It seems premature to me. While Obama may well have done as much as some past recipients already (and more than some), his achievements to date are a pretty small fraction of the tasks he seemed to be setting himself. It feels to me that he'd diminished himself by accepting. Now, declining on the grounds that he hadn't accomplished enough yet, and letting that become known ... that would have been politically effective.
As for restoring the world's opinion of the USA? He's stopped digging, which is significant. He's started pulling things back, and correcting the relatively easy things. But world opinion didn't just snap back to the situation at the end of the Clinton presidency. The world has now seen another face of the USA, one far scarier - because it was so confused, as well as keen on violence - than previous Republican administrations of the post-1945 era. We've also learned that quite a chunk of the US population thinks it was a really good thing, and wants to elect another one like it.
So we're really worried that the USA might turn that way again, and that affects all relations with it. Back in 2003-4, people in the UK with a clue about geopolitics were seriously, if privately, disussing what to do when it became morally impossible to be a US ally any more, which did seem to be a possible result of Bush's trajectory at the time. It will take the world's opinion of the USA a generation to recover from GWB.
@111 - Surely Good Omens?
Cutting yourself lose from unrealisable love: Iain Banks' The Steep Approach to Garbadale.
Farah@6: the situation with soldiers now is rather different. There aren't very many of them at all in comparision to 1918. But they still live fairly crammed together in barracks, where 'flu could spread fast once it gets in.
So if the barracks aren't infected yet, sending the soldiers on leave to less crowded places probably reduces the average number of them who will catch the 'flu. If the barracks are infected, then yes, it spreads vectors all over the place. But we seem to be still quite early in the spread of this swine flu; the barracks probably aren't infected.
The alternative is to isolate barracks, which is much more possible than it is for many places where lots of people live. You can do that for a while, but they'll start running out of supplies at some point.
The annoying thing is that the decision needs to be made quite soon, because waiting increases the chances that the barracks get infected. Epidemic management is probably full of difficult decisions that have to be made on incomplete information.
Meme automation:
BBspot has this one covered.
Get well soon. Happy holidays, to you and to everyone else.
Jo@79:
What odds that Bonar Law will eventually be best remembered for the Round the Horne sketch?
Graydon @29:
I have a lot of trouble imagining the sort of situation that would result in a Royal Visit -- they are planned well in advance -- and a non-confidence vote. If it did happen, the person making the call on what to do would be the monarch, rather than the governor general. (Well, possibly; it might involve kernel panic on the part of protocol advisers, too.)
Actually, it's obvious what would happen. Since the problem is due to a clear case of Trying it On, HM would re-instatiate the suspended GG in a sandbox, and then follow that advice. Being funny doesn't make it the wrong answer.
"The list of right-wing weblogs is by far the longest."
Hum ... is there a parallel universe out there of right-wing weblogs, social networks, and so on? There's Conservapedia, after all. Given that McCain seems to have a problem with ""true conservatives"" who refuse to back him, this might make sense as an operation mainly targeted on the bits of Interweb that such people use.
You can find clear influences from ... RA Lafferty in Gygax’s D&D writing.
Maybe it's because I internalised them at about the same time, in the early eighties, but I'm having trouble working out where the Lafferty footprint in Gygax's work are. Not that it wasn;t very possible to use Lafferty in D&D; I did so in the second D&D adveture I ever ran, which eventually ran away into a scenario that took several years to play through.
EGG didn't really adapt very well to the way that everyone could make RPGs into whatever they liked; lots of his work is full of "the official way" and other attempts to impose his own vision. Dave Arneson's contribution is also often neglected. But yes, EGG was where the ideas condensed and role-playing games took their form.
I note with interest that one of the things that "True Conservatives" seem to hold against McCain is his opposition to torture and things verging on it.
It's hard to tell from over here in .uk exactly why they feel that way. It could be because they can't face up to the idea that US personel will sometimes fall into the hands of opponents of the US, and that therefore the USA does not have total power over everything, everywhere, forever. Or it could be because they don't feel non-US citizens are real people, a position consistent with the "send a few back, so we can keep the rest as an underclass" position on illegal immigrants to the USA.
For the three volume set of LOTR, it's easy: Ring, Palintir, Crown. But no inspiration strikes for the single volume. I've always thought of it as three books, having been brought up on my mother's first edition, second printing set. It's a bit worn now, but she still keeps it: I've just realised that of the books in my parent's house, that's what I most want to inherit.
Happy Birthday. You make people not much younger, like me, feel there's hope for us yet.
Pity that a Baptist Minister has to resort to dirty tricks to slime his opponents.
Err, sorry? There are some grounds for expecting a minister of religion to behave in a morally superior manner to other political candidates? A minister of religion who's standing for political office?
I have a datable memory of my third birthday, and one from maybe a week later. Most of my earliest memories aren't of news, but there's a source of bias. My family didn't have a TV until I was six or seven; the earliest news event I can remember is the death of Robert Kennedy. What I remember is a black screen with "Senator Robert Kennedy Dead", which I think must have been used when there weren't programmes being broadcast, which was quite a bit of the day on the BBC in 1968.
#62, Valuethinker
It is hard to credit a group of men as experienced in government as Bush's war cabinet with that level of incompetence.
Experienced in the hard parts of government, or in just turning the handle and following the guidance of the system? Because many of their actions have seemed to me like those of men who didn't actually have a plan of action, aside from being in power. Most of them learned the trade during the Cold War, and seem to want to behave in the same way, even though that war is over. They were trying to act like men in government, without being able to disentangle the behaviour of the past from its causes.
Sometimes they seem to be fumbling towards having Iraq as a new West Germany, as the frontline of confrontation with Iran as a new Soviet Union; a ridiculous objective, given the limits of Iranian power, but one that would provide them with a familiar context for action.
#22 Valuethinker. Thanks. I don't find the oil theory compelling, simply because if there were a clear objective - any clear objective - it would have been done more competently. The reason for the invasion of Iraq seems to me to be mainly emotional. It goes like this:
September 11th: "This is an act of war". OK, so what do you do in a war? You fight, if your views on how to do a war are the slightest bit conventional. And with nobody invading you, you need to invade somewhere else to have a fight. So invading Afganistan was first, and Afganistan did actually have a lot to do with the attack, so there wasn't a political problem with this. But when the task of invading Afganistan was over, and there wasn't emotional closure for 9/11, what next? Well, Iraq was a traditional enemy, and there wasn't closure on the war of 1991 either, and, damnit, attacking and invading is what armies are for, and armies are how you fight wars (aren't they?). So the military system proceeded with the things it's set up for, Iraq was invaded, and again, there's no emotional closure. That's because Sadam wasn't captured until he'd become irrelevant, the ideas about what to do once Iraq was conquered weren't thought through, and OBL is still out there. Now Iran is offering a option for redoubling the stakes, and the US is still "at war".
The people who say "We shall prosecute this war until we attain victory" are seeking closure, IMHO, on the emotional traumas. These really seem to hang around in US culture, in part because someone has to be so bad, so much an enemy, before the US can go to war. WWII had closure. Korea and Vietnam didn't, and that seems to me to be why they're still live, raw, issues in US politics.
The Al-Ambar strategy is quite similar to the one that the UK used from the beginning in southern Iraq. We didn't hand out arms particularly, because the locals had plenty, but we let them orgaise their own militias and run their areas.
This worked just great at first: we had much less violence, local elections worked, and things generally went splendidly for a while. But the many small militias gradually fused together, until there were only a few, and their heads weren't interested in further merging. They also put plenty of their people into the police, until the police were run by the militias, rather than the ostentible government. Then they started fighting each other a bit, and scoring status points by attacking UK troops. The result of this is that we have been pushed out of Basra, and are just holed up on the airbase, taking a couple of mortar attacks a day and going out as little as possible. This is being spun as "our presence will soon no longer be required", but really, we've been defeated.
And I'm not seeing anything in the Al-Ambar strategy that makes me expect anything different.
If anyone remembers Bush Senior and Brent Sowcroft's article about reasons for not unseating Sadam in 1991? They reckoned, basically, that they'd have to replace him with someone similar, and saw it as pointless.
But reading your predecessor's thoughts and reasons seems to have been too much for this administration, throughout. It's amazing the way they think "democracy = govenrment that does what we want". They can't even manage that reliably in the USA, never mind Iraq, Palestine, etc.
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| 2009 | 6 |
| 2008 | 8 |
| 2007 | 8 |
| 2006 | 3 |
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