Interesting panel this morning on Stephanopoulos' "thisweek" included Zacharia, Will, Perle and Holbrook. Good discussion and reasonably balanced and civil. They ended the program talking about the difficulty of building democracy in Iraq and Will pointed out analogously -- by way of illustrating the perilousness and long-term nature of the situation -- that we're still not done reforming Mississippi [in so many words].

Perle got the closing point in on the discussion: "It took a long time to reform Mississippi -- it took a war to free the slaves".

Then there's the most interesting parallel to this little meander in the discussion that drifted off into slavery: "Slavery is part of Islam". Read it and weep ... Abe Lincoln also took a "world-historical" gamble with the civil war -- he didn't have to do it and took massive grief and second guessing right up until final victory...

Just got around to reading Kagan's "Of Paradise and Power" which is primarily focused on the modern American / European relationship and how we got here. I should have promoted it in my stack a while ago. It's very much in the tradition of Aron and Bruckner. Very powerful and insightful -- probably the best book I've read this year! Watch for some killer references to start popping up...

More later...