Anonymous - Language ability obviously should not be held a sufficient condition of being considered a "serious scholar", but I would submit that it should be a necessary condition. I could be wrong, but doesn't Moustache Friedman also have Arabic? So obviously, there will be many with language facility , but who cannot be taken seriously now or in the future.

And if not the specificities of regional culture and politics, what do these people study? The eternal and esoteric verities of foreign policy abstraction? The universal axioms of statecraft divorced from all cultural, historical and linguistic specificity? Could a historian ever get away without reading original sources, could a scholar of Thomas Mann get away with only reading secondary and general criticism (and only in English) but not the novels themselves in the original German. Nope. Nope.

Does being able to read German make you a scholar of Thomas Mann? Also no.

Not really that hard to figure out.

I think you may have already written the skin and bones of it... that play I suggested we (i.e., the world) need, to model a "new" think tank.

I think it's waiting patiently in your archives here. Hopefully you or someone else has the earlier ones at UT.

No editing... just a bit of shaping. Selection.

Then a chorus of readers/actors/players reading your words "in their characters." A workshop.

Has anyone else noticed that significant changes really only happen when artists get involved? Playwrights, poets, songwriters, and painters, they push the political narrative along, even with its heels dug in.

About that cake with thick chocolate icing. If we ever have a gathering, I'll bring some.

Before I go to lay my sweaty head in a hot-lonely bed, I'll ask the dripping, muggy lord, to consider cooking up some scolding hot tomato stew, and accidentally spill some while serving a bowl up, to spill some on scooter 242's employer's laptop and CEO's financiers head!

Shame on taking advantage of 'ole senile Clinton's lover-boy's...a favorite fan like poor 'ole shooter 242!

Glenn, you're a lawyer. And you're great when you're writing about expanding executive powers, like this recent surveillance law, or affronts to the constitution. You write coherently and with insight, and you look good, smart, and polished on video too. Articulate and passionate, but not crazy.

But political posts like this one aren't your strongest. The Powers memo isn't anything to get excited over. It isn't "important---it isn't even interesting. It's riddled with innacurate, unsupported renderings of what other people say and think, so unsubstantiated that it isn't even wrong. That memo sounds good, it's appealing sure. But it isn't even logical, Glenn. Obama says something that people take issue with and his press department replies with this argument: if the conventional is wrong and you're not conventional, then you must be right?

More interesting is this....

[Glenn]: I conducted an interview today with Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution about his views on the war and his trip to Iraq. I will post the transcript in a couple of days along with some thoughts about it.

I wonder why the unabridged version isn't available somewhere, and why a few days to think about it are needed.

Ummm, because ... oh ... yeah ... Glenn never said he was waiting a couple days "to think about it". He explained -- in terms that even the hard-of-thinking ought to be able to pick up on:

"[On an unrelated note, the interview I conducted with O'Hanlon will be published in a couple of days. He and I agreed that I would only write about the interview with a full, unedited transcript attached. It was a long interview -- he provided some answers, even to simple and direct questions, that were 3-5 mintues long -- and it is going to take a little more time before the transcript is ready]."

See, now that wasn't that hard, was it? Well, then again, perhaps ... if you're the troll they call "shooter042".

Cheers,

Debate is tough. They all go back to lick their wounds.

Nothing is permanent and things change all the time.

Hillary will have some high risk statements, as evidenced by her "lobbyists are a-ok" moment.

It's evolution. Besides the Big Dawg, have we ever had more intelligent candidates than Barack and Hillary?

But Daniel Pipes is a scholar, and an important one. The fact that he sees the world in a different way than you do does not make him less of a scholar.

It's really not that hard to understand.

Samantha Power isn't a foreign policy wonk (or wonkette).

What is she? The best answer is in her book.

Her book:
http://perseusbooksgroup.com/perseus/book_detail.jsp?isbn=0465061508

"A Problem From Hell"
America and the Age of Genocide
by Samantha Power

Feb 20, 2002
Published by Basic Books

Description
About this book: In 1993, as a 23-year-old correspondent covering the wars in the Balkans, I was initially comforted by the roar of NATO planes flying overhead. President Clinton and other western leaders had sent the planes to monitor the Bosnian war, which had killed almost 200,000 civilians. But it soon became clear that NATO was unwilling to target those engaged in brutal "ethnic cleansing." American statesmen described Bosnia as "a problem from hell," and for three and a half years refused to invest the diplomatic and military capital needed to stop the murder of innocents. In Rwanda, around the same time, some 800,000 Tutsi and opposition Hutu were exterminated in the swiftest killing spree of the twentieth century. Again, the United States failed to intervene. This time U.S. policy-makers avoided labeling events "genocide" and spearheaded the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers stationed in Rwanda who might have stopped the massacres underway. Whatever America's commitment to Holocaust remembrance (embodied in the presence of the Holocaust Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C.), the United States has never intervened to stop genocide. This book is an effort to understand why. While the history of America's response to genocide is not an uplifting one, "A Problem from Hell" tells the stories of countless Americans who took seriously the slogan of "never again" and tried to secure American intervention. Only by understanding the reasons for their small successes and colossal failures can we understand what we as a country, and we as citizens, could have done to stop the most savage crimes of the last century. -Samantha Power

Reviews
"Some books elegantly record history; some books make history. This book does both."
— Doris Kearns Goodwin
"Samantha Power has written a much needed and powerful book exposing our unreadiness to fulfill the commitment implied by "never again." Her research is path-breaking; and her writing is lucid, nuanced and compelling. This is a work of landmark significance."
— Aryeh Neier, President, Open Society Institute and author of War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror and the Struggle for Justice
"Samantha Power has written one of those rare books that is truly as important as its subject. With great narrative verve, and a sober and subtle intelligence, she carries us deep behind the scenes of history-in-the-making to map the gray zones of diplomatic politics where the rhetoric of best intentions founders against inertia and inaction."
— Philip Gourevitch, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
"[A] magisterial chronicle."
— The New Yorker
"agonizingly persuasive."
— The New York Review of Books
"The myriad horror stories of this age of genocide have many ugly characters, several of whom Power profiles in her well written and extensively documented book…. Power… seems to have little problem endorsing American global dominance and, on the basis of such, calling for the United States to take the lead in battling genocide."
— The Nation
"An eloquent and detailed testimony to why we should not let our government stand on the sidelines when faced with crimes against humanity."
— In These Times
"In this important book, Power does not preach, and she does not pontificate. What she does, gently but insistently, is to prod our conscience."
— The San Francisco Chronicle

http://pulitzer.org/2003/2003.html

The Pulitzer Prizes 2003

GENERAL NON-FICTION
"A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide
by Samantha Power (Basic Books)

http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/2004/time100/scientists/100power.html

TIME Magazine: TIME 100
Samantha Power
Voice Against Genocide

[...] What made Power's argument so bracing — and cemented its place as one of the past decade's most important books on U.S. foreign policy — was her verdict that, far from ignoring genocide, three generations of American leaders knowingly and deliberately decided it was not in the country's interest to stop it. "One of the most important conclusions I have reached," Power wrote, "is that the U.S. record is not one of failure. It is one of success ... U.S. officials worked the system and the system worked."

A Problem from Hell won the Pulitzer Prize and made Power, an Irish-born 33-year-old who is the executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, the new conscience of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. Though she worked as an adviser to former Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark, Power has a nuanced philosophy that is not an easy fit with either party. She condemns the first Bush Administration for not committing military force to stop Iraqi genocide before and after the first Gulf War. But she opposed the second Gulf War. "My criterion for military intervention — with a strong preference for multilateral intervention — is an immediate threat of large-scale loss of life," she has said. "That's a standard that would have been met in Iraq in 1988 but wasn't in 2003."

- - TIME Magazine, Monday, Apr. 26, 2004