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SECONDARY DOMINANCE
how small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
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Thursday, November 13, 2003 :::
ASHCROFT SINGS!
No explaination needed.
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posted by Galen H. Brown at 2:42 PM
DAISY, DAISY. . .
Happy Birthday to the composer whose name most closely resembles a court case:
Max V. Matthews!
Those who have not studied electroacoustic music may still be familar with his work, since he did the arrangement of "Bicycle Built for Two" featured in 2001 A Space Oddesy.
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posted by Galen H. Brown at 2:30 PM
CONFLICTING IDEOLOGY
Atrios says ". . .I bet will be down to 50,000 troops max by August, no matter what is happening there. Of course, by September we may be in Syria, but..."
I'm not prepared to make predictions one way or the other, but it seems to me that radical force reduction in Iraq and an invasion of Syria come from two separate ideological agendas, so we're unlikely to see both. Force reduction would be a product of the Election2000 Bush's anti-nationbuilding, isolationist ideology, whereas invasion and occupation of Syria is part of the PNAC Pax Americana agenda, which explicitly requires maintaining an occupation of Iraq for the sake of force projection. It's not clear to me which ideology Bush is attached to at the moment, but I doubt he'll mix and match.
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posted by Galen H. Brown at 2:25 PM
WHY THEY FIGHT
I generally really like Matt Yglesias, but I disagree with his conclusion that
this
Ted Rall column is a joke.
Rall has aparently said a number of inflamatory things in the past, and perhaps this column will upset people as well, but it strikes me as a very reasoned attempt to answer some of the basic questions of the day: "Why do they hate us?" and "Why haven't we been greeted as liberators?" I don't read it as an endorsement of terrorism at all, or a poorly executed joke, but rather an attempt to explain the position of the other side -- I found the explaination both convincing and enlightening, even if I think the hypothetical Iraqi writer has the wrong attitude. If we're going to do the right thing, no matter what you think the right thing IS, we need to accurately understand what we're up against.
That said, I agree that the format of the column undermines the cause -- by giving the impression that he might agree with the hypothetical Iraqi he makes himself, and by stupid-but-typical-conservative-extension, others on his side, look like terrorist supporters. A safer, and likely more successful approach would have been to say explicity "Many people on all sides of the debate don't seem to understand why we're getting so much resistance in Iraq after having liberated them from a tyrant. It will help us in clarifying our goals and strategies if we understand the Iraqi perspective, so here's what I think it is."
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posted by Galen H. Brown at 12:10 PM
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