Entries for July 2007

Yes, comes the answer from Brookings Institution scholars Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, in yesterday's New York Times. They write, after an eight-day trip to Iraq, with careful qualifications and with some stinging criticism of the Bush administration (perhaps to reassure readers that it really is the Times they're reading). Here is one key passage:

When I was in second or third grade, my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Mills, was killed in an auto accident. I was told that she was in a car hit head-on by someone going the wrong way on the then new Ohio Turnpike. She was an excellent teacher, and I still feel sad when I think of her death.

The number of people killed in traffic accidents every year is daunting: 42,682 in 2006.  That's more than the number of Americans killed in the Korean War and more than 10 times the number of Americans killed in Iraq.

Turkey held its election Sunday, and the ruling AKP party won a solid victory. The AKP has been called an Islamist party, and its success in this third straight election is a repudiation of the secular tradition established by Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s and 1930s. But the AKP also seems more interested than the opposition CHP and MHP parties in conforming to the requirements for entry into the European Union. Here is a nuanced and, for me, pretty convincing analysis of the AKP from National Review Online's Jim Geraghty, who lived a year or so in Ankara; here is a more favorable view from Claire Berlinski, a keen critic of Islamist terrorists in Europe who lives in Istanbul and sees the AKP as far preferable to the opposition; here is a less optimistic view from Michael Rubin, whose knowledge of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey is impressive and based on a lot of on-the-ground experiences as well as extensive study. Here's Clifford May's pre-election take on Turkey's political background.

Here's my Creators Syndicate column, on our politics as a cultural civil war between two halves of the baby boom generation. The good news is that the baby boom generation will die out sometime reasonably soon. The bad news is that I will die at about the same time.

For interesting and illuminating news out of Iraq, I recommend the new Victory Caucus website, with convenient links to bloggers Michael Yon and Bill Roggio.

Gregg Easterbrook offers a fitting tribute to the greatest living American. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has some apt comments, in which I concur. By the way, Karen Novak, wife of Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute, has sculpted a statue of the honoree, which stands in his home state of Iowa.

I want to link to some recent reviews of my book Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers: Gertrude Himmelfarb in the Weekly Standard, James Bennett in anglosphere.com, and Andrew Stuttaford in National Review (not online yet). I'm grateful for these thoughtful reviews and am somewhat awed to have been reviewed by a historian of Gertrude Himmelfarb's stature. And here is a nice comment from John Hinderaker of Power Line, who interviewed me on his radio show last Saturday.

Here is my Creators Syndicate column of the week.

For more than an hour on Friday afternoon George W. Bush sat down with nine conservative opinion journalists in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. I was one of them. He looks older now than he did when he first became president—the change is more noticeable in person, I think, than on television—but he seemed not at all weary or anguished. To the contrary, he seemed very energized and talked for considerably longer than I think any of us had anticipated. The message that he delivered on Iraq was similar to that in his press conference Thursday and he made reference to the video-conference he had held with three U.S. leaders of Provincial Reconstruction Teams earlier in the day.