Those of you looking to follow along with the latest by Husain Haqqani might like to check out the latest issue of The Washington Quarterly, which features a piece by him as well as two other scholars of the subject of Pakistan. I have no real time to read it now, but I trust that it's good -- feel free to warn otherwise in comments if you disagree. I hope to get around to it myself (as well as finishing Stephen Cohen's The Idea of Pakistan) one of these days.

Now, off to (re)write!

My laptop has gone and screwed itself, won't boot up past the soothing grey Apple startup logo, may have just lost 25+ pages of papers a week and a half before they come due, and naturally all the computer service places around campus will be closed till Monday, meaning I lose three full days of prime paper-finishing time this weekend, if not the whole thing entirely.

On the plus side, the pies turned out great.

I don't mean to ruin Nadezhda's silver lining, but ...

We're Congressional Republicans are spending $2,000,000 taxpayer dollars so that George W. Bush can have a Presidential Yacht?

(Edited: credit where credit is due)

Maybe this is a little early yet for some folks, but Thanksgiving break is here at BU. While I expect to spend the bulk of the break on marathon paper-writing sessions and thus expect my postings to remain light as they have been for the past month or more, I'm not actually going home for the holiday itself. Rather, I'm going to be celebrating it here in Boston... with Professor Bacevich. He invited folks in class without Thanksgiving plans to join him and his family and I was the only one to take him up on it... awkwardness abounds. It'll be great!

I plan on cooking (with my Japanese conversation partner: more wierdness) and bringing a derby pie to the festivities, the recipe for which follows below; this is a holiday staple of my Dad's (natch -- hope he doesn't mind me sharing it here), but times I've made it in the past, folks from around here have never heard of it, so maybe this is really more of a Southern or Midwestern thing. In any case, it's delicious and no turkey day is complete without it.

Happy Thanksgiving!   more »

Not only has the US failed to offer any strong alternative to the madrassas in the wake of the Pakistani public education system's full-scale collapse, we now appear to be ceding ground in Asia without protest:

The center is part of China's expanding presence across Southeast Asia and the Pacific, where Beijing is making a big push to market itself and its language, similar to the way the United States promoted its culture and values during the cold war. It is not a hard sell, particularly to young Asians eager to cement cultural bonds as China deepens its economic and political interests in the region. ...

Over all, China's stepped up endeavors in cultural suasion remain modest compared with those of the United States, and American popular culture, from Hollywood movies to MTV, is still vastly more exportable and accessible, all agree. The United States also holds the balance of raw military power in the region.

But the trend is clear, educators and diplomats here say: the Americans are losing influence.

   more »

Odd news item from everyone's favorite Communist dynasty-ruled police state paradise:

... [A]ccording to reports from Pyongyang by the Itar-Tass news agency and an ambassador in the capital, guests at recent Foreign Ministry receptions have seen only portraits of Mr. Kim's father, Kim Il Sung, a former anti-Japanese guerrilla leader who founded North Korea in 1945.

"Only a light rectangular spot on the yellow whitewashed wall and a nail have remained in the place where the second portrait used to be," the Itar-Tass correspondent said of the People's Palace of Culture.

Separately, a European ambassador in Pyongyang has told his country's ambassador in South Korea that he started noticing last month that Kim Jong Il portraits that had been displayed outside some schools and other institutions in Pyongyang were now gone, the Seoul-based ambassador said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

"One possible explanation is some shift of power, a weakening of the position of Dear Leader, who has not been seen in public for some time," the ambassador in Seoul said. "But I wouldn't bet on any explanation."

There has been no official reaction from North Korea to the reports. But a North Korean diplomat in Moscow was quoted Tuesday by Itar-Tass as saying: "This is false information, lies. Can the sun be removed from the sky? It is not possible."

Right. There are conflicting reports mentioned here — one aid worker is quoted in the article as having visited several schools, hospitals, etc, where the Dear Leader's visage is intact and proudly displayed, so I don't really know what to make of it, exactly. My North Korean kremlinology skills are highly undeveloped (heck, I don't even know what the Pyongyang equivalent of the Kremlin is called, if there even is one) but this sounds like something could be afoot. Very odd, but good timing — we're studying Japanese-Korean relations in class this week and next in my Japanese Foreign Policy course.

Update: A newfound sense of modesty on the part of the Dear Leader, or is he just feeling his age? Your guess is as good as mine...

I'm going out with something of a bang. My classes for my next and final semester at this fine institution:

IR 395 North-South Relations with Professor Strom Thacker
"Employs a multidisciplinary approach to analyze the relations between the industrialized nations of the "North" and the developing nations of the "South." Addresses historical and current issues in North-South relations, including trade, investment, migration, regional economic integration, and the environment."

IR 508 Islamic Political Movements and US Policy with Professor Husain Haqqani
"Studies the origin and impact of various revivalist Islamic political movements and their intersection with U.S. foreign policy. Examines their ideologies, their views of the West, and their contribution to the rise of terrorism."

IR 516 Homeland Security with Professor Arthur Hulnick
"Aspects of homeland security, including information and intelligence sharing, the role of first responders, the structure and functioning of the system, and defensive and operational aspects."

IR 522 Ideas and US Foreign Policy with Professor Andrew Bacevich
"Examines the intellectual foundations of U.S. foreign policy from the founding of the republic to the present."

I'll see about posting syllabi book lists when I get those.

This started as a post about religious fundamentalism and shifted into something else. I'll come back to the fundamentalism stuff in a different post when I get the chance, but since I'm celebrating Veteran's Day with marathon paper-writing (like Trickster the past week has been extremely busy for me on the school and Habitat fronts, hence the skimming and lurking on my part) it may have to wait a while. In any case, here's the something else part:

Praktike has just recently registered the domain Liberals Against Terrorism, in what I think is probably a long-overdue step. He says he's not sure what to do with it yet, though I suspect he has something in mind... but I'll toss in my idea on the subject anyhow.

The fact that "liberals" broadly speaking, spend less of their time commenting on the serious threats that radical fundamentalism poses to the secular, pluralistic liberal society that we cherish — as seen in the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh for his controversial statements on Islam's treatment of women, among other offenses — than we do the many failings of the Bush administration's attempts at tackling this threat has in effect ceded the initiative in the debate. Rather than being the first ones to say "this is awful" and explain why from the liberal perspective, we end up being the ones adding "yes, but.." This isn't good from a political standpoint and probably not for our sense of perspective either.

As much as I don't like to admit it, there are members of the political left (and a few of them are even Democrats) who really do consider the U.S. a bigger threat to world peace than what they see as the comparatively minor threat of terrorism. I do think they are a minority within the Democratic community, but that the relative silence of the middle -- not at all helped by a media that rewards sensationalism over substance -- has allowed them a larger share of our collective voice than they deserve. This colors the rest of us in a negative light.    more »

One of America's increasingly prominent scholars in the fields of international relations and national security is none other than MC MasterChef's own professor at BU, Andrew Bacevich (specialty American military affairs). His op-ed today in the LATimes, "Unsafe for Democracy," is a timely reminder of a dimension of the recent election that has not received enough attention. With most post-mortems focusing on why Kerry came up short -- why Bush voters didn't pull the lever for Kerry, rather than an assessment of why Kerry voters rejected Bush -- no serious appraisal of the foreign policy voting patterns has received any prominence so far.

The President and his supporters have claimed bluntly that because he won, the Democrats should be expected to "stop campaigning" and support his foreign policies to promote "healing" and "national unity." All well and good from a "rally 'round the troops" standpoint, especially as serious fighting has just been launched in Fallujah. But in terms of how America should position itself in the world going forward, a substantial portion of Democrats and independents who voted for Kerry believe continuing down the road that the Bush Doctrine has placed us on would be a profoundly dangerous mistake.

Although a large portion of the electorate has begun to feel that the US got off was unwise to invade Iraq, a fundamental debate about the role of the US in a unipolar world has not yet been joined. During the election campaign, most of the pointed critique of Bush Admin policies and actions -- from either Democrats or the press -- involved relatively narrow issues, such as the feebleness of the grounds for the invasion of Iraq or the lack of competence in planning and execution of the post-invasion phase. Even those claims didn't receive a great deal of public attention until late in the campaign because of the slow process by which concrete evidence emerged that countered the Admin's fantastically rosy pictures of reality. (See discussions in "Media Tipping-Point " and "What will those dumb Americans do next?"

Bacevich argues, along the same lines as John Ikenberry's "Liberal Leviathan" analysis, that the witches brew of traditional conservative US foreign policy principles with Wilsonian idealism is neither sustainable at home nor acceptable abroad. Bacevich does not outline his preferred approach -- whether to shift from conservative to liberal traditional principles and/or to jettison Wilsonianism in favor of some version of realism or a new idealism . But that political elites must recast the discussion in terms other than the "false coinage" of "freedom" and "democracy" cannot be disputed.    more »

This is a fascinating conceptualization of things, one that we've edged around at a few points in the course of my Political Islam in South Asia class but haven't yet tackled full-on. (One recommendation, made with qualifications, on the subject that Prof. Haqqani did make last week was a book by Tariq Ali called The Clash of Fundamentalisms which I gather elaborates more on the identities and goals of the major world fundamentalist ideologies.) Comparisons between Christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism often raise ire early on that prevents much further discussion, but I would really like to see this expanded upon. Unfortunately, I have a paper to be writing at the moment, so my thoughts will have to wait.