I'm surprised that neither of these are getting big play.

1. Tonight's vote in the Knesset on Sharon's pullout plan. Haaretz thinks he's going to win. It seems that Sharon has given the speech of his lifetime, a deeply emotional appeal from a longtime backer of the settler movement. ThisisRumorControl explains Israeli politics for the uninitiated.

2. Musharraf's diplomatic initiative on Kashmir. Al Jazeera says it was "welcomed" in Kashmir, but the boys over at Acorn think it's a nonstarter.

What are you folks watching?

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[UPDATE 10-26-04 3:00PM] by nadezhda

JC has a comment that points us to Eminem's just-released GOTV video of his new anti-Bush song. Salon's got some remarks here.

[UPDATE 2 10-27-04 11:30PM] by nadezhda

"Mosh" is now No. 1 video on MTV.

There are political seasons when certain phrases seem to latch themselves to the brain, repeating themselves over and over, like a song's refrain. This year there have been two for me. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" (even though the remark was occasioned by a Depression-era inaugural, not the war that began on the day that still lives in infamy). And "We have met the enemy and he is us."

I came to Walt Kelly and Pogo late in Kelly's career, when even his strongest admirers would admit he was well past his most creative years, and when the characters had been running for decades and the strips assumed a knowledge of their past adventures not evident from the later tales. Like devoted fans before me, I was captivated by the humor of a funny sketch between a couple of foolish characters, or some over-the-top word play, or Kelly's unique manner of penciling in words in the background or margins of frames: familiar signs, topical quotes, brand-names, mangled literary allusions or sayings. Although I had the impression Kelly began more as a journalist/writer than cartoonist, I knew little about him, and never had the benefit of the long history of Pogo before I became an occasional reader.

Imagine then my pleasure, when Henry at Crooked Timber found a lengthy review/appreciation of a major part of the opus of Walt Kelley that's currently available in a series of eleven volumes of Pogo (1948-60). The essay is by John Crowley in the Boston Review. Of topical interest this political season, Crowley doesn't neglect Kelly as social and political satirist. He gives a flavor of how the McCarthy era, in particular, played out in the characters and storylines of Pogo.
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It only recently came out, so I hadn't been able to order a copy with the rest of my recent book orders, but Stephen Cohen's The Idea of Pakistan was one of the books recommended to me by Professor Haqqani at the start of my Islam in South Asia course. Seeing that Pervez Hoodbhoy has a major review of it in the current issue of Foreign Affairs (which I have just inadvertently found out I can read for free online when connecting through the university network.. sweet!) I've got hopes that I can successfully order a copy now and place it somewhere on my pile.

Ominous declarations of imminent chaos in Pakistan abound in the United States. Cohen aims both to raise warnings and to soothe fears. Although he acknowledges that profound problems plague both the idea and the reality of Pakistan, he distances himself from apocalyptic "failed state" scenarios. Catastrophic failure of this nuclear-armed state is surely a possibility. But Pakistan's fate will ultimately depend on whether its leaders can find an answer to the fundamental question that has plagued their fellow citizens for more than half a century: "How can we make the idea of Pakistan actually work?"

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In the latest New Yorker, we learn that George Soros is in fact a proud member of the Reality-Based Community:

In May, 2003, Bush had what seemed like intimidatingly high popularity ratings, and there was overwhelming public support for the war. But Soros had one of his anticipatory hunches that the President’s support was a bubble that could burst. Moreover, he had the ego and the audacity to think that he could pop it. He commissioned two political researchers, Mark Steitz and Tom Novick, to determine whether it would be possible for Soros himself to exert political impact.

The following July, Soros invited a group of top Democratic activists to join him in the salmon-colored drawing room at El Mirador, his weekend estate in Southampton, Long Island, for the presentation of the consultants’ report. Steitz and Novick indicated that the 2004 election would probably be very close. The electorate was polarized, with only ten per cent of likely voters undecided. The best strategy, they said, would be to mobilize the Democratic base and persuade undecided voters with a state-of-the-art field operation. The plan was projected to cost at least seventy-five million dollars. As the researchers gave their presentation, Steitz recalled, “Soros was very engrossed. He leaned forward when we were talking about getting out the vote, and asked, ‘You mean you actually go door to door?’ All the practical aspects caught his imagination.”

Under the new campaign-finance law, supporters could no longer give unlimited funds directly to the Democratic Party—but according to the consultants’ interpretation of the law they could funnel private contributions into allied “independent” groups. As the discussion proceeded, it was proposed that Soros provide enough funds to these groups to pay for field operations in six or seven of the seventeen states that were expected to be the most contested. Soros, Steitz recalled, insisted that funds be offered for all seventeen. “He said, ‘I don’t want to build half a bridge! I want to do what’s necessary to effect the outcome!’”

Aha. So he wondered if he could have an impact, and then commissioned an expert study to find out whether that was true, and, if so, what was the best way to do it. He didn't just trust his "gut."

Incidentally, it just so happens that two Yale political scientists (who, by the way, are top-notch in their field) have just published a book examing the effectiveness of various approaches to organizing electoral campaigns. Here's what Donald Green and Alan Gerber concluded in Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout.

• Door-to-door canvassing, though expensive, yields the most votes. As a rule of thumb, one additional vote is cast from each 14 people contacted. That works out to somewhere between $7 and $19 a vote, depending on the pay of canvassers - not much different from the cost of that three-pack of underwear. Canvassers who matched the ethnic profile of their assigned neighborhoods were more successful.

Too bad the wrong George was in charge of postwar planning for Iraq.

Yesterday I bought a new book, Sebastian Mallaby's biography of James Wolfensohn, The World's Banker. Not knowing much about Mallaby, Wolfensohn, or the World Bank, I have no idea what to expect. But it looks interesting.

Amazon has a typically boisterous review from Niall Ferguson, who writes:

We often refer to Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when we want to suggest that someone has a dual personality, part of it charming, part of it monstrous. But we tend not to distinguish very clearly between people who cannot help swinging back and forth between the two and those who can alternate at will, and often do so in a quite calculated way.

I wonder if Sebastian Mallaby had Stevenson in the back of his mind when he was writing this book, for the World Bank President James Wolfensohn he portrays here appears to be almost exactly 50 percent Jekyll and 50 percent Hyde. Wolfensohn/Jekyll is the irresistible charmer seen at his vacation home in Jackson Hole, Wyo., who can turn bitter foes into best friends (or at least "frenemies") with a single shot of his charisma. Wolfensohn/Hyde is the intolerable monster seen on Wall Street and in Washington, whose egocentric tantrums have just the opposite effect. The moral of Mallaby's story is that Wolfensohn's presidency of the World Bank would have been more successful had Dr. Jekyll been in sole charge. But that may underestimate the usefulness of Mr. Hyde. [...]

Assailed on all sides, the Bank's bureaucrats -- thousands of economics PhDs from all around the world -- hunkered down and got on with what they did best: generating an awesome quantity of reports and statistics. Nothing illustrates more strikingly what a rut the Bank was in than its snail-like slowness to grasp the magnitude of the HIV-AIDS epidemic. In short, the institution needed a shakeup, and Wolfensohn's job was to administer it. This was not something Dr. Jekyll could do. It called for Mr. Hyde.

I'm looking forward to it.

An OnPoint discussion of the state of journalism in Iraq, spurred by the famous Farnaz Fassihi letter and the shocking bombing attack in the Green Zone.

Somehow, the first person narrative lends reporting a special urgency that you don't get from antiseptic newspaper filings. Michael Ware, the intrepid TIME Bureau Chief, has some particularly stark words. For instance:

Zarkawi’s terrorists control part of Baghdad in sight of US forces. The Iraqi government is a hollow shell unable to exercise any authority. There are terrorist safe havens, Al Qaeda-linked safe houses, bomb-making facilities, organizations, that exist here in Iraq now that did not exist a year ago and did not exist under Saddam. By invading this country, the U.S. administration has given birth to, has fostered, the very terrorist threat that they said they came here to prevent. Jihadis now come here to prove themselves, and we’re now seeing that exported within the region. Is that a success? We’re getting no traction here, we’re losing the population, and … and … Allawi, Allawi’s government is unable to move themselves. So what are we left with?

And later

Well, I don’t think there’s too much historical precedent for this nature of warfare for journalists. Journalists have always been in the firing line in one form or another. But here, we’re now seeing increasingly, we’re specifically targeted. There’s nooooo, not even a vague sense of neutrality for us anymore. We’re seen as a Western interest that, according to Zarqawi’s people, who I’ve talked to, we are legitimate to take and literally behead. So, they’re looking for us. We’re a prized asset.
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Peter W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

I wrote this review last year for my Introduction to Security Studies course. Looking back on it, it's a little more stilted that I'd like it to be, but the word count limits for the assignment were pretty brutal as I recall. Right now I have to be reading up on Japanese defense policy post-9/11 (the consensus so far, it must be said, does not look so great for Kerry's grand-alliance-against-terror plans, at least where Japanese participation is concerned) so an updating of the older review probably won't be forthcoming any time soon... the book itself was quite good, and I'd really recommend you read it over my review, if you have the chance.

For more cogent and current thoughts on the role of private military firms (PMFs) in our current operations in Iraq, check out Phil Carter's reaction to an LA Times Sunday op-ed by Hallburton chief exec David Lesar.
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James Chace, former editor of Foreign Affairs and New York Review of Books, and author of the biography Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World, died at the age of 72 in Paris, where he was at work on a book on Lafayette.   more »

At least according to what seems to be the meaning of this, as best we can determine it.

May his soul rest in eternal peace, but here's saying that if you look up the words "inscrutable," "abstract" and "opaque" in the dictionary, you will find them defined. If you look up "whatinthehellshetalkinabout," you will see Derrida's picture. I tried a couple of times. Honest. But for me at least, this guy's work (or at least those parts of it I managed to take a swing at) was the very Everest of affectedly abstruse prose. And that's not even to mention his politics, which, well . . . whatever. May he bunk in heaven with Bill Strunk, and have G.K. Chesterton as his freshman mentor.

So said Pat Robertson during a speech in Israel in which he declared his opposition to a Palestinian state and threatened to form his own political party if Bush backed the establishement of Jerusalem as the capital thereof.

(link via Brian Ulrich, who needs to get himself an RSS feed)

Speaking of Israel, I was going to post about this yesterday, but couldn't figure out what I wanted to say. Sarah Wildman wistfully linked to a snippet about the then somewhat-operative Israeli-Palestinian peace process from the 2000 vice-presidential debate. Although she acknowledged that the situation had changed since 2000, she appeared to think that some kind of resumption of negotiations is possible at this point. It isn't. Arafat is persona non grata, and there is nobody else.

While I disagree with much of what is going on in Israel on moral grounds, something that was drilled into my head by reading The Missing Peace was that political timing is everything in this highly dynamic conflict. What is possible on Monday may be out of the question on Tuesday. Therefore events and statements that seem routine or unconnected to the casual observer are usually carefully calibrated towards some end, and end up imposing either temporary constraints or creating new opportunities for peace. Right now, although Israel has pretty much shut off the intifada, there are basically no opportunities aside from Ariel Sharon's unilateral pullout from Gaza, which is why you get inflammatory interviews like this one which aren't really statements of policy so much as attempts to give Sharon maneuvering room with the hard right. Of course, as the Head Heeb rightly warns, actions aimed at short-term objectives may pose problems down the road.