Here’s what’s caught my eye this morning:
- Across the Bay posts that the declaration by Iraqi politicians meeting in Cairo the other day doesn’t mean what some, e.g. Juan Cole, have said that it means.
- Marc Schulman of American Future has done a remarkable job of documenting how the editorial and news reporting posture of The New York Times has changed from 1993 to the present and, oddly, made a dramatic course corrrection after Bush was elected to the presidency. Required reading.
- Here’s a fascinating article on intellectual property law in China. The article cites the work of Washington University scholar Andrew Mertha, who contends that the problem with enforcing intellectual property law in China is that China simply lacks the political institutions to do it. My claim for a long time has been that an economic strategy that depends on China selling manufactured goods to us and us selling intellectual property to China is doomed to failure and Mertha’s work would appear to support the claim. Hat tip: China Challenges.
- Dan Drezner wonders who’s farthest from the mark: civilian elites or the military, citing a poll which shows a substantial difference among opinions on Iraq. See also my post from yesterday on a closely related topic. Victory will require more than sticktoitiveness. The stats on the rise of isolationism also supports my view: if Wilsonian interventionism fails we won’t return to a “realistic” mercantilist foreign policy. UPDATE: Here’s a little anecdotal confirmation of the divide from Froggy.
- More commentary on the Padilla (as in “vanilla”) indictment from Michael Froomkin.
- European Tribune has a post on unemployment in Europe that’s very much worth reading. One thing that I don’t understand why people haven’t mentioned is that worker protection rules adopted in the 1970’s tended to subsidize the importation of guest workers (to whom the rules didn’t apply). The info might be dated—it’s been a long time since I worked for a European company.
- Kris Alexander of Intel Dump on Murtha and the value of putting dates to milestones. He concludes:
What’s troubling about Iraq is where I think we’re going to end up without a major shift in policy. We’ll have an Iraqi government whose continued viability is in question. Iraq will still be plagued by sectarian violence with Saddam’s brutality replaced by Zarqawi’s fanaticism. We’ll have a continued large scale military presence in the Middle East. Our troops will continue to be targets for Khobar Towers style attacks while also fueling the animosity that drives extremist recruiting. The Iraq intervention will not have solved the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, another roadblock to regional stability. In other words, its looks like we’re going to finish almost exactly where we started.
That’s the lot.
