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The New York Times reports today that the Kurds in Northern Iraq are reticent about involving themselves any US military action against Saddam Hussein. Apparently being utterly hung out to dry by the previous President Bush has made them somewhat mistrustful that America will see things through. The Kurds (and everyone in Iraq) needs us to get rid of Saddam and replace him with a democratic government that will guarantee the rights that Kurds have enjoyed since the US and UK started patrolling their airspace. Clearly, though, we have buttons to push. If we start to back off from our commitment to maintaining the no fly zone over Kurdish regions, then the Kurds will be just as oppressed as everyone else in Iraq. The question is whether we’re willing to manipulate the Kurds in that way for our own ends. The answer will certainly be a measure of the character of the Bush administration. ...

Matt Welch: Dubya losing the benefit of the doubt

Oblomovka is Danny O’Brien’s weblog. Nobody told me Danny O’Brien has a weblog.

Seth Schoen has prepared two sets of notes (7/3, and 7/5) on Palladium that have helped me understand it a heck of a lot better than I did before. Zimran also explains briefly what Palladium is. It’s important to note that Palladium and TCPA are not the same thing. I was under the misapprehension that Palladium was an implementation of TCPA or something, but they’re two different things.

This Washington Monthly profile of Secretary of the Army Thomas White is worth reading, not so much to learn about White, but more to learn about the current political climate in Washington. You know how I feel about resigning – it ought to happen more often.

Steven Den Beste wrote a great item on education and school vouchers yesterday. The way that schools are run right now is pretty broken, but school vouchers are not guaranteed to help, and he’s certainly right in saying that allowing “market economics” or whatever to work its magic on the school system isn’t going to suddenly make everything OK. The new breed of school incentive systems that President Bush loves is doomed to failure, for the blunt reason that Den Beste offers – some kids just don’t have the same potential that others do. The other stupid thing is that schools (at least in North Carolina) are graded on improvement. So if you have 95% of your students reading at grade level one year, and 95% of your students reading at grade level again the next year, you are evaluated poorly because you didn’t make things better. A rotten school that has 50% of students reading at grade level in year one and 70% reading at grade level in year two is evaluated incredibly well because of the amazing improvement. There’s no facility for saying that schools have simply maxed out. Thus we see students who are average to above average being sent to remedial programs in hopes of improving their scores so that the school’s average scores will go up and teachers can all get their raises. The best and worst thing about the public school system is that they have to educate everybody. So dumb students, psychotic students, ill behaved students, and criminals all get the same opportunity to learn that promising, hard working students get. I worry about what happens when the promising students in struggling schools are all off at some voucher-subsidized school and the teachers at the struggling school are left with everyone whose parents don’t care or who don’t want to learn. I don’t have any data on this, but I would imagine that at tough schools, burnout among teachers will progress more rapidly if the students that make the classes worth teaching are no longer there. ...

Unknown assassins murdered Afghan vice president Abdul Qadir today as he left Ministry of Public Works. This is a particularly bitter moment, because Qadir is the brother of Abdul Haq, the exiled Pashtun leader who returned to the country to rally his people against the Taliban and wound up being captured and executed. The real problem here is that there’s no way right now to tell who killed him or why. Perhaps it was a personal vendetta, perhaps it was members of another ethnic group who resented the fact that Pashtuns had been given that seat in government, perhaps it was former elements of the Taliban who resented the fact that he led part of the uprising against them. If I were in charge of the international peacekeeping force, I’d be trying to figure it out. This also really leads you to respect Hamid Karzai’s personal bravery. He could certainly be cooling his heels in America or in Europe, free from the responsibilities of running a shattered country and walking around every day with the sword of Damocles over his head. Hopefully Afghanistan will be able to turn things around. ...

A group of Arab scholars (led by an Egyptian sociologist) has published the Arab Human Development Report, a document which seeks to document and explain the challenges facing the people living in the 22 Arab League states. The previous link is to an Economist story on the report, which provides a good summary. You can find the report itself on UNDP Web site.

Ted Williams passed away today at age 83. There goes the greatest hitter that ever lived.

I’ve received a couple of interesting emails from readers regarding the International Criminal Court that I haven’t given the attention they deserved. Hopefully over the weekend I can do a bit more research on the ICC and refine my views one way or another.