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Wednesday, Mar 26, 2003

judtment of history

"What is missing in recent American commentary is not so much an appreciation of history—there has been too much of that, with "Munich" invoked at every turn. What is lacking is a sense of the tragic. If the US has had such a long run of foreign policy successes in the modern age, it is in large measure because, as Dean Acheson once put it, "we were fortunate in our opponents." This may not last. We were also fortunate in our leaders. This has certainly not lasted. There is much confident talk of the coming American century; but one hundred years ago many thought it was Germany that held the keys to the new era—and they had good reasons for thinking it. As Raymond Aron once remarked, the twentieth century could have been the German century."

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pnac sack

another pnac article from asia times.

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shock tropes

"The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation"

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watch tower

couple of warblogging resources --inteldump and yahoos list of blogs of warwatchers.

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Tuesday, Mar 25, 2003

mustard gas

"THE ONLY THING FRENCH ABOUT FRENCH’S® MUSTARD IS THE NAME!"

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wonder bread

"This plan, in the form of a budget resolution tied to a firm tax-cut mandate, is moving forward on Capitol Hill even as lawmakers' boilerplate speeches resound with calls for shared wartime sacrifice by all Americans. How an average $90,000 tax cut for each millionaire counts as sacrifice is only one of many unexplained mysteries as Republican leaders fiercely protect President Bush's second wave of tax cuts. The gallant troops in Iraq who are being invoked daily in speeches by members of Congress might be interested to know that the array of cuts includes an estimated $14 billion reduction in military veterans' programs."

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surrender at yorktown

many articles worth a look from the new yorker today.

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Monday, Mar 24, 2003

a day in pictures

"(YellowTimes.org) -- YellowTimes.org was temporarily shut down Sunday night. Its new hosting provider shut it down due to publishing "Inappropriate graphic material."

After removing pictures of civilian Iraqi deaths and injuries, along with photos of American POWs, YellowTimes.org was allowed to print again."

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tie died

wish i could find thisarthur schlesinger op-ed but heres a part of it in an atrios thread and heres a newsweek interview.

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not in my hood

"To anyone who has looked closely enough, Al Qaeda and its sister organizations plainly enjoy yet another strength, arguably the greatest strength of all, something truly imposing -- though in the Western press this final strength has received very little attention. Bin Laden is a Saudi plutocrat with Yemeni ancestors, and most of the suicide warriors of Sept. 11 were likewise Saudis, and the provenance of those people has focused everyone's attention on the Arabian peninsula. But Al Qaeda has broader roots. The organization was created in the late 1980's by an affiliation of three armed factions -- bin Laden's circle of ''Afghan'' Arabs, together with two factions from Egypt, the Islamic Group and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the latter led by Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's top theoretician. The Egyptian factions emerged from an older current, a school of thought from within Egypt's fundamentalist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, in the 1950's and 60's. And at the heart of that single school of thought stood, until his execution in 1966, a philosopher named Sayyid Qutb -- the intellectual hero of every one of the groups that eventually went into Al Qaeda, their Karl Marx (to put it that way), their guide."

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