Fifty British foreign policy “experts” wrote a scathing letter to Prime Minister Blair this week.

We the undersigned former British ambassadors, high commissioners, governors and senior international officials, including some who have long experience of the Middle East and others whose experience is elsewhere, have watched with deepening concern the policies which you have followed on the Arab-Israel problem and Iraq, in close co-operation with the United States.

They’re unhappy about Israel.

The decision by the USA, the EU, Russia and the UN to launch a “Road Map” for the settlement of the Israel/Palestine conflict raised hopes that the major powers would at last make a determined and collective effort to resolve a problem which, more than any other, has for decades poisoned relations between the West and the Islamic and Arab worlds. … But the hopes were ill-founded. Nothing effective has been done either to move the negotiations forward or to curb the violence.

Well, the Israelis seem to have done a pretty good job of curbing the violence. Note the sharp dropoff in suicide bombings in the last 4 years.

Britain and the other sponsors of the Road Map merely waited on American leadership, but waited in vain.

No, they waited for Arafat to act like a statesman who wanted to found a nation, and not a kleptocratic thug. The U.S. played along with the fiction until recently.

Worse was to come. After all those wasted months, the international community has now been confronted with the announcement by Ariel Sharon and President Bush of new policies which are one-sided and illegal and which will cost yet more Israeli and Palestinian blood.

You mean the abandonment of the fictitious ‘right of return’ which was stupidly fuzzed over in the Oslo talks by these professionals?

Our dismay at this backward step is heightened by the fact that you yourself seem to have endorsed it, abandoning the principles which for nearly four decades have guided international efforts to restore peace in the Holy Land and which have been the basis for such successes as those efforts have produced.

And, looking at the facts on the ground in 2003, which successes, exactly, would those be? What ‘principles’, other than an overweening pride, and respect for the ‘process of negotiation’ for its own sake, would those be?

This abandonment of principle comes at a time when rightly or wrongly we are portrayed throughout the Arab and Muslim world as partners in an illegal and brutal occupation in Iraq.

The conduct of the war in Iraq has made it clear that there was no effective plan for the post-Saddam settlement.

No accurate plan, that’s for sure. Here’s the one valid criticism.

All those with experience of the area predicted that the occupation of Iraq by the Coalition forces would meet serious and stubborn resistance, as has proved to be the case.

To describe the resistance as led by terrorists, fanatics and foreigners is neither convincing nor helpful.

Well, that’s funny. Because if the masses of Iraqi people were rising up, the news would look somewhat different than it does, wouldn’t it? Which means that – wait for it – the forces we oppose are terrorists, fanatics, and foreigners. The masses of people haven’t, and aren’t – the trick is going to be making sure they won’t.

… The military actions of the Coalition forces must be guided by political objectives and by the requirements of the Iraq theatre itself, not by criteria remote from them.

It is not good enough to say that the use of force is a matter for local commanders.

Heavy weapons unsuited to the task in hand, inflammatory language, the current confrontations in Najaf and Falluja, all these have built up rather than isolated the opposition.

Thanks, guys but war under diplomatic control was tried several places by UN forces. Didn’t work so well. Let’s not do it any more, OK? Soldiers fight, and make those decisions – when the fighting is over, or has the chance to be over, let’s let the diplomatic corps take the lead.

Here’s a metaphor. If someone (my uncle, say) has pancreatic cancer for two years and doesn’t know about it – is the surgeon who’s excising that cancer causing a problem, or solving one?

The basic failure of this cohort of diplomats – in the UK, US, UN, and elsewhere – is that for twenty years, they were silent and ineffective while Islamism grew in power and hatred.

They believed that by negotiating the terms of ‘stability’ – because, after all, when you negotiate for a living, a successful negotiation is the major thing you’re looking for – even as one side made it clear that stability wasn’t what was being sought – they were accomplishing something.

What they were doing was selling my uncle Lydia Pinkham’s Elixir as the cancer grew deeper into his body. These men (interestingly, it appears to be an all-male group) should be ashamed; ashamed of writing this letter, and more deeply, ashamed for having dined on the Queen’s silver while allowing this problem to grow unchecked.

In fact, they not only let it grow unchecked, but stood by, supportive and silent, as any real peace process was undermined by oil bribes.

One of the keys of any successful negotiation is the willingness to simply go ‘basta!’ – no more – and get up and walk from the table.

The problem with a policy of engagement and continuous negotiation supported by this crew is that you preclude that possibility.

Bush and Sharon have done just that in Palestine, and Bush and Blair have done it in Iraq.

That’s infinitely preferable to a policy in which diplomats confer in luxury while suicide bombers murder innocents.

My uncle had surgery two weeks ago, at Columbia-Presbyterian in New York. His surgery was successful, and he’s recovering at home.

Look, I’m not a historian of the Middle East, nor someone who lives and breathes foreign policy.

But I do know failure when I see it.

And I’ll quote an old reply of mine to Trent, who challenged my credentials in this area:

…the genius of the American system is that there certainly are experts on game theory, diplomatic history, and policy who have substantive and valuable expertise in these areas.

And they all work for guys like me. Our Congress and our President are typically business men and women, lawyers, rank amateurs when it comes to the hard games that they study so diligently at ENA (Ecole Nationale d’Administration). And that’s a good thing, in fact, it’s a damn good thing.

It is a good thing because the unique power of the United States comes from our willingness to diffuse power down into the ranks – to act in ways outside what a small cadre of mandarins sitting at a capital can envision.

I’ll stand by those words, and voice a small appreciation that guys like the jittery fifty work for Tony Blair, and not the other way around.

Kevin Drum has a guest post up by Bruce Reed, who was Clinton’s chief domestic policy advisor (calm down!). It’s a dead-on commentary on the pro-choice march in Washington last weekend (see pictures and commentary by a pro-choice Republican here).

He makes a key point:

After sharing the Mall with a million choice supporters yesterday, I don’t see how anyone could say that our side lacks religious fervor. People made pilgrimages from thousands of miles to stand up for their convictions, flocking to the capital of compassionate conservatism to demand more compassion from their leaders.

At the same time, I couldn’t help noticing that the one thing we seem to have no religious fervor for is religion.

And he concludes…

Still, the Mall could have used more sermons on Sunday, and fewer celebrities. It’s not fair to compare a Sunday spent listening to well-meaning activists with that day Martin Luther King called all God’s children to join hands and sing the words of the old spiritual, “Free at last.” But as we helped our children count the number of dogs at the march so they wouldn’t count the number of obscenities one entertainer was shouting from onstage, I couldn’t help thinking about what has been lost along the way.

And how much longer it will take to get where we want to go without it. (emphasis added)

I’ll drink to that.

I’ve followed the whole ‘defending Howard Stern’ discussion with a kind of sour grin. The only thing I like less than the coarsening of public behavior we’re seeing now is the censorship proposed to cure it; that’s as true of political discourse as entertainment.

OK, here’s a question for all of you who think that it’s the hawks who are moonbats (and I know you’re out there). It stems in part from Henley’s post, as well as much of what I’ve read from people who want to be ‘aggressively chasing terrorists’ while not invading countries.

How – exactly – does that work? Because I can’t figure it out. Let’s take the following examples…Let’s take three hypothetical cases:

# Joe-Bob Bin Laden, Osama’s Texan brother, who has been demonstrated to have financed the Hamburg Al Quieda cell, and is now living in a small villa on the beach in Lebanon.
# Jessica Bin Laden, Osama’s sister, who was videotaped unloading duffel bags into Mohammed Atta’s car in August of 2001. She’s living in a small village somewhere in Syria.
# Juan Bin Laden, Osama’s South of the Border brother, whose call phone triggered the explosions in Madrid. He’s now vanished into Iran.

OK, let’s toss this open.

* How do you find them?

* Once you find them what do you do?

* What do you require from their host country?

* How will their host country react when you do whatever it is that you do?

Via danah boyd:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

“The lawyers wanted to know if the plaintiffs, the black children in Clarenden County, would show the same result as those we had tested earler.”

– from ‘Eyes on the Prize, America’s Civil Rights Years 1954 – 65’ by Juan Williams

(hat tip to Tim Oren)

While commenter Lilith and Trent put ‘paid’ to modern Islam in the comments to the post criticizing Henley’s Grand Scheme below, it’s important to note that there are signs of hope.

In today’s L.A. Times, Walter Russell Mead has a column on Algeria.

It’s important to note that it was in Algeria that the roots of modern anticolonial theory took hold – Fanon wrote from his experience as a psychiatrist in Algeria. The film ‘Battle of Algiers’ brought the brutal reality of counterinsurgency home to us, and the French policy toward the Arab world was shaped in Algeria.

And now, some good things are happening there.

Algeria just completed the freest election in the history of the Arab world, it has lots of oil and gas, it wants to work closely with the United States against fanatical terror — and, as a special added bonus, it still doesn’t like France.

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has played a leading role in the reforms that are changing the country. First elected in a 1999 contest widely regarded as rigged, Bouteflika has lifted controls on the press and on the opposition. He was reelected earlier this month. A brash and independent press criticizes the president daily — and as long as it remains free, Algeria’s institutions will continue to gain international respect.

Reality is complex, and a very smart (and rich) fellow once told me that he’d made most of his money on the simple assumption that things are seldom as bad or good as people think.

Advice well worth taking.

Scott at Demosophia has a measured and thoughtful response to Henley’s Grand Plan up on his site.

Check it out.

Jim Henley gleefully points out that while my post looking agog at his Grand Plan was titled ‘Autarky in the U.S.A.‘, he meant no such thing, and presupposes that we can freely trade with the Islamist world while withdrawing from them culturally, politically and militarily.

This is on a par with his assumption that we can “beat the hell” out of terrorists who attack us while magically remaining at peace with the nations that shelter them. It’s been explained to me that he’s a libertarian, which may explain it, as somehow some of them seem to think it’s possible to have economic or political relationships without social or historical ones. They’re the flip side of the Rawls folks who think that participants in the political world somehow appear magically from the forehead of Zeus.

I’m looking forward to his longer response. No, really, I am.
–

Maybe I’m just too tired right now; it’s been a heckuva week, on many fronts. But when I was pointed to Jim Henley’s Grand Plan, I just lost the capacity for reasonable thought; it was so dumb, such a dorm-room, bong-hit driven idea of how the world ought to be that I almost left it alone. Then I got a link to it from a non-blog person, and realized that I had to Go Back In There and wrestle with it.

Because for many of the folks on my team – the left – this is what foreign policy ought to look like, and in a big way my fear is that this could become something actually thinkable. And I’m not sure if I’m more scared that Trent’s vision of the world or this one will come to pass. Actually, it’s because I believe that this one leads, almost inevitably, to Trent’s.

“A Grand Strategy for the Rest – The Unqualified Offerings Plan, not just for Iraq but for terrorism generally:

1) Stop borrowing trouble

OK, that makes sense. The problem of course is that – as in the oldest known form of drama, tragedy – the trouble we’re paying for was borrowed generations ago. There’s no ‘ollie ollie oxen free’; no Original Position. So as a game-theory concept, it makes lots of sense. As a basis for real-world policy, it makes very little.

2) “Wait” for the people behind the trouble we’ve already borrowed to get old and tired or die off outright.

Right. First Rawls, then Kuhn; a full plate of philosophy’s Greatest Hits. Sadly, the dynamics are little more complex than that. Yes, the changes are large largely generational, but – a big but – the dynamics making the new generation take positions can’t be reset to zero, there are consequences for disengagement, and so there’s little but hope that would lead one to believe that – absent some positive act – the next generations will be happier to coexist than the last.

No, they don’t “hate us because we’re free.” Or put it this way, they may hate us because we’re free, but very, very, very few people can get worked up enough about our freedom to dedicate themselves to ending it – absent concrete American interference in their business. There’s a big difference between hating someone and troubling to cross the world to try to kick their ass.

Well, there are two problems.

The first one is, yes, they do – they do, because they are a part of an expansionist (as are all evangelical) religion that sees a unified worldwide church as is goal, and more important, because one of the strongest strains in that church was raised from stock created here in the West, and defines itself, not only internally through the Quran, but externally, against the West (see Qutb).

The second problem is that even if we tried, we couldn’t cut the ties that are at the boundaries between our cultures. Trade, migration, media…the big three drivers that force their culture into contact with ours – even without the mechanisms of imperialism (stipulating for the moment that imperialism is as powerful as he suggests) force us to deal with each other. Does he somehow think that the Playboy Channel and MTV will somehow stop being watched in Riyadh? And that this itself won’t be a threat to the established order?

And while he doesn’t go so far as to suggest autarky, he seems to forget that in a progressive analysis of trade – the kind engaged in by people who see hegemony and fight it – the terms of trade are always slanted toward the developed world (the West) and the trade itself is thus a part of the problem.

I want to be perfectly clear that this policy does not instantly remove all dangers. The first law of organizations is self-perpetuation. The existing anti-American terrorist organizations, like Al Qaeda, are not going to call off their jihad just because we pull out of Iraq and Saudi Arabia and stop writing blank checks to the Likud. But absent fresh humiliations, fewer and fewer young Muslim men will find the tired old call to yet more jihad worth heeding.

What humiliations, exactly, did he have in mind? Because I think he’s forgetting that OBL is talking about ancient colonial history, and battles in Andalusia and at the gates of Vienna. These folks have a much better sense of history than we do.

“Wait” is in scare quotes because it sounds more passive than the policy I intend. For one thing, I would continue to harry the men and organization behind the September 2001 atrocities to the ends of the earth. “Don’t Tread on Me” is my policy, and that’s what Al Qaeda did. Bite back hard. At the same time, don’t pretend that everyone on earth doesn’t respond to the same impulse – go tromping in the dens of others and they will bite back too. This country’s conservatives of old were smarter about this kind of thing: they didn’t think they were the only conservatives in the world. They didn’t imagine that you could deploy trooin 150-odd countries without provoking a reaction. They wouldn’t imagine that the reaction was noble, but they respected the force of nature that is the essential conservatism of the planet.

How the hell do we do this, given that we’re supposed to leave the Arab countries alone? Sneak in and assassinate them? Use Predators and Hellfires? Does he think that the Arab world won’t freaking notice when these guys suddenly start turning up dead? How does he think the sovereign countries that we’re supposed to be so sensitive to will react when we kidnap or kill their citizens or guests without their consent?

More important, can I get some of what he’s smoking?

For another thing, I believe the American system, as conceived if not always as practiced, is deeply attractive. So let’s be American. Let’s be free, for one thing. Kill the excresences on the Constitution the current administration as brought forth – the PATRIOT Act, the evisceration of habeas corpus, the asserted power to unreviewably revoke citizenship and declare someone an enemy combatant. Let’s trade and travel and welcome visitors to our shores. Let us, in other words, have the faith that we are our own best advertisement. Thence comes your Muslim reformation.

Yes it is, and here for once we’re largely in agreement. We’re not selling what we’ve got, because in no small part, we’re not living it.

“About those visitors. An obvious trend presents itself: young Muslim students who come to the West for a specifically technical education, who become radicalized politically by a poisonous combination of culture shock, homesickness, youthful hormones and – ironically – insularity (isolating themselves among other young Muslim men). America’s university’s are the glory of our educational system. And from what I’ve read, our graduate technical departments depend on a steady stream of foreign students to keep afloat. But I’d make it a requirement of a student visa that recipients take a heavy dose of humanities, especially American studies courses. I’d also have the State Department screen applicants better, though this would probably be of limited use. (I think the salient problem is students who are moderate at home and become radicals here.) Will cramming humanistic education down the throats of engineering students do any good? The college I dropped out of thinks so. MIT always bragged that it had the toughest humanities requirements of any elite school, glossing over the fact that it had to: it’s the only way most of its students would take those courses. I don’t for a moment believe the humanities requirement would convince every foreign student to love the United States. But it will help engage them with American culture in an open, nonviolent way. If nothing else, it’s an opportunity to let off steam.

Humanities like the Palestinian Studies courses they teach at Berkeley? Henley doesn’t realize or chooses not to see that it is a strong strain of self-hatred in the West that is reflected and amplified into Islamist hatred of the West. They’ve read Fanon, too. They took our own doubts and anger, planted them in much more fertile soil, and are growing the hate that we are dealing with now.

What about the oil? Buy it, same as we do now. Who’s not going to want to sell it to us? Saddam Hussein himself would have sold us all the oil we could use, absent sanctions. You can’t eat the stuff. It doesn’t even make a good salad dressing.

Right. But as noted, they think we’re screwing them by buying it, and we’re supporting a kleptocracy in so doing.

And let’s not forget that you can manipulate economies with it, and if you’re willing to accea little pain, you can shapolicy by paying brokers and thereby making friends. When you deal in hundreds of billions of dollars a year, a small taste will buy a large number of greedy and corrupeople.

What about Iraq? Bring the major players together in one room – anyone with a constituency. Tell them, “fellas, we’re out of here in time for Christmas. Start talking. You’ve got a chance to make your country something much better than you could have imagined. Or you can turn it into hell on earth. It’ll be your doing one way or another.” Stop paying non-Iraqis to do work Iraqis can do.

Right. You’re on your own kids! Have fun storming the castle!! Declare victory and leave. That’s a good plan. Our failure (of intention, planning, and execution) in Vietnam had significant negative consequences for our foreigh and domestic policies for decades.

Who will defend Iraq against its neighbors? Look at the place now. If you were the neighbors, would you want to bite that off? The real military estimated it would take a half-million US trooto secure the joint. You think Iran or Syria or Turkey dare to even try to scraup that kind of manpower?

What if Iraq becomes a weak state complete with Al Qaeda training camand weapons labs? See scare quotes around “wait” and the part about harrying the people behind the attacks on the US to the ends of the earth, above. If camset uwe pound hell out of them. It’s not like we don’t know how to bomb Iraq.

Hang on. Here we go again with the ‘please pound the hell out of them – but do it while you leave them alone’. I think he has a different meaning for ‘leave them alone’ than I do.

What About Israel and the Palestinians? Pull them in and tell them two things. 1) Israel will be paying its own way from now on. They can have what military equipment they can buy. 2) But we also will not be restraining them from any action they may wish to take to safeguard what they imagine to be their security. If they really want to kill Yasser Arafat, we’re not going to stop them. If they want to nuke Tehran, that’s Tehran’s lookout. Concentrates the mind. But Israel will have to stand on its own two feet, financially and politically. If Israel can’t survive as an independent country without ceaseless American financial aid and political backing, then Israel has failed as a refuge for the Jewish people – it’s simply a different version of the very dependence on powerful patrons that the early Zionists were trying to get beyond. I think Israel can survive, with prudent leadershiIronically, the key to the survival of the Jewish people is actually the diaspora: it’s much harder to exterminate the Jews if they aren’t conveniently gathered in one place.

So the end of Israel is AOK with our friend Jim; after all, the disapora will make sure that Jews survive. Who needs the only functioning pro-Western democracy in the Middle East? Ignoring the moral issues, this announcement is the trigger to the nuclear war scenario Trent seems to anticipate in the post below.

Some have feared that anti-Israeli terror grouwould make the US actually evicting Israel’s Jews by armed force the price of peace. We would refuse, of course, and destroy those grouif they messed with us. See “Don’t Tread on Me,” above.

What about cooperation against international terror? I’m for it. For instance, I favor using American law to interdict fundraising and organizing for Hamas, Lashkar, the Tamil Tigers and the IRA within the United States. “Terrorism” will be strictly defined as war crimes by non-state actors, so say that we’ll suppress fundraising for any armed rebellion – it’s bad international relations juju. For the duration of our Al Qaeda problem, I’d keep bases at Diego Garcia, in Turkey, Oman and Qatar and Afghanistan. I’d be willing to provide American trooto help overmatched foreign governments against anti-American terror grouin their midst, but I’d do due diligence to make sure we weren’t just being suckered into settling someone else’s quarrel for them.

So first off, we’ve just frozen the political sphere, saying we’ll support existing governments against rebels no matter what our interests may be. And we’ll send out trooabroad to die – as long as a) they’re attacking terrorists within countries (who will sit by and let our troooperate freely without military or diplomatic consequence); or b) it’s not in our interest, but some higher calling.

What about NATO? Remember when you were a kid, and you had a really good friend, so you started hanging out together constantly, and staying over at each other’s house all the time and suddenly you realized you were really getting on each other’s nerves? That’s us and continental Europe. And the way Iraq is going, I think there’s a good chance it’s us and Great Britain within one to five years. We all need some quiet time to ourselves, in a politico-military way.

Yes, it’s America First, all over again. Let me go get my Lucky Lindy button…

What about Korea? Something like 50% of the South Korean population lives within artillery range of the North. I don’t recall recommending that settlement pattern, do you? On the theory that South Koreans aren’t stupid, I take it to indicate their true estimate of the danger from the North. South Korea is a rich, powerful country that can afford as much defense as it needs. Nevertheless, North Korea has to be watched carefully, since it is desperately poor and either on the verge of becoming a nuclear power or already one. We tell Kim Jong-Il that if he so much as glances in the direction of anyone remotely associated with Osama bin Laden, including the Pakistani ISI or the “government” of Saudi Arabia, we will make his country look like a jamboree of Osirak reenactors. And if we get the idea that he’s trying to sell a nuke, we will provide him more than one of our own.

The Godfather defense. Right. If my kid catches a cold…I’ll kill you. How do we do this with a high enough standard of proof to satisfy a Congressional hearing after the fact? How do we show that KJI is actually running a sale on tactical nukes? Do we rely on the classified ads?

Note that intelligence is an inexact science; he’s willing to trigger the Seond Korean War if they do what we don’t want them to do, as long as…hell, I’m confused. We’ve had such good luck making deals with KJI in the past, why not do it some more?

That’s more or less the Grand Disengagement at a high level. Like I said, I see it taking a generation for the aftershocks to subside. That is, I’m solving the terror problem in no more time than the “reconstruct the entire Middle East” hawks, for a lot less money, with a lot less ammo and preserving a lot more freedom here. If they hate us because we’re free, they’ll really fucking hate us when I’m done.

Excethat it won’t solve the terror problem, it will make it worse. It will either leave terrorists free to operate with impunity or trigger wars with nations whose soverignty we violate to ‘hammer the bad guys’ as we chase them to the ends of the earth.

What if there’s another catastrophic terror attack? That will really suck. It will be important to summon up the resolve to stay the course

if that happens. Look, there are no guarantees in life. And if we get attacked tomorrow, do you think the uberhawks will tell you that this proves they were wrong all along? No. They’ll say it proves how urgent it is that we reconstruct the entire Middle East and probably Venezuela when we get a chance, and they’ll remind us that it’s going to take a generation. Like I said before, Fine, but then non-interventionism gets a generation too.

And then a third one, and a fourth one? And then we lose patience and nuke the fuckers…and we’ve brought my nightmare to life; we’re genoicidal killers. Because Mr. Henley and his crew want to have clean hands while they live in the world.

It takes time for things to play out. The atrocities of September 11, 2001, were in many ways the culmination of two taste treats that decidedly did not go together – the US buildup of militant Islam against the Soviet Union in the latter days of the Cold War and Phase I and II of the US War Against Iraq. (Now in Phase IV.) Phase III of the Iraq War – the invasion that began in March 2003 – was the sort of hideous foreign policy mistake that a country simply can’t avoid paying for in numerous ways. Pulling out will lead to a loss of prestige and will embolden our enemies. For a time. Dragging things out another year or five will cost even more prestige and foster even more emboldening. But we are not looking at the Apocalypse either. Losing Vietnam cost us prestige and emboldened our enemies. Within five years we were tightly cooperating with one of those enemies (China) against the other, and within 15, the other (the USSR) was no more. We cut and ran and won. The Soviet Union stayed the course in Afghanistan and bled to death.

Aha. It’s our fault. Then again, to many, everything in the world is the fault of the West; kind of like those for whom everything in the world is their parent’s fault.

I’m not inherently opposed to cutting and running, if what’s at stake – as it was in Vietnam – is essentially national prestige. You can reclaim that.

But the interests here are (a) inseparable – we can’t economically (or culturally) ‘disengage’ from the Islamic world; and (b) central to our well-being – it’s not only the oil and the economy, but the fact that while the Vietnamese Communist Party signed up for the internationalization of Communism, we didn’t need to worry about them, it was the USSR and China carrying that ball; Hanoi was happy to just bring Saigon into the fold. It was a nationalist manifestation of an international movement. Islamism isn’t nationalist. It hasn’t, doesn’t, and won’t stop at national borders.

Henley doesn’t see that. And that’s why the notion is stupid.
–

Paul Berman has an oped up in the New York Times that summarizes my position on the election and the current situation in Iraq brilliantly. His concluding sentence:

bq. This is not a project for after the election … this is a project for right now. America needs allies. Today, and not just tomorrow. And America needs leaders. If the Bush administration cannot rally support around the world, let other people give it a try.

Meet my blogging theme for the next month.

As I’ve said, I’m a fan of Valentino Rossi, who bravely changed teams and is now racing Grand Prix motorcycles for Yamaha.

So here are Friday’s MotoGP Qualifying Results From South African Grand Prix:

1. Valentino ROSSI, Yamaha, 1:33.353
2. Sete GIBERNAU, Honda, 1:33.378
3. Loris CAPIROSSI, Ducati, 1:33.709
4. Max BIAGGI, Honda, 1:33.730
5. Kenny ROBERTS, Suzuki, 1:33.841
6. Colin EDWARDS, Honda, 1:33.859
7. Marco MELANDRI, Yamaha, 1:34.100
8. Makoto TAMADA, Honda, 1:34.177
9. Nicky HAYDEN, Honda, 1:34.208
10. Carlos CHECA, Yamaha, 1:34.540

Note that Roberts, Edwards, and Hayden are all Americans (although Edwards is a Texan, so some may disagree…). It’s like the 1970’s again in MotoGP…