Recommended Reading….Christmas Holiday Edition
Ho…Ho…Ho !
Top Billing ! Outside The Beltway’s The Schuler- Finel Debate…”Pulling Out: Debating Middle East Disengagement”
Pulling Out: Debating Middle East Disengagement (Neg. Rebuttal) – Schuler
Pulling Out: Debating Middle East Disengagement (Negative) – Schuler
Pulling Out: Debating Middle East Disengagement (Affirmative) – Finel
Pulling Out: Debating Middle East Disengagement (Neg. Cross) – Schuler
Pulling Out: Debating Middle East Disengagement (Intro) – Schuler
Pulling Out: Debating Middle East Disengagement (Rebuttal) – Finel
Pulling Out: Debating Middle East Disengagement (Aff. Cross) – Finel
This was a very enjoyable exchange both for it’s civility as well as the erudition of the debaters ( Pundita opines at length here on the discussion) Dave Schuler and Dr. Bernard Finel. The former may not seem remarkable but by contrast, HNN, a site with an audience that is heavy in professional and aspiring historians and social scientists, cannot run an article related to either Israel or Islam (or George W. Bush) without provoking outbursts of (at times) maniacal vituperation and flaming in the comments section.
Fabius Maximus – The State Department needs help, stat!
Fabius was kind enough to link to me and here is a key excerpt from his post:
State is the natural counter-weight to DoD. In a parochial society such as ours the State Department staff should be those best able to understand the outside world in any fullness, in a multidimensional fashion. It has experts with a depth of foreign experience unmatched by other Government agencies – unlike the academics in the CIA or the military professionals in DoD.
Deep knowledge of foreign cultures and their leaders is necessary for success in a multi-polar world. We’ll need people like Robert Clive and Sir Richard Burton, and State is where they’re most likely to find a home in our bureaucracy. But not, of course, in today’s State Department. Nor anywhere in the US Government apparatus, which often rejects people with great initiative and expertise as surely as your body rejects foreign bacilli.
That’s the news; here is the bad news
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