Foreign Policy Magazine's March/April issue asked the question: who has come out ahead in Iraq? For their ten answers. the magazine contacted ten scholars to write a short essay. The results were engaging and informative. A few of the essays are available on the FP Magazine website, while others are restricted to subscribers. Excerpts are reproduced below along with my own thoughts on them.

In a news item you may have missed beside everything else going on this month, over 300,000 people attended a rally in Ankara, the capitol of Turkey, on April 14. With Turkey's population at 71 million according to the CIA World Factbook, this protest would be equivalent in scale to over a million people protesting in the United States. What ideals could bring so much of a nation together? What were these people in Ankara demonstrating for?

They rallied for secularism.

It's a wonderful feeling to rhetorically stomp some propaganda-addled moron into the ground. Oftentimes, few can say it wasn't deserved. However, as you argue on Daily Kos or on other forums, take care to think outside the simple context of a single argument. We are currently combined in a greater effort to defeat the corrupt embezzlement machine that is the modern Republican Party, and many of us also pursue other ideological goals. What is the strategic gain, in the greater effort, of such a victory in one small Internet thread?

I'm used to my local "Democrat" paper endlessly repeating Republican lies without any kind of fact checking, but today they've stepped further over the line than usual by carrying a Prickly City cartoon which calls Bill Clinton a "sexual predator". The same paper has previously censored comic strips, most memorably B.C.'s Easter strip which slowly extinguished a Jewish menorah and erected a Christian cross in its place. Chances are somebody reviewed this cartoon, found it acceptable, and chose to run it.

The past few weeks have seen a major shift in the political affairs of the United States as President George W. Bush has claimed and secured a level of unchecked power unseen since Lincoln suspended the Constitution during the Civil War in the 1860s. As usual, Bush has done this subtly enough to be able to deny it if ever directly questioned about it, and those newspapers that have reported on it have done so in such an unconcerned manner as to give the appearance that these changes are merely another run-of-the-mill partisan skirmish.

[Cross-posted at Live from the Nuke Free Zone]

One of the more underreported events of recent months is the growth in influence of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, an alliance of China, Russia, and several former Soviet states. Among other aims such as economic cooperation and fighting terrorism, the SCO is now moving to counteract the influence of the United States in Asia. This reached my attention when SCO member nation Uzbekistan ordered the US to withdraw from Karshi-Khanabad ("K2") airbase (more) which the US has been using post-Sep11.

This rare flexing of political muscle by a client state against its master is often a sign of said client having found a new master, and some reports on the topic mentioned the SCO either in passing or as being behind the demand.

I think the rhetoric against insufficiently loyal Democrats is getting too heavy, and seeing the thread targeting the Blue Dogs convinced me to write something in response. I bet some of those Blue Dogs are just as certain it's the Progressive faction that is hurting the party, but that's beside the point. My point is, to win elections, you need a majority. That means to reach out and win the hearts and minds of people who don't agree with you on a lot of issues. Consider the Blue Dogs a barometer for the average conservative that the Democrats will need to win over to get a victory in 2006/8. So they're not voting the right way and you're stuck with them for two years minimum. Accept that. While you have them, use them.

Apologies for the extremely limited interest of this posting, but there are a couple locals here who don't have public e-mail addresses and this is the best way I know of to get in touch with local non-right-wing activists. The rest of you can skip this diary or just take a gander at our situation and learn from it or offer advice.

The nutcases behind the red scare at Santa Rosa Junior College (more) (more) (more) are running for the student government, and the election is on Wednesday and Thursday (13th and 14th). That's probably tomorrow by the time you read this. To piss off the liberals even more, they're calling themselves the New Progressive Party.

What's at stake here is the SRJC student body officially supporting the Horowitz bill to allow frivolous lawsuits against teachers for mentioning bad stuff the US did in history classes and not teaching creationism in science classes and such.

Back in yesterday's thread about media bias, I noted that my local birdcage liner had the inexplicable headline about Condoleezza Rice's weasly, evasive hearing testimony, "Rice Stands Firm". Anyone watching the part of the hearing I saw, where she was utterly demolished by Senator Dodd, would have come up with quite different words to describe it. I halfway wondered if the Pee Dee just copied and pasted their headline from an RNC talking points memo.

Upon seeing my post, Bignap jumped up and exclaimed, "Where are you from? Our local newspaper had the SAME crazy headline about Condi and I just about choked when I saw it [...] BTW, I'm in central California."

It looks like I might use this diary space to dump stuff I started working on for Nuke Free Zone and never finished or published, but the fellows here might enjoy reading. This is often stuff I leave half finished on my hard drive, forget about, and rediscover a few months later. Today, I invite you to read about what I call The Unspeakable Megascandal: what the media didn't report about George W. Bush and the Islamic Institute.

Disclaimer: The primary reason I didn't publish this one was that I couldn't source some of my claims, having written them from memory, so don't use this as reference material. Do your own research and treat this as just some guy spouting off on the internet.

So says the headline in my morning paper. Apparently, the Surrendercrats are going to reach out to Republican voters by doing and promoting what the Republicans want regarding abortion even though they know it's not the best thing for the country. Note the great success that John Kerry and the Democrats had by positioning themselves against gay marriage, the other moral value that Republicans have.

Democratic leaders say their party needs to de-emphasise the issue of abortion rights, concerned that Republicans have hurt the Democratic Party by portraying it as an uncompromising champion of abortion.

This is a little satire I sidelined when the Killian memo came out and just rediscovered when I logged onto a computer that I don't use much anymore (new laptops are fun!). This was before the "reality-based community" stuff came out... some of you might enjoy it.

Leading conservatives held a press conference today to reveal to the American people what one speaker, Sean Hannity, called "the greatest threat facing America today, even greater than terrorism."

• Trading-With-The-Enemy fines down under Bush
• Dollar Nosediving
• Rumours of a Chalabi-Sadr Alliance
• Quick thoughts on the Falluja offensive

Also, if you're interested in the Cote D'Ivoire conflict, go see what wrote about it on the blog I write for.

Hmm, <hr> tags don't seem to work here. Darn.

Recently, I heard some guy on TV (yeah, a real accurate source) say that only one in six people the pollsters call is actually willing to go along with the poll.