April 11, 2008

Unicorn + unitard = ...

Unus cornus, plures voluntas. (One horn, many uses.)

Posted by madadam at 07:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 25, 2007

Mount Moran

Day 11669: Woke up, ate a sandwich, went to bed.
Day 11670: Woke up, ate a sandwich, went to bed.
Day 11671: Woke up, climbed a mountain, went to bed.

...now back to sandwiches.

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Photomatic

Got a new camera for my birthday (Thanks Ani!). To celebrate the glorious future of me and my new camera, here's a small taste of the glorious past with my old cameras -- three random pictures. Can I get a Hallelujah!!!?
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February 18, 2007

"The Awakening of Baghdad"

An open question: can anyone produce an example from history in which an occupying power successfully, over the long run, subdued the local population with military force?

I can't think of one. They usually wind up with drawn out guerilla warfare finally ending in full-scale revolution (Vietnam), or the colonial power is atrophied by the stretched-out conflict and eventually loses support at home, and leaves (India, Spanish and French colonies). Or, at best, the conquering power manages to assimilate the territory, leading to ethnic conflict fifty years or more later (Soviet republics).

Yet another method exists, one that has proved successful beyond historical expectation, one that we Americans basically invented. That is, of course, cultural hegemony and the thin wedge of the free market. It too, has its pitfalls, and I'm not going to defend it in full. But in contrast to a military campaign, it is less brutal, cheaper (hell, it makes money!), and, I think the record shows, more successful.

Yet here we are, in Iraq, still trying to do what's never been done.

The comparison with Vietnam is obvious, but it's worth calling it out explicitly: after our military left Vietnam in the '70s, it began the long recovery process, which finally, in the '90s, turned into a cultural victory. Today's NY Times has a travel article called "The Awakening of Hanoi", depicting the burgeoning art scene of the "stylish, European-influenced metropolis" that it has become.

The sooner we stop trying to force the Iraqi people at gunpoint to become what we want them to be, the sooner they can begin the transformation to what they want to be. Which, I think history has shown, is probably the same thing.

Posted by madadam at 12:17 PM | Comments (0)

July 17, 2006

Why war doesn't make us safer

More evidence that a military strategy is a very difficult and unlikely way to make us safer in the war on terror, from the NYT article by Scott Shane about so-called global terrorism:

In fact, the vast majority of terrorists are provincial in their goals, said Robert A. Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. His analysis of suicide attacks from 1980 to 2004 for his book, ''Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism'' found that 95 percent of attacks worldwide were motivated by resentment of the presence of foreign combat troops.
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