BUT WILL THE PROVOST EXHORT THEM TO CELEBRATE DIVERSITY? Joanne Jacobs (not kidnapped, not drafted) on the state of public indoctrination education, elementary, secondary, and tertiary, in Saddam's Iraq.

ET VITAM VENTURI SAECULI. The liberation of Iraq has its good news-bad news moments. (What's the good news? Saddam Hussein is overthrown. Allah be praised! What's the bad news? Some friends of Israel did it.) Intel Dump sees in a Shia protest a glass half-full. Mark Kleiman is less cheerful. This Independent coverage by Fergal Keane is worth a look. Am I asking too much to hope that someone at that constitutional convention understands the Establishment Clause? It would be a waste for Iraq's Shia, having been denied religious freedom for so long, to deny it to others.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Substance matters more than symbolism, and those who are less quick to discover that are likely to marginalize themselves. David Brooks argues that the substance that matters is what young adults, relatively free of the conventional wisdoms of the past, see. Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel call the roll of failed conventional wisdoms, noting inter alia that viewpoint diversity on the campus must come. Power Line, making a case for Express Messenger status, recommended these articles (here) and caught a prominent academician in an inconsistency and made a case for pressuring moderate Republicans on tax policy.

WHAT'S ARABIC FOR "ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE?" Ur is an excellent place for a constitutional convention, if Philadelphia isn't convenient. Details at Command Post.

EXPENSIVE, BUT A START. An internet cafe in Kandahar, Afghanistan (are you cleared for this?) It appears that the owner understands what "Internet privacy" is all about.

THE ACADEMIC FEVER SWAMP. Award for best war coverage goes to Al-Jazeera, argue Frances S. Hasso. About what you might expect from a professor in "gender and womens' studies." (If I ran the University ... stay your hand, that rant will be coming). Get this: "Rather than being an anti-Western propaganda tool, al-Jazeera is popular in the Arab world because it addresses issues that are already on the minds of people in the region: U.S. foreign policy and militarism, Israeli occupation, poverty, democratization, gender inequality, and the role of religion in public life." Yes, and there is a topology in which a bikini is isomorphic to a burqa, isn't there?

The reality is, all this talk about "gender" is just that, talk. This Eszter's Blog post covers all the bases in a recent gender identity quiz. (I found it via Farrellblogger. The exact post is here, and do check all the cross references. The Farrells have reorganized their link list and you might wish to start at the top.) Apparently being uncomfortable around power tools is NOT a social construction of the female "gender."

DO THE RESEARCH (Also via Betsy's Page.) Michael Skube discovers too much sound and fury and too little substance in the ongoing ideological struggle. Professor Skube visits the bookstore and what does he see: "A sampling: 'Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First.' 'Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right.' 'Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism'." What does he conclude? "It would serve conservatism better if some of these best-selling authors -- no one would call them writers -- trafficked more in ideas and less in impulses." Methinks he doth protest too much. He's confusing pundits and popularizers with serious thinkers (Richard Pipes, the Kagans father and son, Friedrich Hayek, Paul MacAvoy, Milton Friedman, Bruce Ames, Bjorn Lomborg after he got mau-maued for doing some research come to mind, and I beg your forgiveness if I missed one of your favorites or didn't name you) and it is those ideas -- not to mention the abject failures of Social Security, public assistance, affirmative action, U.N. sanctions, Amtrak, and the designated hitter rule -- that provide a ready market for the popularizers. Skube grasps some of this: "It required only liberalism's self-mutilation from the '60s through the '80s for a majority of Americans to realize what they were not. They might be Democrats or they might be Republicans, but they were not liberals." But his ending is totally unconvincing. "If some have traded civility for braying boorishness -- and they assuredly have -- they've effected an unflattering reverse image. The same contempt and hubris that did liberals grave harm now is reflected back at them. With the tables turned, conservatives of a certain stripe are proving themselves as capable of ignorance as anyone in the faculty lounge." Get some viewpoint diversity into that common room, and then, perhaps, it will be time for malice toward none, charity toward all.

D'OH. Broder Discovers Median Voter. (Hat tip: Betsy's Page.)

WORKIN' ON THE RAILROAD. Train service from Umm Qasr to Basra resumes (via Command Post.) Here is a capsule description of Iraq's railroad network (large map here, and the person who maintains the site has also done some work on Afghanistan's railroads.) My 1990-1991 Jane's All the World Railways indicates that the Ministry of Transport and Communications had a number of plans, including a planned direct line across the Turkish border, bypassing Syria. That plan was overtaken by the Kuwait crisis.

At one time, the Iraq railroad hosted the Taurus Express from Istanbul with service to Cairo or Basra provided by Wagons-Lits, beloved of Agatha Christie for real, and Bond, James Bond, on screen.

LONG WEEK. Now to find a cave, roll a stone in front of the entrance, take a nap, and expect the stone to be rolled away Sunday morning.

START A FLYING MUSEUM. Australian troops have taken custody of Iraq's air fleet.

IT'S THE SECOND WEEK OF DEER CAMP. Bag limit: one gazelle.

WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE, WITH CHARITY TOWARD ALL. Perhaps some day, but we still have not settled what sort of intellectual culture we are going to have just yet. James Lileks has little patience for another "discovery from the 9/10 fossil bed, another attempt to insist that nothing changed - the old paradigms, the old arguments, the old hyperboles hanging on the cars of the long postmodern circus train are more relevant now than ever." Noemie Emery sees the usual carping from the usual carpers, and despairs. Joshua Chafetz identifies yet more things not in your name, and earns an endorsement from Daniel Drezner. And so the beat goes on.

SELF-SELECTION. Number 2 Pencil has some thoughts on enrollment management strategies in Georgia, including raising admission standards. Now if we could do something about people conflating janitors and plumbers. One is a job, in fact it's an honorable way of working through college. The other is a skilled trade.

COPIED IN FULL. I'm lifting the following from Common Sense and Wonder, who lifted it from Curmudgeonly and Skeptical.

MEMO TO NANCY PELOSI:

A Failed Plan?

1. We took Iraq in less time than it took Janet Reno to take the Branch Davidian compound. That was a 51-day operation.

2. It took less time to find evidence of chemical weapons in Iraq than it took Hillary Clinton to find the Rose Law Firm billing records.

3. It took Teddy Kennedy longer to call the police after his Oldsmobile sunk at Chappaquiddick than it took the 3rd Infantry Division and the Marines to destroy the Medina Republican Guard.

4. We took Iraq in less time than it took to count the votes in Florida in the year 2000!

Nancy, you and other Democratic leaders sure have a strange concept of failure.

HORIZONTAL, VERTICAL, AND SITUATIONAL EQUITY. Pick any two, notes Virginia Postrel in examining the "marriage penalty" and other tax benefits.

BELLICOSE WOMEN. Charlie Sykes is impressed by Killer Chicks but not Augusta aspirants.

YA'ACOV, SON OF YOSEF, BROTHER OF YESHUA. Yes, that Yeshua. Tape Sunday at 8 pm and 11 pm (God's Time.) (Via Betsy's Page.)

BIASED GRADING? (Warning: mini-dissertation.) Kitchen Cabinet finds a post critical of the war effort headed The C-Student War. Kitchen Cabinet correctly recalls that the Vietnam War was a production of the self-described "Best and Brightest" (there is a great, albeit dark Doonesbury cartoon from the mid-1970s in which several guys attending a party as "the best and the brightest" lay some hubris on other guests, "We can win the war in Vietnam!" after which Mike Doonesbury remarks, "what has happened to us?) and that production didn't turn out very well for anybody. Captain Indignant, on the other hand, suggests there is a necessary role for the U.N. (enlighten me, please?) One wonders if the A grades and the C grades aren't being assigned on the basis of agreement with Generally Accepted Mushy Good Intentions rather than on any substance. The Paul Krugman column Captain Indignant links to goes on in a similar vein: the absence of any Grand Plans after the toppling of the Taliban and the Ba'ath Party cause the professor to furrow his brow. (I have to wonder, however, if these same people wouldn't be complaining about cultural insensitivity, or hegemonic biases, or some other Intolerance, if Defense and State had Grand Plans for the future Afghanistan and Iraq.)

Perhaps it is Captain Indignant (whose background I'm not familiar with) and Professor Krugman (who ought to know better, his recent professional writings on suburbanization show some awareness of emergent systems and spontaneous order) who deserve a C (or, as it's the holy season, the benefit of an Incomplete) for arguing from a weak model. As Command Post notes, the notion of showing up for work even if the Ba'ath Party is no longer around to tell you to do so is a new idea in Iraq, and the notion of starting your own business may take time to catch on. It strikes me as presumptuous in the extreme to argue that there's any kind of Grand Plan that anybody (United Nations, State Department, Northern Illinois University faculty senate) could design for Iraq or Afghanistan that would have any hope of working.

(Footnote: Paul Krugman's New York Times columns do not rise to the standard he has set in his professional writings. It is useful to visit Hoystory or stay alert to unrefereed comments such as this article (hat tip: Common Sense and Wonder.) Perhaps in the midst of all the selective interpretation of the spin is something resembling the truth, but getting at it is oft a lot of work.)

Perhaps the reason Mushy Good Intentions earn undeserved As is that Mushy Good Intentions oft go unchallenged for too long. Consider today's first academic atrocity, again from an Ivy League university. Students Eliana Johnson and James Kirchick filed a report on a teach-in with Front Page, a site that doesn't like the academic Left. Yale professor Jim Sleeper keyed an op-ed for the Yale Daily News making a case for civility. But even he is not immune from sloppy thinking. Start with his thesis: "But we do endure something more chronic and perfectly legal: the belligerence of some students who think themselves entitled to subject their peers and even professors to baiting, ridicule, and ad hominem attack." So far, so good. Logic and content are supposed to rule. But read on: "Unlike us in 1968, though, none of you has to risk your life, fortune, or sacred honor for your convictions. You haven't had to oppose this war by risking imprisonment and life as a felon. You haven't had to support it by serving in it -- and I note that none of the Fedayeen Uncle Sams who've intimidated people here has enlisted, as did many Yalies whose names and dreams outlasted their 20s only on those icy, marble walls." Hasn't the good professor crossed the line into baiting (you ingrates aren't old enough to have protested President Johnson's war with your graduate student deferment, let alone to be conscripted into and subsequently killed in President Roosevelt's war) and the ad hominem (never had to go to Canada, never had to meet a payroll, blah blah blah.)

Hugh Hewitt has pointed out some other problems with Professor Sleeper's logic, with the thanks of Power Line, and SCSU Scholars have located a rejoinder by the students, with a response from Professor Sleeper (just keep scrolling.) Clearly, the war at home, over what kind of culture we are going to have, and whether there is going to be viewpoint diversity at the universities, and whether there are going to be consistently applied standards of discourse, is a long way from over.

UPDATE: Kitchen Cabinet with some local knowledge of the Yale squabbles.

WINNING THE PEACE: the importance of the Establishment Clause. Buzz Machine reports that on the first Friday after liberation, many Iraqi Moslems demonstrated for an Islamic government. He notes, "It is time for us infidel Westerners -- religious leaders and the leaders of the U.N., France, Germany, and all their fellow travelers -- to demand democracy for Iraq, to make it clear that we cannot trade a secular dictatorship for a religious dictatorship." Quite so. Balancing the tension between competing religious visions in the political sphere is challenge enough, but it beats having to submit to an established vision.