February 13, 2006

Quote of the Day (and a reading suggestion)

Not that this is new news, but winning the (smaller) war in Iraq and the (larger) war against fundamentalist Islam will be harder than we thought, and take longer than we want:

...the number of books translated by the whole Arab world over the past thousand years is equivalent to the numbers of books translated by Spain in one year...

Go and read the whole article by David Corn (World War IV as Fourth-Generation Warfare in Policy Review).

I'm not convinced he's right, and he's a bit too sympathetic to the NeoCons for my taste, but he makes some points that are at least worthy of larger debate. In particular, the argument that we need to focus our efforts not on Muslim women and youth (Corn claims that's the target today), but on the Muslim clergy and the Muslim military (the uniformed militaries of the states of the region) is an interesting hypothesis. In any event, worth the read.

(The Corn article was found via this WaPo Op-Ed in Sunday's paper, which also cited the translation statistic.)

Posted by baltar at February 13, 2006 12:27 PM | TrackBack | Posted to International Affairs | Iraq | Military Affairs | Politics | War


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