Linguistic Terrorism

I have discovered a new news source: GlobalPost.com. It's interesting. They only pay their reporters about $12K a year, but for that price they get some pretty good talent since most newspapers are laying off their foreign correspondents. After all, if it doesn't happen in America how could it be news?

The first article I read was about the French fear of linguistic terrorism. Well, it is the French, but to some small extent they have a point. OTOH, French is not exactly the international language it once was, and nothing is going to change that.

Still, I wish I could speak it better.

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New use for Google Earth.

Carmen loves Google Earth and all the Google map stuff. Here is a picture from Pakistan in 2006, for example.

And what are those little things parked on the runway? The ones that look like, oh... Predator attack drones?

The Laboratory of History

Which model of politics and economy would work best for a developing country in the 21rst century? Hard to tell, but let's go to the history lab and take a look at our two latest experiments.

Oh dear, one of the test tubes seems to have exploded, destroying the experiment and the lab assistants.

Oh well. There are plenty more grad students to conduct further tests while I remain at a safe distance here in my office at History Central.

Derbyshire on Immigrants.

I can understand why out of control illegal immigration might upset anyone. I can even, to a point, share the dislike for rewarding 'illegals' with a decent shot at residency and citizenship. But among some conservatives their dislike for 'illegal immigration' is morphing into a weird type of nativist anti-immigration spite pure and simple. Here , for example, is a reader writing in to agree with John Derbyshire, my favorite NRO commentator, about wanting to trash the 'Nation of Immigrants' image of America as untrue. Here's the key points:

Best I can tell most of my family came from Germany well over a century ago. But I'm not a German, never been there, don't really want to go. I'm an American. Let's start calling ourselves that instead of this ridiculous Nation of Immigrants nonsense.

And I don't buy Andy McCarthy's saying we have a '"nation of immigrants' self image.' I certainly don't. I don't know anyone who does. It's what we're told, we're expected to believe it, but I know nothing of having an immigrant past, and know only one person ... who does.

This is fun for several reasons. One, the Derby himself is an immigrant, from England, I believe (as are Andrew Sullivan, Arriana Huffington, Fareed Zakharia, Christopher Hitchens, etc, etc). Second, his ancestors came from Germany a century ago! Newcomer. My ancestor, a guy named Jesse, an Englishman or a Scots-Irishman, was active in the little North Carolina town near here in the 1760s. As a group, African Americans are the oldest 'American' population there is, if you discount the Native Americans (who really had an illegal immigrant problem).

Yet this relative newcomer now knows only ONE person who has an immigrant past. How odd. I live and work in rural America, the region where the good ol' WASP American culture first crystallized. People here either come from families that have been here for 200 years, or they've been here for less than 15 years. There is little in between.

As for me - I know lots of people with an immigrant past. My Cuban wife, for starters, and my second generation Cuban-American niece and nephew. They've done so well assimilating. My beloved sister-in-law is Vietnamese, which means my other niece and nephew are half-Vietnamese, though pure American and have no impulse to visit the old country tho' the older one says he can still understand Vietnamese.

Then there is my cousin's son: 1/4 African American, 1/4 Japanese, 1/4 Viking Minnesotan, and 1/4 Clemens. And my aunt married a Hungarian Jew who had escaped from Vienna one step ahead of the Nazis. He was actually the most sophisticated and intellectual of all my relatives.

And my friend Maeráed's dad is from Ireland; my niece Mulan is from China; one of my colleagues is from Kenya, one from Russia; one raised in Argentina though at least legally an American; one was socialized as an adult in Mexico and considers himself as Mexican as his Mexican wife who is, btw, legal as all get out; and one is Finnish. Of my two favorite colleagues over in the English Dept one is the daughter of Yiddish speaking survivors of the Holocaust and the other is, well, English.

What is this poor WASP boy to do, except buy into the 'Nation of Immigrants' image?


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Turkey, Greece and the USA

Greece has traditionally been somewhat more anti-American than France. Now that the Greeks are facing the reality of having Turkey in the EU, without passports or borders needed, and with only the elite (and hypothetical) EU rapid deployment force to protect them, the Americans don't seem quite so bad after all.

Victor Davis Hanson, vacationing in Greece, has the observation.

More on Books from the WSJ!

This time about America's long and not often smooth relation with the Arab world, from The Wall Street Journal:

1. An Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania by Peter Markoe (1787).
Written as a spoof to convince Americans to form a more perfect Union by convincing them there was an Arab spy haunting Philadelphia! It worked.

2. Sufferings in Africa by James Riley (1817).
The story of an American shipwrecked off Africa, captured and tortured by Arabs, finally escaping to tell the tale (and writing a best seller). Having been a slave himself, Riley included an impassioned call for the abolition of slavery. Young reader Abraham Lincoln took it to heart.

3. Valley of Vison by George Bush (1847)
Bush called for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, which would be freed from Ottoman hands by American military force! In 1847! A truly visionary exhortation by an ancestor and namesake of two of our recent presidents who ... manfully support a Jewish state in Palestine.

4. The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain (1869)
The book that made Twain a national treasure - and a small fortune. Twain did his best to present the Arabs (and everyone else he met) in the worst possible light. Alas, the American romantic vision of the Arab world remained mired in the Arabian Nights (pre-Walt Disney and Princess Jasmine version). OTOH, his views on Germans gained some currency around 1917.

5. The Arabist by Robert Kaplan (1993)
Kaplan goes on a tear ripping up the academic experts on the Arab world - who have, now that I think on it, been wrong about most things, with the possible exception of our decision to invade Iraq. Anti-academic polemic at its best, or at least most heart felt.

That's it folks - the conservative reading list on America and the Arab world! Some good stuff here, though I could come up with my own list with a slightly different slant. Fiasco might head it up.


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And now for something ... French

I am back from Virginia and about to start my paper on urban violence that has to be finished by Wed morning (Mora has won once again). Then off to Kalamazoo for the great meeting of Medievalists so I won't be posting much until next Monday.

But this is interesting. On NRO Denis Boyles comments on Sarko's victory in France and how to mine it for good advice for Repubs running in '08. Here's one of his conclusions:

The whole country knew that Jacques Chirac hated Sarkozy and that Sarkozy thought Chirac was a fraud; they knew Villepin and the whole UDP establishment was uncomfortable with Sarko. Even though he ran a campaign that had more in common with the UDP than with the Socialists, he was smart enough to know that the biggest asset he had was the enmity of Chirac, and he knew that the biggest mistake he could make would be to court the support of a president from his own party. He refused to do it, and the nation loved him for it. After all, most French voters think Chirac is a hopelessly inept and cynical loser — sort of the way most Americans, including many conservatives, feel about George W. Bush. The smart Republican candidate will make Bush his Chirac.

Our Officer Corps

Most Americans, I think, ignore the officer corps of the army. We just don't think of them when we imagine our democratic institutions. But we should, for many reasons.

Anyway, the Iraq war has had a number of unintended consequences, one of which is a growing split between the younger mid-ranks of the officer corps and the generals. Today Lt Col Paul Yingling, a combat leader who has proven his worth in Iraq, publishes a critique of the generals in Armed Forces Journal. There is an article about it in today's WaPo which you can read. Here's a taste of Yingling's conclusions:

"After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America's general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public," he writes. "For reasons that are not yet clear, America's general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq's government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq."

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A Baghdad Dispatch

Fouad Ajami has published his latest update on the war in Iraq in today's Washington Post. Ajami is a professor at Johns Hopkins and is author of The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq. I greatly admire his work and his personal insights into the Middle East since he is a Shia from Lebanon who has long lived and worked in the US. When he talks and writes of 'us' and 'we' he invariably means 'us' Americans.

I do not know what to make of his political judgement. He is, to some extent, a prose poet of Shia triumphalism and it worries me that he is a close friend of the Chalabis. Still, his prospective on the situation is almost unique. If I understand his dispatch, the civil war for Iraq has just been fought, and the Shia have won. The US should not pull out, but allow the moderate Shia to forge some type of compromise with the more realistic Sunni who can accept no longer being in charge. Ajami's writings on Iraq always seem to me to be laced with an inexpressible sadness, but this dispatch ends on an upbeat note, perhaps too upbeat at this late date. Please see for yourself.

The crackdown on the Mahdi Army that the new American commander, Gen. David Petraeus, has launched has the backing of the ruling Shia coalition. Iraqi police and army units have taken to the field against elements of the Mahdi army. In recent days, in the southern city of Diwaniyya, American and Iraqi forces have together battled the forces of Moqtada al-Sadr. To the extent that the Shia now see Iraq as their own country, their tolerance for mayhem and chaos has receded. Sadr may damn the American occupiers, but ordinary Shia men and women know that the liberty that came their way had been a gift of the Americans.

The young men of little education--earnest displaced villagers with the ways of the countryside showing through their features and dialect and shiny suits--who guarded me through Baghdad, spoke of old errors, and of the joy and dignity of this new order. Children and nephews and younger brothers of men lost to the terror of the Baath, they are done with the old servitude. They behold the Americans keeping the peace of their troubled land with undisguised gratitude. It hasn't been always brilliant, this campaign waged in Iraq. But its mistakes can never smother its honor, and no apology for it is due the Arab autocrats who had averted their gaze from Iraq's long night of terror under the Baath.

The other war against the Talilban

Pakistan - remember them? There is a nasty little war going on in Waziristan (shades of "The Man Who Would be King") between locals and the government on the one hand, and "foreigners" on the other. Latest dispatch from "Dawn," a very interesting English language newspaper from Pakistan, available on the Web, is here. The "foreigners" they mention are mostly Uzbeks, Central Asian Turks. They have a reputation for ferocity and may be desperate. After allying themselves with the Taliban government they have no where to go.

I think "Dawn" uses the euphemism 'foreigners' to avoid spelling out that these guys are connected with the Taliban. The ISA mentioned is the Pakistani CIA. You know, those wonderful people who brought us the Taliban. Some elements of the ISA supposedly still want the Taliban back in power.

Very confusing if you can't tell your Uzbek from a Tajik.