I know metafilter discovered the thing a year-and-a-half ago, but I found it today and it clearly needs rediscovery because it is beyond clever.

Using the "people-who-bought-this-are interested-in-that" feature of amazon.com, the Amazing Baconizer takes you through the steps of separation from any one item (book, CD or movie) on amazon.com to another. You can set up the start and end yourself, or you can do random walks. Some are hysterically funny, others uncover some interesting gems on the path from one personal favorite to another, apparently totally unrelated, personal favorite.

Beyond the simple fun of a "six degrees of separation game," the Baconizer actually has some fairly neat implications for social networks -- including why smokers are critical to successfully navigating bureaucracies. But enough of theory, it's his centrality charts that are quite entertaining.   more »

I generally enjoy the prose stylings of Atrios, James Wolcott, Kevin Drum, and even Steve Gilliard on occasion.

But, like Matthew Yglesias, I think they really ought to keep their opinions to themselves until they've actually read The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Betweeen Iran and America. Having just finished the book, I think it's wrong to suggest that Pollack has simply gone through The Threatening Storm replacing q's with n's. If anything, the book is meant to forestall a foolish course of action such as a military invasion (he's got a section aptly named "The Case Against Invading Iran") or a covert regime destabilization campaign (there's another section called "The Ghost of Kim Roosevelt").

Pollack's nuanced case is duly replete with qualifiers and caveats, but the bottom line is that, as "our least bad option," he favors a "Triple Track" approach consisting of the following elements:

• Hold Open the Prospect of the Grand Bargain
  
• A True Carrot-and-Stick Approach
  
• Preparing for a New Containment Regime
  

He says on p. 385:

[J]ust because the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons does not quite justify the extraordinary price of an invasion does not mean that it is not a threat or that it would not justify other actions by the United States that might not be as costly as an invasion but could still require considerable sacrifices. Foreign policy is rarely an all-or-nothing activity--that either a threat is great enough to justify paying any price, including invasion or nuclear strikes, or else it is not a threat at all and therefore does not justify paying any price. Most foreign policy problems fall somewhere in between, and the Iranian nuclear threat still falls toward the higher end of the spectrum.

Failing to succeed would meaning learning to live with a nuclear Iran, which would be pretty bad but not the end of the world.

I should warn potential readers that the book is quite sloppy in parts, probably the result of a headlong rush to publication. Pollack often appears to directly contradict himself within the same paragraph.

For instance, on p. 16, amid a discussion of 19th century Iranian history:

Entire Iranian industries were thus wiped out by foreign competition, impoverishing Persia's middle class and artisanry. At various points, European creditors pressed the shah to sell off Crown lands to repay debts, increasing the power of the landlords at the expense of the central government and further diminishing royal revenues in the future. Moreover, these new duties brought the shahs increasingly into competition with Iran's rising middle class, composed largely of merchants and business (called bazaaris because their place of business was the bazaar, meaning "market" in Persian) who were being penalized for the government's financial mistakes. (my bolding)

Try making sense of that.

That's only a minor example of Pollack's discombobulating prose-- the big picture is equally muddled. Iran has been mostly helpful in Iran and Iraq, he says, but Iran has reverted to its bad old ways from the 1990s. Khatami has lost his mojo and the hardliners from that time period are back in charge, but the current regime "does not have a history of reckless behavior." It's been nearly impossible to get the Europeans, Japanese, and Chinese to go along with punishing Iran for its bad behavior, but it will be possible to get the Europeans, Japanese, and Chinese to go along with a multilateral sanctions regime. Strangely, there's no mention of Iranian support for Muqtada Sadr or most of the other predations described in US News, although Pollack does cite one November 2003 attack by Iranian guerillas on a Fallujah police station as an example of bad behavior. Sadr's name doesn't even appear in the index. If Pollack believes the swirling accusations about Iran's involvement in the insurgency to be false, he should have made some effort to debunk them rather than letting them stand. I was also troubled by Pollack's use of Wikipedia as a source on the 1973 Oil Crisis (aren't there books on that subject?), and I imagine I could find other problems if I cared to look. Not to mention the fact that Pollack has never been to Iran, and doesn't speak any Farsi.

My bottom line: I can't recommend this book unless you know little about Iran, don't follow the news, and can't bother to read the James Fallows piece or Pollack's burgeoning list of editorials on the subject. But don't believe the knee-jerk reactions from left blogistan, either. Pollack should have done a better job, but this isn't Threatening Storm II.

[UPDATE] This essay is one of three on the recommended reading list of the "Grand Strategic Choices Working Group" of the Princeton Project on National Security (Woodrow Wilson School). The group is one of seven organized for the academic year 2004-05. John Ikenberry is co-chair of this working group along with Francis Fukuyama. The other two recommended essays are Fukuyama's article from the Summer 2004 issue of National Interest, "The Neoconservative Moment," (sub reqd) and "Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World" by Charles Krauthammer (Speech to American Enterprise Institute, February 12, 2004) .

See praktike's Democratic Realism is a Joke, which discusses this debate.

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John Ikenberry's piece from Britain's Prospect magazine, written prior to the election, sets out the case for liberal hegemony. It is a vision in sharp distinction to the conservative hegemony that the Bush Administration has been pursuing, especially since 9/11, and which Ikenberry explains will lead to tears. The shape of his overall argument, reflected in the excerpts selected below, is of more interest than his descriptions of the familiar set of actions and attitudes of the Bush Admin that he uses to illustrate and reinforce his analysis. We

Let's start with his conclusion, also the title of the piece.

A traditional realist strategy of reconstructing a Westphalian balance of power order that reaffirms state sovereignty is quite unrealistic, particularly given unipolarity and the character of the new security threats. There is no going back.

What the world needs is an order where the US continues to underwrite global security but does so within a framework of rules and bargains that render the resulting system legitimate and sustainable. We need to move beyond balance of power and empire towards an international order that combines American unipolar power with widely agreed upon rules and institutions. The world needs a liberal leviathan.

His conclusion is not surprising -- it reflects the basic premises of those who set the grand strategy for the US, and therefore defined the key structures of the liberal international system in the West, during and after WWII. With the interim Cold War brought to an end, there is a return to the logic of the system that was installed by the Western allies and elaborated through building regional and international institutions and arrangements.

As such, his analysis is part of the overall "empire" debates that have sprung up, especially post 9-11. Falling in the camp of "in a unipolar system the world needs a hegemon" he takes the argument further beyond debates that view the world through the US perspective -- type of empire, whether empire is the right term, whether managing an empire is consistent with other key features of the American character or system -- and instead discusses the US role within the context of a new and challenging international system.

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Enough of the gloom and doom already. Being of a juvenile bent, I can only take it for so long, at which point I require something altogether stupid and goofy. This works for me. I particularly recommend a visit to The Gallery of Regrettable Food, which is contained in the Institute of Official Cheer. I may be a latecomer to Lileks, but I nearly made myself a mischief (any Brits out there will catch my drift) looking through this.   more »