This thought also occurred to me over the weekend, listening to homeland security announcements.

I think the real problem is that we are in a permanent state of emergency, grasping at straws to get our work done. We perform many minor miracles through trial and error, excessive use of brute force, and lots and lots of testing, but -- so often -- it's not enough.

Who is that, and what is the subject? Click through.

The Real Problem | Technology Review

Mark Danner in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books.

Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.
—George F. Kennan, September 26, 2002

I ask you, sir, what is the American army doing inside Iraq?... Saddam's story has been finished for close to three years.
—President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran to Mike Wallace on Sixty Minutes, August 13, 2006

In the coming weeks we will hear much talk of "exit strategies" and "proposed solutions." All such "solutions," though, are certain to come with heavy political costs, costs the President may consider more difficult to bear than those of doggedly "staying the course" for the remainder of his term. George W. Bush, who ran for president vowing a "humble" foreign policy, could not have predicted this. Kennan said it in October 2002:

Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before. In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it.

If we are indeed in the third act, then it may well be that this final act will prove to be very long and very painful. You may or may not know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.

On the subject of "solutions", I would draw your attention to my digest of Rumsfeld's Rules:

2. It is easier to get into something than to get out of it.

8. For every human problem there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong.

9. Simply because a problem is shown to exist doesn’'t necessarily follow that there is a solution.

On the subject of Rumsfeld, Novak finds no one who is satisfied with the orchestration of Rumsfeld's exit.

Iraq: The War of the Imagination

The turbulence intensifies. The overhead luggage racks begin to rattle. “This is nominal,” I think, and I am amazed once again at how skillfully humans normalize the lives they find themselves living. It is really what explains the success of our species, our ability to absorb experience, to engulf it with our minds and accommodate it, in conditions infinitely more grievous than a bumpy flight. A couple of times a year I find myself at cruising altitude wondering what could possibly induce me to board a plane again. How do we manage to take this for granted? I wonder. But then we land and my mind turns to other things, and before we have parked at the gate, I’m ready to make my connecting flight.

There is something about Verlyn Klinkenborg.

Things That Go Bump in the Flight

Update:

In one of the deadliest sectarian assaults since the ouster of Saddam Hussein, explosions from at least three powerful car bombs and a mortar shell tore through teeming intersections in the Shiite district of Sadr City today, killing at least 144 people and wounding 206, the authorities said.

Security is not to be taken for granted.

Up to six car bombs killed 133 people in a Shi'ite militia stronghold in Baghdad on Thursday, in one of most devastating such attacks since the US invasion.

A further 201 people were wounded, police said.

The blasts, which were followed by a mortar barrage aimed at a nearby Sunni enclave, came at the same time as gunmen mounted a bold daylight raid on the Shi'ite-run Health Ministry.

The Health Ministry is run by followers of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose Mehdi Army militia is accused by many Sunnis of being behind some of the worst death squad violence in the capital, in which hundreds of people a week are being kidnapped and tortured and their bodies dumped around the city.

The United Nations said on Wednesday violent deaths among civilians had hit a record of over 3,700 in October, although the health minister insisted it was much lower.

Bombs Kill 144 in Baghdad, Gunmen Storm Ministry

The Book Review has selected this list from books reviewed since the Holiday Books issue of Dec. 4, 2005. (The 10 Best Books of 2006 will be released on the Web on Nov. 29.)

Here is my selection:

Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon

IN “Against the Day,” his sixth, his funniest and arguably his most accessible novel, Thomas Pynchon doles out plenty of vertigo, just as he has for more than 40 years.

Where to begin? Where to end? It’s both moot and preposterous to fix on a starting point when considering a 1,085-page novel whose setting is a “limitless terrain of queerness” and whose scores of characters include the doomed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a dog who reads Henry James, the restless progeny of the Kieselguhr Kid and a time-traveling bisexual mathematician, not to mention giant carnivorous burrowing sand lice, straight out of “Dune,” that attack passengers of desert submarines — or, rather, subdesertine frigates.

Note that Michiko didn't care for it:

It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex.

Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky

THIS stunning book contains two narratives, one fictional and the other a fragmentary, factual account of how the fiction came into being. "Suite Française" itself consists of two novellas portraying life in France from June 4, 1940, as German forces prepare to invade Paris, through July 1, 1941, when some of Hitler's occupying troops leave France to join the assault on the Soviet Union.

Reading Like A Writer, by Francine Prose

Prose recommends savoring books rather than racing through them, a strategy that “may require some rewiring, unhooking the connection that makes you think you have to have an opinion about the book and reconnecting that wire to whatever terminal lets you see reading as something that might move or delight you.”

“The advantage of reading widely,” she notes, “as opposed to trying to formulate a series of general rules, is that we learn there are no general rules, only individual examples to help point you in a direction in which you might want to go.”

The Places in Between, by Rory Stewart

Rory Stewart's first bo... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

100 Notable Books of the Year - The New York Times Book Review

Over the next few months, I’m going to ask the presidential hopefuls the following question: What lessons do you draw from the Iraq experience about decision-making in the White House?

Brooks makes some good points here. It's true that structural problems are rampant, and that they have played a role in getting us to this point.

But I am skeptical that a shift change in the White House can really address enough of the structural issues to make a difference. Sure, the issues Brooks raises are within the White House's control, but they are only the most prominent and talked about.

Before the rest of them can be addressed, we'd be at the tail end of a two-term Presidency fully devoted to making such changes. And the likelihood that a President could allocate so much time to amending the micro-structure of Government? Slim to none.

Building a Team of Rivals

Rangel is making an important point, even if his argument for the draft does not work. War is a special activity of society. It is one of the few in which the citizen is expected -- at least in principle -- to fight and, if necessary, die for his country. It is more than a career. It is an existential commitment, a willingness to place oneself at risk for one's country. The fact that children of the upper classes, on the whole, do not make that existential commitment represents a tremendous weakness in American society. When those who benefit most from a society feel no obligation to defend it, there is a deep and significant malaise in that society.

Perhaps. Certainly the nature of political discourse has evolved (for the worse, most would agree) since World War II.

I might argue that the apparent absence of obligation can be easily explained. "Those who benefit most" are not compelled to defend because they do not really feel threatened and do not feel that running around Ramadi in a HMMWV is really protecting Americans. If the mood of the general public reflected the sense that America faces an existential threat, I think plenty of people would be ready to make an existential commitment.

So when "those who benefit most" display no feeling of obligation, they are reflecting a general disregard not for the fundamental existence of America, but for the chronic plight of the rest of the world. This disregard is quite widespread and does not split along class lines. Why should Americans feel more obligated to prevent civil war in Iraq than in Sudan? That's easy; because Americans actively established the conditions for civil war in Iraq, but merely failed to act in Sudan.

The reasons given by enlisted volunteers are as various as the volunteers themselves, but broadly, the Army is seen as both an opportunity and (perhaps ironically) as a (financial) "safe harbor". As evidenced by the "who's Rumsfeld?" comment, the motivations of volunteers are not necessarily political. If you polled new Army recruits about their reasons for joining up, I think you'd find very few who refer to the prevention of African genocide or to the encouragement of women's literacy.

There is room among the arguments against leaving Iraq for something about not creating a "haven" for anti-American terrorists. But this does not translate into an argument for going to Iraq. By staying in Iraq to suppress civil war, we accomplish very little toward eliminating the existential threat to America, to the extent it is even real. There is little reason to expect successful businessmen to join the Army when the threat is sufficiently abstract that the most accessible means to understanding it is a RAND monograph.

If, as the RAND monograph suggests, "deny[ing] sanctuaries to terrorists" is a pillar of the war on terror, and if civil war zones are assumed to create such sanctuaries, then the war strategy now obligates the US to intervene in all future civil wars. Clearly our (in)actions indicate that we do not believe in our own strategy -- neither in its merits nor in its practicality.

This is amusing:

If you can play tennis as well as you claim to for as long as you say, you can patrol a village in the Sunni Triangle.

As for Friedman's claim that

There is no inherent reason why enlistment -- or conscription -- should be targeted toward those in late adolescence.

I wonder about the futility of trying to train a 50-year-old bankruptcy attorney how to hunt terrorists in the caves of Afghanistan. Something about old dogs ...

Stratfor (and Rangel) on the Draft

This book examines terrorist groups that, while not formally allied with al-Qaeda, pose a threat to Americans, at home and abroad, and to the security of our friends and allies. Although the temptation for policymakers is to set aside as less dangerous those groups that have not chosen to join al-Qaeda, such terrorist or insurgent groups and criminal organizations still pose a threat to the United States, its interests, and its allies. The authors first look at violent Islamist terrorist and insurgent groups without formal links to al-Qaeda, such as Hamas and Hezbollah in the Middle East and Islamist groups in Africa. They then examine a number of non-Islamist terrorist groups — for example, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the FARC and ELN in Colombia, Maoist insurgencies, and the violent antiglobalist movement — and explain how these groups might fit into the al-Qaeda agenda and how they use criminal organizations and connections to finance their activities. Finally, they show how the presence of these threats affects U.S. security interests, and they identify distinct strategies that the United States may take to neutralize or mitigate each of them.

Beyond al-Qaeda: Part 2, The Outer Rings of the Terrorist Universe

Five years after September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups continue to threaten the lives and well being of Americans and the security of our friends and allies. This study first examines how al-Qaeda has changed since September 11. It then turns to an analysis of the broader global jihadist movement — al-Qaeda and affiliated or associated terrorist groups or groups that may not be formally part of the al-Qaeda network but that have assimilated its worldview and concept of mass-casualty terrorist attacks. These groups, the authors believe, are where the center of gravity of the current global terrorist threat now lies. They conclude by setting out a four-pronged strategy against terrorist groups: Attack the ideological underpinnings of global jihadism; seek to sever the links — ideological and otherwise — between local and global jihadists; deny sanctuaries to terrorists; and strengthen the capabilities of front-line states to counter local terrorist threats.

Beyond al-Qaeda: Part 1, The Global Jihadist Movement

Howard Stringer, you have a problem. Your company’s new video game system just isn’t that great.

Last year, Sony blithely insisted that the PS3 would leapfrog all competition to deliver an unsurpassed level of fun.

Put bluntly, Sony has failed to deliver on that promise.

Over the weekend a clear sense of disappointment with the PlayStation 3 emerged from many gamers.

It often feels as if the PlayStation 3 can’t walk and chew bubble gum at the same time.

Sony seems to have lost its way; their technologists seem to have won out over the people who study fun.

A Weekend Full of Quality Time With PlayStation 3