General is 1st a Scholar - Philip O'Connor, Chicago Tribune
I arrived in Baghdad in mid-March to work on electricity issues, just as Gen. David Petraeus returned to Iraq to lead the "surge," of which he is the prime architect. But my sense of identification with the commander of the Multi-National Force-Iraq goes beyond that. To most people Petraeus is a four-star general, an experienced combat veteran and the consummate military officer. But when I pass him in a hallway of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, I have to catch myself from blurting, "Good morning, Dr. Petraeus." Like me, Petraeus has a doctorate in political science, his from Princeton, mine from Northwestern. I see Petraeus as a political scientist and former professor in the department of social science at West Point who just happens to be an Army ranger and general. It's his persona as a scholar that is key to understanding what the surge is and why it seems to be working. Author of the "Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual," Petraeus has literally written the book on 21st Century real-world application of a well-established political science theory on defanging armed insurgencies. David Kilcullen, the Australian adviser to Petraeus, has said that counterinsurgency is 100 percent military, 100 percent political, 100 percent economic and 100 percent social.
The Kurdish Secret – Thomas Friedman, New York Times (subscription required)
Iraq today is a land of contrasts — mostly black and blacker. Traveling around the central Baghdad area the past few days, I saw little that really gave me hope that the different Iraqi sects can forge a social contract to live together. The only sliver of optimism I find here is in the one region where Iraqis don’t live together: Kurdistan. Imagine for a moment if one outcome of the U.S. invasion of Iraq had been the creation of an American University of Iraq. Imagine if we had triggered a flood of new investment into Iraq that had gone into new hotels, a big new convention center, office buildings, Internet cafes, two new international airports and Iraqi malls. Imagine if we had paved the way for an explosion of newspapers, even a local Human Rights Watch chapter, and new schools. Imagine if we had created an island of decency in Iraq, with public parks, where women could walk unveiled and not a single American soldier was ever killed — where Americans in fact were popular — and where Islam was practiced in its most tolerant and open manner. Imagine… Well, stop imagining. It’s all happening in Kurdistan, the northern Iraqi region, home to four million Kurds. I saw all of the above in Kurdistan’s two biggest towns, Erbil and Sulaimaniya. The Bush team just never told anybody.
If Iraq Falls – Josef Joffe, Wall Street Journal
In contrast to President Bush's dark comparison between Iraq and the bloody aftermath of the Vietnam War last month, there is another, comforting version of the Vietnam analogy that's gained currency among policy makers and pundits. It goes something like this: After that last helicopter took off from the U.S. embassy in Saigon 32 years ago, the nasty strategic consequences then predicted did not in fact materialize. The "dominoes" did not fall, the Russians and Chinese did not take over, and America remained No. 1 in Southeast Asia and in the world. But alas, cut-and-run from Iraq will not have the same serendipitous aftermath, because Iraq is not at all like Vietnam. Unlike Iraq, Vietnam was a peripheral arena of the Cold War. Strategic resources like oil were not at stake, and neither were bases (OK, Moscow obtained access to Da Nang and Cam Ranh Bay for a while). In the global hierarchy of power, Vietnam was a pawn, not a pillar, and the decisive battle lines at the time were drawn in Europe, not in Southeast Asia. The Middle East, by contrast, was always the "elephant path of history," as Israel's fabled defense minister, Moshe Dayan, put it. Legions of conquerors have marched up and down the Levant, and from Alexander's Macedonia all the way to India. Other prominent visitors were Julius Caesar, Napoleon and the German Wehrmacht. This is not just ancient history. Today, the Greater Middle East is a cauldron even Macbeth's witches would be terrified to touch. The world's worst political and religious pathologies combine with oil and gas, terrorism and nuclear ambitions. In short, unlike yesterday's Vietnam, the Greater Middle East (including Turkey) is the central strategic arena of the 21st century, as Europe was in the 20th. This is where three continents--Europe, Asia, and Africa--are joined. So let's take a moment to think about what would happen once that last Blackhawk took off from Baghdad International.
Marine Humor - Ralph Peters, New York Post
Behind their no-non sense personas and pa rade-ground posture, the Marines have the wickedest sense of humor of any of our services. It's a hoot to be around them. That take-no-prisoners humor was on display in the Fallujah area of operations. As I walked into a headquarters shack, a poster on the front door made me do a cartoon double-take. To appreciate the beauty of it, you just have to understand one military term, "OPSEC," or operations security - the protection of any tidbit of information that might be of value to an enemy. On the poster, a frightened kitten bounds across a field of wildflowers straight toward the viewer, as if about to leap into your arms for protection. Fanged gingerbread monsters are in hot pursuit. The main caption: "Every time you break OPSEC, God kills a kitten." At the bottom, flanked by twin photos of beseeching kittens, the poster begged: "Please, think of the kittens." I laughed out loud, then laughed again at the audacity of it. My own service, the Army, would've worried about offending religious organizations. The Navy would've failed to see what kittens have to do with aircraft carriers. And the Air Force would've objected that its chief of staff had never been personally involved in the execution of kittens, that the scandal was all the contractor's fault. God bless 'em, the Corps realized that if it made young Marines laugh - memorably - they'd be more apt to remember the message.
Arming Against Iran – William Hawkins, Washington Times
The best argument for the necessity of American victory in Iraq was made by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Aug. 28 when he declared his regime was "prepared to fill the gap" if U.S. forces withdrew. To give meaning to Tehran's claim, the Iranian-backed Mahdi Army of Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr appeared poised to take control of the key Iraqi city of Basra in the wake of a British pullback. And attacks by the Mahdists on rival Shi'ite groups in Karbala took more than 50 lives during a major religious festival. Sheik al-Sadr plans to strengthen his militia over the next six months to prepare for the end of the U.S. surge. President Bush responded to the Iranian threat in his speech to the American Legion, but he is already doing more than just threatening to declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. At the end of July, the State Department unveiled a series of arms sales in the region to help contain Tehran. In her July 30 announcement of the potential sale of $20 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia and the other five members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the arms will "support a broader strategy to counter the negative influences of al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran." The military aid to the Saudis and Gulf states will run in parallel with an increase in military aid to Israel ($30 billion) and Egypt ($13) over the next decade.
Ahmadinejad Isn't the Issue - Ray Takeyh, Boston Globe
Two years ago this month, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the little-known mayor of Tehran, was inaugurated as president of Iran. Since then, his fiery rhetoric and combative style have provoked hyperbolic claims of Iranian peril from the Bush administration and its allies. The menacing Ahmadinejad is portrayed as pushing Iran in a bold new direction, developing nuclear weapons with plans to destroy Israel and evict America from the Middle East. Yet these dire assertions have only limited basis in reality. Halfway through his term, Ahmadinejad's foreign policy is not all that different from his reformist or pragmatic predecessors. Iran's danger is nowhere more evident than its accelerating nuclear program. Neither America's veiled threats of military retribution nor a series of United Nations Security Council resolutions seem to distract Iran from its nuclear course. While it is tempting to ascribe Tehran's defiance to Ahmadinejad, Iran's nuclear program began in earnest under former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, a pragmatist acclaimed in the West as someone we can do business with. During the presidency of the reformist Mohammad Khatami, Iran did suspend its nuclear activities for more than two years in the hope of reaching an accommodation with the Europeans. Still, it was the same Khatami government that ended the suspension in 2005 and denounced further diplomatic efforts. Had Ahmadinejad not been elected, Iran's nuclear trajectory would not have been all that different. The desire to deter the United States and project power in the Middle East has pressed successive Iranian regimes toward the nuclear option.
Iran's Land Grab - Amir Taheri, New York Post
Iran's banks , operating through front men and companies, are financing land purchases that could redraw Lebanon's complex ethnic and religious map. Soon after last year's Israel-Hezbollah war, the Islamic republic set up a "Lebanon Committee" ostensibly to rebuild Shiite areas damaged in the fighting. It started with a $250 million "Islamic gift" distributed by Hezbollah among supporters. Soon, however, it became clear that those who received the cash didn't use it to rebuild their homes in Shiite villages south of the Litani River. When I visited the former war zone last spring, I was surprised to see little reconstruction work in the Shiite villages near the Israeli border. Is Tehran developing a new strategy, in which Lebanon south of the Litani would serve as a buffer zone in a future war against Israel? Until last year's war, the area was Hezbollah's stronghold, and host to more than 90 percent of its arsenal, including thousands of rockets and missiles.
Tom Ricks’s Inbox – Tom Ricks, Washington Post
Some observers have taken a page from urban planning theory to describe Iraq as a "wicked problem" -- a term coined to describe complex and divisive issues, such as building a new highway through a city or finding a location for a large homeless shelter. Here is one expert's explanation of the rules governing this kind of conundrum. They do indeed seem to illuminate the current U.S. policy impasse in Iraq…
Leave it to Us to End the Poppy Curse - Ahmad Zia Massoud, London Daily Telegraph
I have no doubt that the efforts of Britain and the international community in fighting the opium trade in Afghanistan are well-intentioned and we are grateful for their support. But it is now clear that your policy in the south of our country has completely failed. Hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent over the last five years, the UK contributing £262 million, the US about $1.6 billion (£800m) . Yet UN figures show that opium production increased by 34 per cent last year and more than doubled in the last two years. In Helmand, where the British are based, poppies have spread like a cancer. The province now produces half of Afghanistan's opium. Why, when so much has been spent, has the policy failed so badly? The primary reason is insecurity. Opium cultivation has continued due to the pressure exerted by the Taliban, who "tax" every aspect of the poppy crop. In more secure provinces, in the north and centre, we have succeeded in reducing opium cultivation. Second, and almost as important, the counter-narcotics policy has been much too soft. We are giving too much "carrot" and not enough "stick". Of course, it is important to bring development and alternative employment to the people. Millions of pounds have been committed in provinces including Helmand for irrigation projects and road-building to help farmers get their produce to market. But for now this has simply made it easier for them to grow and transport opium. What is missing is the "stick". Eradication was so low last year, at only about 10 per cent of the crop, that it hardly made an impact on the production and will not be enough to deter farmers from planting in the future.
The War on Poppies - Peter Bergen and Sameer Lalwani, Los Angeles Times
Stepping onto the balcony of the governor's mansion in Uruzgan in southern Afghanistan, you quickly grasp the scale of the drug problem gripping the country. Beginning at the walls of the mansion and stretching as far as the eye can see are hundreds of acres of poppy fields ready for harvesting for opium sap, pretty much the only way to earn a living in poverty-stricken Uruzgan. In late April, at the height of poppy-growing season, a team of more than 200 police officers from Kabul led by contractors working for the American company DynCorp International arrived in Uruzgan to undertake the first eradication efforts in the province. After some tense negotiations with local officials, the teams went out to begin destroying the poppy fields. For two days, nothing much happened, mostly because of a dispute about which fields were to be eradicated. But on the third day, when the work was getting underway in earnest, a Taliban-led force bearing small arms, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars appeared from nowhere and attacked the eradication teams as they destroyed the fields. Four Afghan police officers were seriously injured. The Uruzgan attack demonstrated, for those who hadn't yet figured it out, just how the Taliban is seeking to exploit popular resentment against eradication efforts. All across the country, Afghan support for poppy cultivation is on the upswing; 40% of Afghans now consider it acceptable if there is no other way to earn a living, and in the southwest, where much of the poppy crop is grown, two out of three people say it is acceptable. In Uruzgan's neighboring province, Helmand -- which supplies about half the world's opium, the raw material for heroin -- favorable ratings for the Taliban now run as high as 27% (compared with 10% in the whole of Afghanistan).
Hostage Disaster: The Koreans Were Freed, But Mistakes Were Made - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial
The hostage agreement reached by South Korea with the Taliban is a textbook case in bad practices, with unfortunate implications for the United States in Afghanistan. On July 19 the Taliban took 23 South Korean Christian missionaries hostage. While pressure built on the Seoul government to obtain their release, the Taliban killed two of them to show they were serious, and then released two sick hostages to show they were not total monsters. There was also some pressure on the United States from the South Koreans to assist in obtaining the captives' freedom. An agreement produced the release Wednesday and Thursday of the remaining hostages. The South Korean government has made important concessions, some of them with broad implications. It has agreed to withdraw the 200 troops it has in Afghanistan by the end of the year. The Korean government says it had already decided to withdraw them, but the linkage has important implications for other countries with troops and other citizens in Afghanistan working in relief, development or other civilian fields.
Pentagon Justice – Washington Post editorial
The misbegotten effort to hold military officers accountable for the notorious abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison limped to a close last week when an Army lieutenant colonel was cleared by a court-martial jury of charges that he was responsible for the mistreatment of detainees. Steven L. Jordan, the only officer to be prosecuted for crimes that were documented in stomach-turning photographs and videotapes, probably never should have been charged. His week-long trial demonstrated that he had little or nothing to do with the harsh interrogation tactics and other abuse introduced at Abu Ghraib in late 2003. His prosecution was symptomatic of the Pentagon's perverse handling of Abu Ghraib: The most senior officer to be administratively sanctioned, an Army Reserve brigadier general, also had no role in carrying out the abuses. There were certainly officers at Abu Ghraib overseeing interrogations of prisoners. There were other senior officers who drew up or approved methods -- such as the use of dogs to terrorize detainees -- that violated the Geneva Conventions and U.S. military codes. And there were civilian political appointees in the Pentagon, including then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who demanded more aggressive steps to collect intelligence from prisoners.
Enter the Eurohawks - New York Post editorial
Europe's leaders sound surprisingly hawkish these days, and that's nothing but good news for the Iraq-War-strained Atlantic alliance. Consider maverick French President Nicholas Sarkozy, who in a speech to French diplomats last week raised the prospect of military action against Iran. To be sure, he mentioned it as part of a larger point about the importance of continued diplomacy. But his meaning was unmistakable. If diplomacy fails, he said, the world will face a "catastrophic" decision: "the Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran." Sarkozy also warmly reaffirmed France's friendship with America, something his predecessor rarely had time for. The situation is somewhat different for the British, who continue to reduce their troop presence in Iraq. Some 5,500 British soldiers now patrol the southern city of Basra, down from 7,200 in January - with a further 500 set to leave this month. U.S. officials have worried that that's not leaving enough. Nevertheless, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown explicitly refused last week to set a timetable for further withdrawal. British troops, he said, still have "an important job to do" and "clear obligations to discharge."
The World Divides… And Democracy is at Bay – Robert Kagan, London Times
The world has become normal again. The years immediately after the end of the cold war offered a tantalising glimpse of a new kind of international order, the hope that nations might grow together or disappear altogether, with ideological conflicts melting away, and cultures intermingling through free commerce and communications. That, however, was a mirage – the hopeful anticipation of a liberal, democratic world that wanted to believe the end of the cold war did not end just one strategic and ideological conflict but all such conflict. The world has not been transformed: nations remain as strong, as ambitious, as passionate and as competitive as ever. While the United States is the only superpower, international competition among great powers is back. The United States, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, Iran and others vie for regional predominance. It is a time not of convergence but of divergence of ideas and ideologies. The old competition between liberalism and absolutism has reemerged, with the nations of the world increasingly lining up between them or along the fault line of tradition and modernity – Islamic fundamentalism against the West. The Islamists’ struggle against the powerful and often impersonal forces of modernisation, capitalism and glo-balisation is a significant fact of life in the world today, but oddly this struggle between modernisation and tradi-tionalism is largely a sideshow on the international stage. The future is more likely to be dominated by the ideological struggle among the great powers than by the effort of radical Islamists to restore an imagined past of piety.
The Crisis Will Not Disappear – Niall Ferguson, London Daily Telegraph
It is extremely hard to know how big a crisis is while it is actually unfolding. Retrospectively, we tend to think of crises, whether financial or geopolitical, as one-day wonders: think of "Black Monday", the stock market crash of October 19, 1987, or 9/11, the terrorist attacks of six years ago. This notion of short, sharp shocks fits in well with our human inclination to live for the moment. Perhaps it is also a symptom of our era's chronic attention deficit disorder. Yet the really big crises in history unfolded over months and years, not mere days. In these protracted sequences of events, there were many gloomy nights, but also many false dawns. Because hope springs eternal, people tended to attach more importance to the latter than the former, mistaking them for real dawns and blinding themselves to the underlying downward drift. I think we are in one of these protracted crises now - or, rather, in two of them. An encouraging word from the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, persuades investors that the "sub-prime" mortgage crisis is going to blow over. A few scraps of good news persuade at least some newspaper readers that the "surge" in Iraq is working. My strong suspicion is that both crises still have a long way to go.
The Peace Racket - Bruce Bawer, Los Angeles Times
'If you want peace, prepare for war," counseled the Roman general Flavius Vegetius Renatus more than 1,600 years ago, echoing the sage advice given nine centuries earlier by the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu. But in a film I saw recently at Oslo's Nobel Peace Center, this ancient wisdom was turned on its head: "If you want peace," it said, "prepare for peace." This purports to be wise counsel, a motto for the millennium. In reality, it's wishful thinking that doesn't follow logically from the history of war, the real lesson of which is the one that Sun Tzu and Vegetius taught: Conflict happens, power matters, and it's better to be strong than to be weak. Human history has demonstrated repeatedly that you're safer if your enemies know you'll stand up for yourself than if you're proudly outspoken about your defenselessness or your unwillingness to fight. Yet this truth is denied not only by the Nobel Peace Center film but by the fast-growing, troubling movement that the center symbolizes and promotes. I'm not talking here about a bunch of naive Quakers or idealistic high school students, but about a movement of savvy, ambitious professionals that is already comfortably ensconced at the United Nations, in the European Union and in many nongovernmental organizations. The peace racket, as I've come to think of it, embraces scores of "peace institutes" and "peace centers" in the U.S. and Europe, plus several hundred peace studies programs at universities such as UC Berkeley and Cornell. What's more, this movement is also waging an aggressive, under-the-media-radar campaign for a Cabinet-level "Peace Department" in the United States.
When War Was the Answer – George Will, Washington Post
War was the answer to what ailed Europe in 1944. "In 1942," writes Timothy Garton Ash of Oxford and Stanford's Hoover Institution, "there were only four perilously free countries in Europe: Britain, Switzerland, Sweden and Ireland." Twenty years -- a historical blink -- later, almost all of Western Europe was free. Twenty years after that, Spain, Portugal and Greece had joined the liberal democracies. Today, for the first time in 2,500 years, most Europeans live under such governments. Ash argues that Europe cannot define itself negatively -- as not America or not Islam. "Europe's only defining 'other' is its own previous self" -- its self-destructive, sometimes barbaric past. "This is," Ash says, "still a very recent past."
With Russia, Pray for Cynicism – Jim Hoagland, Washington Post
Russian prosecutors say that the separate grisly murders of two of the Kremlin's most vocal opponents during the past year have a common motive: They were committed by enemies of Vladimir Putin to frame and embarrass his government. A similarly sinister hidden agenda lies behind U.S. plans to create antimissile sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, Russian officials are telling Western diplomats. The silos that the Americans say are needed to defend against Iranian missile attacks will, in the Russian version, be stuffed with multiple-warhead offensive rockets aimed at Moscow. These "explanations" of murders and missiles raise a chilling question about Putin's Kremlin: Is it worse if the Russians are cynically offering up blatantly implausible tales as propaganda -- or if the Russian president and his aides actually believe their own accounts?
New Russia, New Threat - Michael McFaul, Los Angeles Times
On Aug. 17, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin announced that a dozen missile-carrying strategic bombers, accompanied by support and tanker planes, will be permanently airborne. Their mission: to protect Russian territory. From whom? Putin didn't name the enemy that caused the resumption of such flights after a 15-year hiatus. But only one other country has similar air capability -- the United States. Twenty-four-hour bomber missions is one of many recent flexes of Russian military muscle. Last month, Putin presided over a joint military exercise in Russia of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a new club of autocratic and semi-autocratic regimes including China and most of the former Soviet republics in Central Asia. Also in August, Georgian officials reported that Russian planes had entered Georgian airspace and launched a missile at a Defense Ministry radar. The missile did not explode.And earlier this year, the Russian leader approved a seven-year, $200-billion rearmament plan to build planes, missiles and ships. Did the Cold War sneak back? Thankfully, no. Should the United States be worried about a new Russian threat? Yes.
Putin’s Treaty Trap - Cliff Kincaid, Washington Times
The Russian claim to the North Pole has started a panic among some politicians and the press, who think the U.S. response should be to dicker with the Russians over Arctic riches before a United Nations panel established by the Law of the Sea Treaty. The United States must ratify the treaty quickly, they say, so we don't get left out. In fact, the U.S. already has valid claims to the North Pole region, under the "Doctrine of Discovery" legal principle, and accession to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) could sink any chance of America ever cashing in on the black gold. The Russian ploy was old-style disinformation that shows President Vladimir Putin hasn't forgotten his old KGB days. As part of his effort to resurrect Russia as the superpower it was during Soviet times, he sent an expedition to the Pole to stake a claim.
Vladimir the Great? – Jay Winik, Washington Post
Having just grabbed a piece of the Arctic the size of Western Europe, the Russian military has announced ambitious plans to establish a permanent presence in the Mediterranean for the first time since the end of the Cold War. The guiding hand behind this Russian resurgence is undeniably Russia's enigmatic president, Vladimir Putin. On the surface, enigmatic seems to be the word. Putin dons well-tailored suits even as he clamps down on domestic opposition and homemade democracy. He flashes a warm smile in the councils of international summitry even as he smashes dissent in Chechnya. He has charmed President Bush even as he stymies U.S. policy in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. The conventional wisdom is that Putin's background in the KGB is what ultimately drives his more notorious actions, leading foreign policy commentators to raise the specter of a renewed Cold War. But if the West is truly going to come to grips with Putin and a resurrected Russian state, it would do well to see him not as something relatively new but as something old, drawing on historical roots stretching back to the 18th century and Catherine the Great. Indeed, it is far more likely that Putin and his allies are following not the ghosts of Stalin and Khrushchev but spiritual masters such as Empress Catherine in seeking to reestablish Russia as a great nation on the world stage.
China's Latest Export: Soft Power - Joshua Kurlantzick, Los Angeles Times
During the last two months, as Washington focused on Iraq, few people were paying attention to what was going in the remote Ural Mountains of Russia. There, under the auspices of the benign-sounding Shanghai Cooperation Organization, some 6,000 troops, combat vehicles and planes from six nations conducted a nine-day war game called "Peace Mission 2007." The Bush administration's lack of interest in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization -- which is in fact a regional security group linking Russia, Central Asia and China -- is not terribly surprising. Since 9/11, President Bush, who won the White House in part by vowing to take a tough line against China, has concentrated on the Muslim world. To win global support for the war on terrorism, his administration has stopped calling Beijing a "strategic competitor," as he did before 9/11. On a recent visit to China, the U.S. chief of naval operations, Adm. Michael G. Mullen, announced that he was "reassured" about China's military power, adding, "I'm very encouraged about their commitment to continuing to improve this relationship" with America. But even as the administration praises China, Beijing is subtly working to increase its global influence. In the long run, China could become the first major power since the former Soviet Union to threaten U.S. international influence.
New President Makes Turkey Testing Ground - Baltimore Sun editorial
The real test of whether Islam and democracy are compatible is taking place not in Iraq or elsewhere in the Arab world but in Turkey. Right now. On Tuesday, a devout Muslim named Abdullah Gul, whose wife wears a head scarf, was elected president of Turkey by the country's parliament. Turkey is a country where the presidency has traditionally been held by a secular figure, and women in head scarves are banned from government buildings. Mr. Gul's election has unnerved many secular Turks. He is a member of the ruling Justice and Development Party, which is commonly described as having "Islamic roots"; his new post will give the party control over laws, education and the appointment of judges. His rise has provoked deep opposition inside the Turkish military, which has zealously guarded the Turkish secular model that was established by modern Turkey's founder, the legendary Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Stars and Politics a Shallow Mix of Nothingness - Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian
Many have wondered why we treat the views of current and retired rock stars, pop stars and movie stars with such respect. Why would the opinion of many of those who are high school drop outs, who sleep all day, party all night and do drugs in the hours left over, merit attention? Do the Dixie Chicks know more about running America’s foreign policy just because they are pretty and passionate? Were Bono and Bob Geldof right to condemn the G8 economists who thought investment, good governance and a liberated private sector would help Africa more than a drip of unconditional aid? Not likely. Yet their genius for a spectacle, unerring grabs for the heartstrings and saccharine sincerity give such stars a platform way out of proportion to their IQs. In some misguided circles, rockonomics rules. Ditto other stars of stage and screen.
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