Robert “Paradise and Power” Kagan, the global expert hyperpundit famous for determining that someone like Jacques Chirac is unwilling to take action to defend his interests, being more interested in maintaining an illusory island of Kantian peace in his backyard, thinks the capital of Australia is Sydney.
Apparently, according to leading US scholars, the essential difference between Arab men and the rest of humanity is that they associate women with erotic pleasure. (Except the gay ones, presumably.) Think of that. Women! When normal people like you, I, or Dick Cheney prefer otters, HSDPA-enabled, standards-based radio network controllers, or AGM-109A missiles – no wonder we can’t just get along. Snark aside, go read. Bernard Lewis believes this stuff and he has the ear of the President. If I may breach Godwin’s Law, people will study The Arab Mind in future years in the same way as I studied the writings of people like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Co.
More seriously, this cheers me. We will be able to say, when it’s all over, that for several years the mad people were in charge, and that was the problem. Now, the mad people have been got rid of and sanity is back. That is of course a myth. Mad people don’t get to be in charge unless some of the sane people go along. A Hitler needs a Speer and a von Manstein. But it’s observable that some nations, whom we won’t name, have done rather well in recovering from being ruled by mad people by espousing exactly that myth.
Hmm, more evidence for the stupidity thesis.
Training for war, I spent an afternoon in an army classroom listening to presentations on improvised explosive devices and the insurgents who plant them. Droning through one of the inevitable PowerPoint presentations, a sergeant first class read directly from the slide in front of us: The insurgency, he read, will probably die down after we capture Saddam Hussein. Except that the class was taught this October, a couple of years after that former dictator had been dragged out of his spider hole. The sergeant stopped for the briefest moment, mumbled that the slides were a little out of date, and went right on reading.