The world according to Hirsh: what, me worry?

The New Neo Posted on by

Michael Hirsh has a column in Newsweek that must be read to be believed.

Channeling Alfred (“What, me worry?) E. Neuman, Hirsh takes the loooong view of history, arguing that our withdrawal from Vietnam “worked.” After all, Vietnam isn’t doing so very badly today, three decades later.

To Hirsh, the boat people and the re-education camps were just a few small speed bumps along the way. The fact that Vietnam started to rebound economically in the 90s wipes it all out in Hirsh’s eyes, and motivates him to use scare quotes when he writes, referring to Bush’s speech, “This [capitalist future] was the ‘harsh’ aftermath that George W. Bush attempted to describe this week when he warned against pulling out of Iraq as we did in Vietnam.”

Actually, Michael, no it wasn’t. This was, among other things. And Hirsh calls Bush’s remarks “an abuse of historical fact?”

Then he resorts to that surefire routine, always good for a yuk: mocking Bush’s academic credentials. According to Hirsh, Bush is “just now catching up with the Political Science 101 reading he shrugged off at Yale.” Ho, ho, ho.

It appears that Hirsh may have shrugged off some reading himself as an undergrad (well, who among us didn’t?) back at Tufts, because his next sentence shows he’s got a bit of catching up to do, as well, “Yes, a lot of Vietnamese boat people died on the high seas; but many others have returned to visit in the ensuing years.”

Hey, it’s kinda like those concentration camp survivors who returned decades later for the deluxe tours of Auschwitz and Dachau. All’s well that ends well—or, as Emily Litella would put it, “Never mind.”

I guess if you take a long enough view everything works out in the end. The Holocaust was a success for the Jews because it led to the establishment of Israel. Stalin and the twenty to forty million deaths he caused? Hey, have you seen the USSR today? Capitalists. Case closed.

Brian Baird comes out for giving the surge a chance

The New Neo Posted on by

Rep. Brian Baird, Democrat from Washington state, has written this extraordinary piece appearing in today’s Seattle Times.

Baird has been one of the more consistently anti-Iraq-War members of Congress. How do we know that? He voted against the invasion at the outset, and has been consistently and strongly critical of the decisions the Bush administration made in waging it.

That hasn’t changed, as you can tell by reading his column. No, Baird hasn’t become an apostate; he still thinks the war was a mistake. Continue reading →

Whose Vietnam analogy is it, anyway?

The New Neo Posted on by

Bush’s speech yesterday seems to have spawned a further opening of that wound that’s never really closed, the Vietnam War.

Bush’s critics are incensed: after all, Iraq/Vietnam is their analogy, always good for a negative spin on what we’re doing now in Iraq. How dare Bush—who, it goes without saying, is as ignorant of history as he is of everything else save Machiavellian grabs for power—how dare he co-opt it in the service of the surge and the continuing US presence in Iraq? Continue reading →

Bush and Kerry: just who’s being irresponsible about Iraq and Vietnam?

The New Neo Posted on by

In today’s speech in Kansas City to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, President Bush gave the reconstruction efforts in Iraq the historical context some of us have been writing about for some time: the need to avoid the sort of bloodbath that followed the Vietnam abandonment, and the need to try to mimic as much as possible the post-WWII success in Japan.

Of course each situation is not analogous to Iraq in its details. But there are still lessons to be learned from both histories about what to avoid and what to pursue.

Majority Leader Harry Reid begs to differ on the specifics of what those lessons might be. Reid, of course, has a dog in this race; he gave up on the surge before it even occurred, and recent surge-friendly news must be an embarrassment to him. Continue reading →

Comments links working—for now

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m aware that for a long time there’s been a problem putting links into comments on this blog. Part of the link gets broken and appears at the beginning of the paragraph.

It’s been a real annoyance to me, and I’m sure to many of you. I’m happy to report that I’ve found the source of the problem: a plugin that handles both the preview and captcha functions was causing a glitch.

I’ve disabled the plugin and those functions for now, so it’s good news and bad. The good news is that you won’t have to bother with reproducing that #$*@! code before posting your comments, and any comments links should work the way they’re supposed to. The bad news is that you’ll temporarily lose the preview function. But that’s OK; everyone gets a pass on typos.

The other bad news is mostly for me: there may be a bit more spam for a while, and I’ve got to find a new plugin to take over those functions. Maybe even two new plugins. Any suggestions from WordPress experts?

Svensmark and those “objective” scientists: when research and politics interface, watch out

The New Neo Posted on by

The hallmark of scientific research is objectivity. Its goal is the attainment of truth about the universe in which we live, knowing of course that we can only learn by bits and pieces, and that total truth is probably not attainable. But truth is what scientists strive for, and the entire scientific method is designed to ensure that personal biases are eliminated as much as humanly possible.

As much as humanly possible—ay, there’s the rub. Because, humans being what they are, there are many roadblocks in the way of getting to objective truth. Even in science, politics and special interest groups often intervene.

Some topics are more charged than others, and the explanation for the cause of global warming has attained a rarified status near the pinnacle of the politically vital pantheon (women in science is another such issue, as the ever-unpopular Larry Summers discovered a while back, much to his sorrow). Continue reading →

I ain’t gonna study war no more: Victor Davis Hanson and the teaching of military history

The New Neo Posted on by

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you,” is a quote attributed (apparently incorrectly?) to Leon Trotsky.

Whether or not he actually said it, it seems true.

And getting truer all the time—at least the first half of it, rephrased as “You may not be interested in the study of war…” The insightful and articulate Victor Davis Hanson has written an insightful and articulate article on the subject that I recommend reading in its entirety.

Hanson’s thesis is that modern post-Vietnam-war education has virtually ignored the study of military history, once considered a necessary part of a liberal education that emphasized ancient military history and classical history in general. This has had enormous and dire consequences (a point I’ve made, as well; see this). Continue reading →

Spammer styles: feel the love

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve got various kinds of spam blockers on this blog. They don’t work perfectly. but if they didn’t work at all, I’d have hundreds of spam comments here a day. As it is, there are probably fifteen or so, which I remove almost as soon as they come in.

It’s been interesting to watch the evolution of the spammers. Like the replicates of science fiction, over time they’ve become more and more like real commenters—at least, they become better at mimicking what they think real commenters sound like. Continue reading →

Viva partnering, ballet, and la différence

The New Neo Posted on by

When people think of ballet—if they think of it at all—they often think of dancing on pointe, something only women do in ballet. George Balanchine, one of the greatest choreographers of all time, famously said, “Ballet is woman.”

Then again, he was a man. And, although it’s not PC to say so, he was somewhat of a rarity in ballet in being a heterosexual man.

Not that they don’t exist in ballet, of course. They do, indeed they do. And when they do they generally have a sexual field day because of the interesting ratio of heterosexual woman (high) to heterosexual men (lowish) in the ballet world.

I disagree with Balanchine; but then again, I’m a woman. As far as I’m concerned, you could instead say, “Ballet is partnering.” Continue reading →

Carnage for Congressional consumption

The New Neo Posted on by

The truck bombs that exploded two days ago in Iraq took a horrific toll. Whether the final tally of human life will be 250 or 500 (the exact figure may never be known), virtually all of the victims were Yazidis, a non-Muslim Kurdish sect who are an extreme minority in Iraq.

Al Qaeda, almost undoubtedly the perpetrator, knew full well what it was doing. As this Ralph Peters column entitled “Killing for Congress” points out (I had titled my post before I saw his; the similarity in titles is a coincidence), the terrorist group was well aware that its former targeting of fellow-Muslims in Iraq has caused it to become hated there.

So al Qaeda was faced with a dilemma: how to generate enough gore to deflate recent reports (see this) that the surge is going rather well, without causing the Iraqi population to turn even further against it. An inventive answer was found: attack a group too marginal and powerless to matter much in terms of backlash, and kill enough of them to cause maximum consternation in Congress and American public opinion. Thus, the Yazidis, the perfect victims. Continue reading →

No surprise in Venezuela: all Chavez, all the time?

The New Neo Posted on by

Venezuelan not-quite-President-for-life-but-getting-there Hugo Chavez announced that he’s asking for a few changes: an extension of the length of the Presidential term of office, and an end to limits on reelection.

To those critics who suggest this is another step in his road to fidelity to a Fidel-like dictatorship, Chavez has an answer. Not a very good one; but an answer nonetheless: it’s only a possibility, a possibility that depends on many variables.

But of course. Only a possibility, depending on many variables, such as how firmly he can entrench himself in power in the meantime, and how many of the former constitutional safeguards against tyranny he can manage to jettison. If the “possibility” doesn’t become an actuality, it’s certainly not for lack of trying on the part of Chavez.

Not surprisingly, Chavez is also proposing changes in some of those “variables,” such as a program to end “the autonomy of Venezuela’s Central Bank, which would give him access to billions of dollars of foreign reserves. He also called for increasing the government’s power to expropriate private property before getting a court’s approval.”

And so Chavez marches on. To those who suggest he’s undermined the democratic process in Venezuela, he cites the wide margins by which he’s won elections.

Wide margins, of course, do not a democracy make. In fact—with the rare exception of the occasional bona fide landslide, of course—they tend to be the hallmark of dictatorships featuring fixed, manipulated, and/or coerced elections. The quoted AP article fails to detail the very strong evidence that Chavez did exactly that, but it’s here if you wish to peruse it (follow the links in there, as well).