Lloyd directed me to this Washington Post article: U.S. unit masters art of counterinsurgency. There is hope in Iraq if we can duplicate success like this. Yet, much of the trouble in Iraq seems to be things we should’ve figured out in the first place. Things I figured my government had figured out. I mean, like language training. What most heartened me was mentioning treating the Iraqis with respect. If you treat your prisoners like shit, of course you’re going to breed more terrorists.

I’m a little bit late on this Scientific American article, Scientific American: Getting a Leg Up on Land, which came out last December. It talks about new discoveries of how fish evolved into land-dwelling animals. It’s very interesting how they bring different threads of research, like research on genes and research on fossils, to illustrate this evolution. Evolution isn’t rampant speculation; it’s a careful theory. And fish evolving legs completely destroys the “microevolution vs. macroevolution” distinction that creationists like to use.

From The Believer, A Soldier Upon a Hard Campaign. Wither satire. He says the world is so absurd that it does the work of a satirist already. Then, where does that leave one room to write satire? Of course, the article talks about more than that. It’s quite a humorous read, as well.

I just stumbled upon this article, After Neoconservatism from the New York Times. It’s by Francis Fukuyama. I think he’s going to be a speaker in the Foreign Affairs Symposium we’re having at Hopkins. Anyway, by just stumbled upon, I mean I’m only on the second page. His use of the phrase “realistic Wilsonianism” really attracted me, as I had recently mentioned to Lloyd that we need a more “patient Bush Doctrine.” (“If it isn’t oxymoronic,” I didn’t hesitate to add.)