capability and two entirely different designs of nuclear weapons from scratch in 26 months. That kind of thing just doesn't seem to happen today, anywhere. Maybe that's a good thing. It's certainly fodder for another post.

Jeffrey Lewis (says we can expect more later)

Paul Kerr (here and here)

Andreas Persbo

Wednesday O'Keeffe Blogging

by CKR

My iris are blooming. So far, mahogany and two kinds of blue and white composition. Their scent hangs heavily just outside my door when the wind allows it. I watered them this morning on the basis of my vast experience with Murphy's law. It looks and feels outside like we can expect rain, but the flower garden has been drying out, and it seems like watering it should encourage the rain gods.

Let's see if I can do some Georgia O'Keeffe kinds of thing with the iris.

That last isn't an iris, it's a geranium I bought at the grocery store. Still O'Keefeian though.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the yard,

The Blair Whitewash Project

By Elizabeth D. Dyson, Guest Contributor

Upon David Halberstam’s recent untimely death, journalists of all stripes wrote enthusiastic eulogies, reminisced about his courageous reporting, and praised all over again his landmark book “The Best and the Brightest.” Halberstam had forever changed the face of journalism, they wrote, and in “The Best and the Brightest” he had unflinchingly exposed the failures of the top, brilliantly educated figures in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who helped embroil America so deeply, and irrationally, in the quagmire of Vietnam.

Sadly, not even “best and brightest” people occupy leadership posts in the Bush administration today -- “bright,” perhaps, but certainly not “best.” But what about the American press? Shouldn’t far more of our best and most prominent writers and commentators be willing to follow Halberstam’s example by exposing weaknesses and faults in world leaders who are all too commonly thought to have a “bright” reputation?

Not, it seems, when it comes to Tony Blair.

Many informed observers believe that Tony Blair is one of the few people, along with Colin Powell and George Tenet who might have changed the course of history had he stood up to, and exposed, George Bush and Dick Cheney and their manipulation of intelligence in making the case for pre-emptive war. Jimmy Carter, for example, told BBC Radio on May 19 that Blair’s support of Bush was “Abominable. Loyal. Blind. . . . And I think the almost undeviating support by Great Britain for the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq have been a major tragedy for the world.”

But what “liberal” commentators in the American mainstream press have bemoaned the fig leaf Blair provided for Bush’s preemptive attack on Iraq, or otherwise pointed out Blair’s faults and deceptions upon his recent resignation announcement? Who has written forcefully about Blair’s misleading of his own people, not to mention the world at large, with respect to the “45 minute” claim, not unlike the administration’s “mushroom cloud” claim on this side of the Atlantic? With the exception of a passing mention by Maureen Dowd, who else has highlighted the clip played over and over on British TV in which “Blair said Saddam had W.M.D. that could be activated in 45 minutes”?

Monday Morning Mix and Match

by CKR

I was going to write about the non-content in Intelligence Director Mike McConnell's impassioned plea for modernizing FISA, but Kevin Drum has pretty much covered it for me.

It's not possible to have a responsible public argument on policy without facts. What is the current policy? What does it need to be changed to? Why? How does this improve law inforcement? Does it infringe on civil liberties? If so, is that infringement acceptable in view of the goals. McConnell finds "trust us" a sufficient argument to cover all these questions.

In my continuing non-coverage of global warming, I must make note of Arnold Schwartzenegger's challenge to the Bush administration: lead, follow, or get out of the way. Pretty strong stuff for a Republican. But if the states are to be a laboratory for policy, it doesn't make sense for the feds to sit on any experiments they want to do. Unless actual evidence is no part of the federal policy. Here's some soft environmentalism in action: carbon tax, new technologies, emission standards, better forestry, environmental impact reviews. It's no surprise that the author is a professor at Harvard, and I'll bet he makes a bunch of money from consulting on just those subjects. But, because carbon dioxide is an essential product of combustion, if we're serious about decreasing it in the atmosphere, it'll take a lot more than that. Less carbon fuel consumption, which will mean seriously less power usage or more nuclear power. We'll be hearing more about that from the UK this week. The unwillingness to face up to the hard decisions is one more reason I don't write much about this.

Everyone else will have more to say on this, so I'll just note that rejecting suggestions out of hand makes it harder not to look like a fool when you have to backtrack. President Bush's desire to look strong continues to undercut itself. Meanwhile, Iraqi leaders are planning to be out of that country for a while. Here's a nice summary of how peace came to Northern Ireland, which one may or may not extend to any other country in turmoil.

Finally, the Cutty Sark went up in flames last night. Photos here.