Something that’s been bothering me for a while – the ever-smushier and less critical lovefest between leftwing opponents of the Iraq war and rightwing realist opponents of same. “Steve Clemons”:http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/000904.html, who has contacts in both camps, quotes an unnamed _Nation_ person yesterday as saying that “realism has become the new liberal foreign policy ideology.” When it isn’t (quite rightly) ripping shreds out of the “liberal hawk” establishment, Ari Berman’s _Nation_ article reads like a mash-note to an emerging “dissident establishment”:http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050829&s=berman that unites left and right against foreign policy adventurism. Now there’s a lot to be said in favour of building a short-term alliance to push back against the lunacy of recent years, and inject a little reality into foreign policy thinking. Rightwing realists have smart and interesting things to say, and are, all in all, a vast improvement on the crew of yahoos and me-too cheerleaders who gave us “Operation Wishful Thinking”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005/08/power-of-imagination-giblets-will.html. I’d be delighted to see the Perles, Boots and Ledeens of the DC foreign policy establishment consigned to the outer darkness. But leftwingers who rush too quickly to embrace their new friends on the right should meditate upon the malign example of Henry Kissinger, and the implications of _Realpolitik_ for the causes and issues that they’re committed to. We should all be in favour of the reality-based crowd taking over Republican foreign policy making – it’ll mean that our arguments with them will be conducted on a saner basis. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that those arguments will magically disappear. Whatever realism is, it isn’t a good basis for a leftwing approach to foreign policy (though it may have valuable lessons to impart to such an approach).

More interesting things from around the WWW.

Scott McLemee is back from a break, with two great columns. The “first”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/08/16/mclemee is on Alfredo Perez’s “Political Theory Daily Review”:http://www.politicaltheory.info/, which is one of my daily reads, and imo a simply terrific resource. It beats the better-known “Arts and Letters Daily” hands-down in terms of depth of coverage and (for me) interest. Somebody needs to give this guy a paid job doing this full-time The second is an “essay”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/08/18/mclemee on the mutual disdain of academia and journalism for each other, defending intellectual border-crossing and amateurism, in the original sense of the word.

The American Institute for Contemporary German Studies has set up a “German elections blog”:http://new.aicgs.org/news/ with commentary in English from German journalists and experts. Speaking of which, I’ve been meaning to give a plug to “Sign and Sight”:http://www.signandsight.com/intodaysfeuilletons feuilletons page for a while; it’s a great way of keeping up with the intellectual debate in Germany and elsewhere.

Tim Harford and others have set up the World Bank’s first “blog”:http://psdblog.worldbank.org/psdblog/, which aims to promote private sector approaches to international development.

My old colleague, Ron Deibert has set up “Civiblog”:http://www.civiblog.org/, a free blogging service for people involved in NGOs and civil society organizations.

Jesse at Pandagon finds Kathryn Jean Lopez wondering why the media isn’t covering an Amnesty International report on terrorism in Iraq. He notes, among other things, that “this may constitute the first time since September 11th that any conservative commentator has honestly admitted that Amnesty writes anything that isn’t a direct attack on America.”

Publius at Law and Politics has a marvelous look at Hitchens’ “sister cities” article.

I understand the emotional need to attack those who you don’t care for anyway. But the idea that the anti-war Left and the sister city program have one damned thing to do with our problems in Iraq is nothing short of full-blown delusion (though it is interesting from a psychological perspective)…

You may hate the Left so bad that you’d like to wring all their necks. But that hatred has exactly zero relevance to the larger truth that you may or may not be willing to confront – if this war is lost, then Bush lost it.

I’m afraid that we might be having this argument a lot more in the future.

Beautiful Horizons is a just a terrific blog that doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves, because few other bloggers can talk on Randy Paul’s level about Central and South America.

During the Vietnam war, John Steinbeck was writing to the White House with ideas about weapons and tactics, including the idea for a baseball-sized napalm weapon. Funny old world.

Living in Texas can drive a liberal crazy, but the people here do some things right.

Finally, Brad DeLong has the Concord Coalition’s plausible forecast of budget deficits.

Orin Kerr recently proposed a useful simplified framework of possible outcomes in Iraq:

1) The U.S. beats back the insurgency and democracy flowers in Iraq (call this the “optimistic stay” scenario),
2) The U.S. digs in its heels, spends years fighting the insurgency, loses lots of troops, and years later withdraws, leading to a bloody and disastrous civil war (the “pessimistic stay” scenario);
3) The U.S. decides that it’s no longer worth it to stay in Iraq, pulls out relatively soon, and things in Iraq are about as best as you could hope for, perhaps leading to a decent amount of democracy (optimistic leave), and
4) The U.S. decides that it’s no longer worth it to stay in Iraq, pulls out soon, and plunges Iraq into a bloody and disastrous civil war with the bad guys assuming control eventually (pessimistic leave).

Speaking only for myself, I’m entirely confident that we could achieve outcome 4, believe that staying the course will continue to lead to outcome 2, and can scarcely imagine outcome 3. What about outcome 1? Is it achievable?

There’s been some good discussion among some war supporters who believe that the situation in Iraq is dire, but salvageable. They aren’t spending a lot of time flailing against a stab in the back from the press or from tricksy liberals. They’re disturbed by the dialing down of expectations, and by official talk of troop withdrawls. See Charles and von at Obsidian Wings, Bill Kristol at the Weekly Standard, Greg Djerejian at Belgravia Dispatch (also here).
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How fitting that the greatest sporting moment (so far) of the 21st century, and one of the greatest comebacks of all time, should be commemorated “thus”:http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0500liverpoolfc/0100news/tm_objectid=15870300%26method=full%26siteid=50061%26headline=night%2dof%2dtriumph%2dcaptured%2din%2dlego%2d-name_page.html :

bq. WITH a triumphant look on his face, Steven Gerrard can be seen standing next to the Champions League Trophy flanked by his manager, Rafael Benitez.

bq. But look again. For this is not an image from the historic final between Liverpool and AC Milan in Turkey earlier this year – it is a re-creation of the scene made entirely from Lego.

bq. Artists Darren Neave and John Cake – who are known as The Little Artists – have built the work from the toy bricks and it will go on display at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery later this week.