Summer reading: "Obama's Iraq Problem"

"In February, 2007, when Barack Obama declared that he was running for President, violence in Iraq had reached apocalyptic levels, and he based his candidacy, in part, on a bold promise to begin a rapid withdrawal of American forces upon taking office. At the time, this pledge represented conventional thinking among Democrats and was guaranteed to play well with primary voters. But in the year and a half since then two improbable, though not unforeseeable, events have occurred: Obama has won the Democratic nomination, and Iraq, despite myriad crises, has begun to stabilize.

...At the start of 2007, no one in Baghdad would have predicted that blood-soaked neighborhoods would begin returning to life within a year. The improved conditions can be attributed, in increasing order of importance, to President Bush’s surge, the change in military strategy under General David Petraeus, the turning of Sunni tribes against Al Qaeda, the Sadr militia’s unilateral ceasefire, and the great historical luck that brought them all together at the same moment. With the level of violence down, the Iraqi government and Army have begun to show signs of functioning in less sectarian ways. These developments may be temporary or cyclical; predicting the future in Iraq has been a losing game. Indeed, it was President Bush’s folly to ignore for years the shifting realities on the ground.

Obama, whatever the idealistic yearnings of his admirers, has turned out to be a cold-eyed, shrewd politician. The same pragmatism that prompted him last month to forgo public financing of his campaign will surely lead him, if he becomes President, to recalibrate his stance on Iraq. He doubtless realizes that his original plan, if implemented now, could revive the badly wounded Al Qaeda in Iraq, reënergize the Sunni insurgency, embolden Moqtada al-Sadr to recoup his militia’s recent losses to the Iraqi Army, and return the central government to a state of collapse. The question is whether Obama will publicly change course before November. So far, he has offered nothing more concrete than this: “We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in.”"

"Obama's Iraq Problem" by George Packer in The New Yorker

ANTHONY BRADLEY ON CNN/HEADLINE NEWS WITH GLENN BECK

Anthony Bradley is a professor at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis with my dad and works with the same youth group I do at Chesterfield Pres.  I think he's awesome.

mmm...Obama

Thanks to Julie for this!

Articles & Fragments

• the celebrities in Nigeria are priests and generals. odd. BBC News: "Nigeria's new celebrity class"
• To read later: David Brooks' "The Segmented Society" and "Questions of Culture"
• From "Questions of Culture":

  · "Economics, which assumes people are basically reasonable and respond straightforwardly to incentives, is no longer queen of the social sciences. The events of the past years have thrown us back to the murky realms of theology, sociology, anthropology and history. Even economists know this, and are migrating to more behaviorialist and cultural approaches. The fundamental change is that human beings now look less like self-interested individuals and more like socially embedded products of family and group. Alan Greenspan said that he once assumed that capitalism was "human nature." But after watching the collapse of the Russian economy, he had come to consider it "was not human nature at all, but culture.""

• What I want to study: "It all amounts to this: Events have forced different questions on us. If the big contest of the 20th century was between planned and free market economies, the big questions of the next century will be understanding how cultures change and can be changed, how social and cultural capital can be nurtured and developed, how destructive cultural conflict can be turned to healthy cultural competition."
• My love for Sasha Frere-Jones is growing and growing. His look at artists on MySpace: "Full Exposure: Making it on MySpace"
• NYtimes on Facebook advertising: "The Evolution of Facebook's Beacon"
• To read next: Rajan and Subramanian's report: "What Undermines Aid’s Impact on
  Growth?"
• New book on my Amazon.com wish list: Culture Matters: How Values shape human progress
• "This collection of essays addresses a difficult question: Are some cultures better than others at creating freedom, prosperity, and justice? Although Culture Matters offers varying responses to this politically incorrect question, its editors, Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, as well as the bulk of its contributors, answer in some form of the affirmative."

Honestly how the election will probably be won.

Finally politicians are lowering themselves to actually marketing to the illusive non-voting 18-24 demographic. I don't know whether to be disgusted or to shrug my shoulders at the inevitable. It is kind of funny though. I'm still going with Obama.