Unqualified Offerings

Remaining browser tabs to deal with:
* Long chronicle of neoconservatism since the fall of the Soviet Union and especially in re Mideast policy by Jim Lobe and Michael Flynn which has the virtues of length and an understanding that the neoconservatives could never have gotten up to this much folly on their own; they required [...]

1. Glenn Harlan Reynolds has an excellent article on the dangers of police militarization in, of all publications, Popular Mechanics. Best excerpt:
Abetting this trend was the federal government’s willingness to make surplus military equipment available to police and sheriffs’ departments. All sorts of hardware is available, from M-16s to body armor to armored personnel carriers [...]

I read the President’s speech looking for the did-he-or-didn’t-he “just ratchet back up our ambitions for Iraq?” Zachary Roth seems to overstate when he writes that “Bush never said anything about democracy in Iraq. It’s just an incredibly sloppy mistake by the AP.” Bush clearly includes Iraq among the “fragile democracies” NATO is defending [...]

I neither obsessively blog nor obsessively follow “latest atrocity” stories from Iraq, because I tend to think that structure and trends are where the action is. So before I quite noticed that AP reported that Shiite death squads burned a bunch of Sunni worshippers alive as they exited mosques last Thursday, I noticed that what’s [...]

An April article in Governing magazine exhumed by Brian Doherty offers fodder for liberals and libertarians both. Unfortunately not from the same trough. Alan Ehrenhalt analyzes the painfully slow return of genuine supermarkets to poor urban neighborhoods. The good news is that the economics of running the stores are good! (”The conventional wisdom is that [...]

Yesterday the Washington Post ran one of those stories that surely had someone somewhere complaining that it was objectively pro-terrorist. In it, Sudarsan Raghavan explains the sources of the Mahdi Army’s popularity among Iraqi Shiites, especially in Baghdad.
But the attacks Thursday illustrated the immense difficulties involved in tackling the Mahdi Army, the country’s largest and [...]

Bookmarking the rules for A Tale Unwinding here lets me close another browser tab!
UPDATE: Sad. Link is dead now. It looked so healthy even yesterday.

George Packer gets down to the nitty gritty in the only article in The Non Republic’s “special Iraq issue” that deserves to be called a contribution. The only remaining relevant question for US policy is whether and how to save the lives of “Iraqis who have had anything to do with the occupation and its [...]

From Borowitz:
But critics of Operation Noble Euphemism were skeptical of its outcome, particularly after the White House unsuccessfully launched a slogan contest last month to replace the phrase “stay the course.”
That contest, which was announced with much fanfare, was abandoned after a leak revealed that the top contender was “slog through the mire.”
White House spokesman [...]

Canada passes a motion ‘to recognize that Québécois “form a nation within a united Canada.” ‘ It gets contentious.
When I was in Montreal in June, I kept thinking, “This city ought to bestride the global economy and culture like a colossus. It’s an educated city whose inhabitants at least theoretically speak two of the four [...]