Stay the Course

Kaplan’s conclusions drawn from the Lankan Tamil-Sinhalese dust-up:

So is there any lesson here? Only a chilling one. The ruthlessness and brutality to which the Sri Lankan government was reduced in order to defeat the Tigers points up just how nasty and intractable the problem of insurgency is. The Sri Lankan government made no progress against the insurgents for nearly a quarter century, until they turned to extreme and unsavory methods. Could they have won without terrorizing the media and killing large numbers of civilians? Perhaps, but probably not without help from the Chinese, who, in addition to their military aid, gave the Sri Lankan government diplomatic cover at the UN Security Council.

These are methods the U.S. should never use. But the fact that this is what it took for the Sri Lankan government to subdue the Tamil Tigers makes clear just what a hard grind lies ahead for the U.S. in Afghanistan.

What’s the lesson here?  Maybe the Melians had it coming.

Independence Day

So Iraq is celebrating… what?  America’s victory over Iraq?  That can’t be right.  Iraq’s victory over America?  Implausible.  But every nation needs a day to parade its army.  Live it up, friends.  The feeling is mutual, I’m sure.

I can’t tell from the story how we’re supposed to feel about this.  Not proud, certainly.  Putting down an Arab rabble doesn’t quite swell the breast like smashing the Kaiser’s legions.  Nor could I plausibly feel relieved, since the bad news from the Levant had already slowed to a trickle.  Numb?  Yes, that’s about right.  The Iraq engagement ended for me years ago when I began resolutely changing the channel whenever the topic intruded.

Fighting the Last War

A convention of Paleontologists met in Ohio recently, and when a few dozen of them crossed into Kentucky to visit the Creation Museum the New York Times was on-hand to report.  Among the highlights:

Near the entrance to the exhibits is an animatronic display that includes a girl feeding a carrot to a squirrel as two dinosaurs stand nearby, a stark departure from natural history museums that say the first humans lived 65 million years after the last dinosaurs.

Dr. Bengtson noted that to explain how the few species aboard the ark could have diversified to the multitude of animals alive today in only a few thousand years, the museum said simply, “God provided organisms with special tools to change rapidly.”

About 50 kinds of dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark, the museum explains, but later went extinct for unknown reasons.

That last bit is my favorite.

Long-time followers of this blog know all about the Creation Museum, of course, so the only news lead-in is the visit by the bone-collectors.  One wonders: did the Times put them up to it?  This is just the sort of ploy they might use to sell a few more papers in Indianapolis or Boulder.  If so, I don’t think it will work; my sense is that Darwinism as a theater in the Culture Wars has played out for now.  Middle America is going to find all new ways of exhasperating the Guardians in the years to come, but Creationism won’t be chief among them.