While reading this Unmedia post about the semi-retirement of Steven den Beste, it occurred to me that the Reichenbach Falls analogy might also apply to another reluctantly famous blogger who, despite her dreams of killing off her valuable web site, has posted a new open thread.

 
Ken Rosenthal explains why Barry Bonds should be this year's NL MVP. From the few times when I've seen the Giants play, I have to agree. Even aside from the stats, there's the effect he has on the game and the way other teams pull themselves way out of whack trying to account for him. One can only imagine his numbers he he were handled the same way as Albert Pujols or Scott Rolen.

Inevitably, of course, Rosenthal also mentions the possible BALCO connection, and how accusations of steroid use might taint his legacy. I have a question, however. How much can a player really be helped by that? My understanding is that steroids mainly enhance strength. Do they really have that much impact on hand-eye coordination and other key aspects of Bonds's game?

This is not to say that such steroid use, if real, should be tolerated. I just don't think what we're seeing could be nothing more than the creation of a few chemicals.

UPDATE: In the game I saw last night, Bonds hit the second and third longest home runs in Turner Field history in the same night. Steroids could make the ball go farther, but do they help him actually hit it?

 
Pak Tribune has an article on how messed up Afghanistan's voter registration situation is. Apparently registration cards are now considered an investment worth at least $100. In one area, the number of people registered to vote is about 250% of the population. This is not a promising situation.

 
As Jonathan Edelstein notes in comments, Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri has decided to support another term for Lahoud after "being summoned" to Damascus. One should not expect Lebanon to break free of Syria on its own at this stage - Syria is too powerful and has too many ways to pull strings in the country. Still, I sense the tide of Lebanese national feeling may be slowly simmering.

 
FOX News military analyst Bill Cowan (sp?) just gave an analysis of Afghanistan which is almost exactly what I've been saying for weeks.

 
I watched some FOXNews earlier today, and it was rather distressing. The topic was Najaf. I didn't catch the name of the guest, but he kept claiming just matter-of-factly that all Muqtada Sadr's actions were dictated by Iran, a perspective radical enough that the host should have at least enquired about it rather than treat him the same way networks treat their designated experts. Since it was a conservative talk show, however, you can defend it as an opinion piece. However, while he was speaking, the little information blips at the bottom of the screen talked about the Najaf fighting, and said things like the U.S. was fighting several thousand "terrorists" in Najaf. Huh? Granted, Muqtada Sadr isn't a nice guy, but can't we at least distinguish between "terrorists" and "armed militias?" That's just downright misleading. Those who don't see the extend to which this network promotes propaganda from a certain political perspective need to have their heads examined.

 
I hate evil.

 
This, good readers, is the ruined mosque in the Chellah of Rabat, as originally described here. The white buildings in the background of the mausoleums of three walis, or "friends of God." Not visible in this picture is the pool with the sacred eels, which is right outside the largest of the three mausoleums.

 
Al-Jazeera has some disturbing coverage from the site of Muqtada Sadr's court of justice:

"Police on Friday took reporters to a room that had been used as a courthouse, about 200 metres from the Imam Ali shrine, where at least 15 bloated, blackened corpses lay covered in flies.

"'We entered the building which was being used as Muqtada al-Sadr's court and we discovered in the basement a large number of bodies of police and ordinary civilians,' said the deputy head of the Najaf police, General Amr Hamza al-Daami.

"'Some were executed, others were mutilated and others were burned.'"

 
In the aftermath of the Najaf peace deal, Matthew Yglesias is feeling rather helpless in looking at Iraq and Iran. What we may be seeing here is the sheer difficulty of trying to build democracy by force of arms. Military power can create situations in which democracy can grow, but that alone is not enough to do the job, even in cases like Iraq where I'm sure most people would like a true democracy to develop. This is why I'm less concerned about our possible pulling out of the country than I used to be. There are other armed groups that can create stability, though terrorism will likely be a problem for some time. The trick is to get as many of these groups on the same page as possible so that they will be working primarily to promote stability in areas where they are strong rather than fighting each other for control. Not all such groups are reachable - Muqtada Sadr may not be - but places like Colombia manage to pull off democratic elections despite an ongoing civil war. Furthermore, while we may not like all the groups who would participate in the process, sometimes we need to suck it up and have faith in the ballot box as an intrument of human governance. As Odo said in a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode, "One of the dangers of giving people freedom of choice is that sometimes they make the wrong choice." All of this, however, depends more on diplomatic skill - including "diplomatic skill" of the rather unsavory kind we used to hold together the Afghan warlords in the run-up to our war against the Taliban. However, we have little room to manuever diplomatically given our current force posture in the country and our unpopularity with much of the population. This wouldn't matter so much if we could just forcibly control all Iraq, but we can't do that either. And this is the root of our present quandary.

 
Continuing my break from dissertation work, I've been flipping around to random sections in al-Masudi's Meadows of Gold. One short paragraph clearly dealt with the reign of the Roman Emperor Nero, placing him between "Qlaudis" and "Titish" and saying that in his days many Christians were killed in Rome, including Paulus and Petrus. The thing was, the text kept calling the emperor "Tezun." I couldn't figure out how they got that until I glanced at a footnote and saw that in some texts it was written as "Nerun." Yeah, I like those texts better.

 
As the academic year starts, I want to suggest that everyone remember to relax!

 
Christian, Druze and Muslim religious leaders in Lebanon are putting up an united front against plans to allow Emile Lahoud, Lebanon's Syria-backed President, to seek a second term. Such shows of unity are all too rare in Lebanon's troubled history, and may indicate that if Syria were to pull out, the country would not descend back into civil war as some fear.

 
A long time ago, I read something about Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani reading up on Gandhi in case it should become necessary during the course of the occupation. I wonder if what we're seeing now in Najaf is the result. Juan Cole is, naturally, covering these developments very well. I am shocked, however, that our allies the Iraqi police are shooting peaceful protestors. This may be a blip to American audiences, but will loom large in Iraqi memories of the events and darken the memory of all those institutions which Americans have died to erect in that country.

 
At Cliopatra, Oscar Chamberlain asks why we don't teach more scientific history. I think there are two main reasons for this. One is that for historians, the application of a scientific principle is generally more important than the science itself, and there is usually a lag time while the new scientific discovery is applied in new technology that affects people's everyday lives. It is more important that students know when the TV became a household object and how that effected our culture and politics than they learn about all the technology that went into it.

The other issue is that to do a really solid job of showing scientific history, you actually have to understand the scientific principles people are working with. The semester I got to teach my own class, I did a lecture on Islamic science, and it was the most intellectually challenging to put together simply because of all the complexity in explaining a scientific principle even in general terms, and then providing historical significane in terms of what changed as a result of that discovery. Few of us want to say that Albert Einstein developed the theory of relativity and then have students not know anything about it any more than we would want them to memorize which general won which battle in a random war.

Despite these issues, I think the integration of an awareness of science and technology into our understanding of history is a crucial development in the field, and I try to include it whenever possible. Chamberlain is right that this stuff often has a greater impact on a greater number than wars or political movements. One reason my dream job would allow me to teach a world history survey is that I see that as the best way to examine these developments in a professional context. Today I took a day off from my dissertation to pore over the volume of The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Daily Life dealing with the ancient world. This work is arranged not by region, but by category, so instead of having stuff like marriage and food as subheadings under Greece, you have a broad category called "Family Life" that talks about all these ancient civilizations. While this approach does have weaknesses, it does bring out some interesting points, and in fact, most of the key developments one can see across regions, such as the gradual replacement of water with overland shipping, are the result of scientific progress.

 
Angry Arab notes that al-Jazeera has aired over 500 hours of Bush speeches since September 11. When I was in Morocco, I saw one, and it was just Bush speaking, dubbed into Modern Standard Arabic with no commentary. So do Arabs oppose American foreign policy because of the Arab media, or because they can hear for themselves what President Bush says and decide that it rings hollow?

Incidentally, the image of President Bush speaking fluent formal Arabic is really weird.

 

"But there are no cats in America
And the streets are paved with cheese
Oh there are no cats in America
So set your mind at ease"

This song has been running through my head all morning. In tracking it down, I discovered I had melded together memories of two great films from the 1980's, An American Tail and The Great Mouse Detective. The latter was my favorite, and I actually purchased the novelization, which I see is now out of print, as is the Eve Titus novel which introduced the character. Truly our culture is in serious decline when people can no longer appreciate the adventures of the great Basil of Baker Street!

 
You might not have heard about the revolt of Hussein Badreddine al-Huthi, and Zaydi Shi'ite preacher who for over two months has been engaged in a military conflict against the Yemeni government. Aside from the daily body count, details are hard to come by, but he apparently has support in the mountainous north of Yemen, which only recently was governed as a Zaydi Imamate. The Lebanon Daily Star has one write-up of the situation, which carries the warning that if Yemen becomes a failed state, it will become a significant base for al-Qaeda.

Although al-Jazeera reports that the government controls his major bases, as in other guerrilla conflicts attacks and ambushes drag on. In fact, al-Huthi's anti-American message may be drawing more support, as the Yemen Times reports that many tribal leaders have renounced their commitment to fight him and Yemen's President, Ali Abdullah Saleh is distancing himself rhetorically from the United States.

Developing...

 
Lots of conservatives are recommending this column by an officer in Iraq. Mr. Butler sounds like a good, thoughtful, heroic patriot, and I suspect we'd probably get along in real life. Furthermore, his voice is important - unlike the vast majority of people who comment on this stuff, he's actually risking his life for the cause at hand.

At the same time, however, I don't see how he has any special qualifications for the overall strategic situation, and in fact he admits he doesn't. And that, to me, is where the problem with the Iraq war currently lies. He invokes the line about "no attacks on American soil since 9-11," which ignores the fact there were no attacks on American soil before 9-11 either, and that threats requiring terror alerts continue just as before. Meanwhile, our enemies are striking from Madrid to Bali, regardless of what's happening in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I do not dispute that removing Saddam from power was a good thing, nor do I dispute what Butler says about the danger of losing the fight against the forces which have risen in Saddam's wake. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that these issues are more complicated than just "finishing the job." War, however profoundly terrible, is a tool to achieve policy options. It was the proper tool for eliminating Saddam. Whether it is the best tool for dealing with all these militias is a question I don't think has been seriously debated. And until that debate happens, while I may support the missions of soldiers like Butler, I also worry that many of them may not be the best tool to serve the cause for which they fight. And that is why we have the right to criticize the President during wartime.