What not to send: Anything by H.L. Mencken, Randolph Bourne, Alfred Nock, Murray Rothbard, James Bovard. Thomas Fleming, George Orwell, Gore Vidal, Jacob Hornberger, etc. The truth will not make Iraqis free.

What they want is Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, David Horowitz, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Kagans, Jonah Goldberg. Ya'know credentialed subliteracy adorned with smug contemptuosness and a loathing for facts.

Well, do you plan to send anything from either list?

For reference, I sent these.

A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present by Howard Zinn

The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama

Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual Legacy by Thomas L. Pangle

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance by Soros, Chomsky, et.al.

The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinski

yeah, i'm sending fiction, too:

Bend Sinister, Vladimir Nabokov

The Trial, Franz Kafka

Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler

The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Sounds good, Vivian, but most Iraqi's are not Communists. The balance of their political forces are more fascist.

I'm sending some biographies of Lincoln and Jefferson.

Most interesting, Lady Vivian. Such venom, and delivered with such nonchalance! Are Fukuyama and Brzezinski not to your liking? Whyever not? From what I've read, I can see why you'd dimiss Zinn and Chomsky as fiction, but those other two seem right up your proverbial alley. For what it's worth, I do like your selections. Particularly Kafka. :-)

Ok, seriously. If I can find time to send anything, they would be taken from the following list, which I think represents lessons the Iraqi people very much need to learn if they're going to make a go at a true democracy. Not saying that I think they are, but if they were to:

Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu

Candide, Voltaire

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft

Common Sense, Thomas Paine

Rights of Man, Thomas Paine

The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine

Two Treatises of Government, John Locke

The Republic, Plato

Politics, Aristotle

Ten Discourses on Livy, Niccolo Machiavelli

The Education of Cyrus, Xenophon

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche

Hmmm. I'll have to think about a fiction section. That might be a longer list...

It really gets to me though....sniff, chortle, choke, ....all the stuff you guys are willing to do for Iraq. I don't think that you are phony weirdos at all. Sending books is completely appropriate of course and will accomplish...uh...something or other.

Your negativity is preventing democracy in Iraq. Did you know? ;-)

Of course it won't accomplish anything. It just shows how the pro-war crowd has been reduced to grasping at such paltry straws. I think it's laughable, personally. The idea that a university curriculum is going to be cobbled together out of random donated books is patently absurd. What they needed to do (if they were serious) is ask for specific quantities of specific titles in specific editions. Or just ask for money and buy them on Amazon.

Seems like this university will be just as poorly planned and executed as the rest of OIF.

"Sounds good, Vivian, but most Iraqi's are not Communists."

well, neither am i, and i love those books. what the fuck are you talking about?

"I'm sending some biographies of Lincoln and Jefferson."

well, good.

"Fukuyama and Brzezinski not to your liking? Whyever not?"

i've read neither, and didn't say i disliked them. i was commenting on the fictions of, you guessed it, Zinn & Chomsky- 2 colossal frauds; Bend Sinister is the novel in which Nabokov out-Kafkas Kafka. that, and The Trial, have nothing to do with Communism, btw.

"Of course it won't accomplish anything. It just shows how the pro-war crowd has been reduced to grasping at such paltry straws. I think it's laughable, personally. The idea that a university curriculum is going to be cobbled together out of random donated books is patently absurd."

Actually, your comment (as well as most the others on the forum) is absurd. Nowhere does Hitchens say that "a university curriculum is going to be cobbled together out of random donated books". Are you that disingenous, or can't you read?

It just shows how the anti-war crowd has been reduced to deriding every single success story in Iraq, every positive deed that might help one day rebuild it, and continue with their cheap and inartful cynicism and donkey-brays. It's pretty revealing, actually.

What's it supposed to reveal?

I have not read Bend Sinister, but I shall add it to my list. Fukuyama is a Neocon from before that term became associated with all that is wrong in the world. I don't like him personally because I find his historical determinism to be extremely simplistic; almost childish. He's almost like a capitalist version of Marx. Brzezinski is a classic balance-of-power Realist and the author of The Grand Chessboard, which is an excellent book. Incidentally, simplistic interpretations of things are also why I don't care for Chomsky or Zinn. I appreciate A People's History of the United States as the proverbial view from the gallery, but little more.

While Hitchens does not say that this university's curriculum will be cobbled together from random donated books, without a specific list of titles and editions, that is exactly how it will happen. Or they'll end up with thousands of unusable books once they've picked the ones they wanted. The smart way to do it would have been to ask for monetary donations or issue a "wish list" of titles; specific editions, translations, etc. Just asking for books is remarkably imprecise. What do they mean by books? Heck, I've got some old David Eddings paperbacks that have been sitting in a box since I was about fourteen. Would they want those? It's just no way to run an institute of higher education; particularly one that will charge $10,000.00 per year in tuition. But, that's really par for the course, isn't it? Nothing about this war has been properly thought out. We behave as though we don't have almost three thousand years of recorded observations on the nature of politics and warfare, and as a professional warfighter who spent his university years buried in political science texts, I find that approach distasteful. If we were going to do this, we should have done it right or not at all. On the stupidity scale, what we've done isn't too far from the Athenian invasion of Sicily. We're just lucky there isn't an actual adversary out there who could take advantage of our resulting weakness; you must see that counting on the weakness of others to avert our disasters is an unwise practice in general.

So am I deriding every single success story in Iraq? Well, maybe. Though to be fair, I haven't actually heard of any. Certainly nothing that would even remotely approach justifying the horrific wrongness of our foreign and economic policy. Yes, I'm happy they're building a university for wealthy Iraqi families. That's very nice for those few who will have the means to attend. However, in the larger scheme of building a successful democracy, that's like trying to treat a hollow-point wound with a band-aid. If you choose to drink that kool-aid, that is your right. Je refuse, mademoiselle.

Since I'm not a Democrat, I do not believe anything I've said counts as a donkey-bray, and I rather find my cynicism to be extremely artful, thank you very much. That cynicism, just so you know, was born during Shock and Awe, which was my first of two deployments to our special little Greek tragedy. I'll probably get a third in the very near future, so I expect my cynicism to reach truly epic levels. Worthy of song, even! But here's the thing: I'm a Realist and a Machiavellian and I know exactly what those terms mean. I kill people for a living and have no trouble sleeping at night. My criticism of this war has more to do with timing, concept and execution than quaint moral fluff. Although I generally hold that stupidity resulting in needless suffering must be classified as immoral, bleeding-heart sentimentality has no place in that calculation. Who needs it? I have game theory. I have a well-worn copy of Liddell Hart that followed me to war and back. Actually, on my first deployment, I did bring along Lattimore's translation of The Iliad, so I guess that's pretty drippingly sentimental. I'm a sucker for the Classics. You might like reading Liddell Hart, now that I think about it. He was brilliant strategist.

What my disdain reveals, my Lady Vivian, is that my eyes are open. Nothing more.

So Mr. quillsinister, you read Captain Sir Liddell Hart? You then are aware he was influenced by MajGen JFC Fuller.

Going forward, both gentleman influenced others. I have a book you might find interesting by Norman F. Dixon, titled, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. But let's not send that to Iraq : - |

And it is back to the 21st Century for me quill. Pickett's 12,500 men assaulted through a wheatfield 145 years ago today. The result: that definining moment - the beginning of the end of General Lee's invincibility and eventual surrender of the Confederacy.

As a side bar, my favorite individual, Joshua Chamberlain, will recover from serious wounds later in the war; breveted to MajGen; will be put in charge of the surrender at Appamatox, where he will astound the world with what he does as the Stonewall Brigade comes by. He will return to his profession as a college professor and be awarded the Medal of Honor, 30 year later. Our warrior school teacher will die of lingering war wounds in 1914, and many feel he may be the last Civil War veteran to die as a result of wounds.

Enjoy your 4th of July, I've heard they wind surf at Almirida Beach - every get there?

I'm a big fan of Liddell Hart. Strangely, I was directed to his book by two science fiction books by Greg Bear, called Forge of God and Anvil of Stars. Good books, if you like sci-fi. Most of the great books I've read have come into my life in serendipitous ways, and Liddell Hart is no exception. I don't know if he ever read the Tao Te Ching, but he writes and thinks as though he had. I have not yet had the pleasure of reading Fuller. I've added Dixon's book to my Amazon list. Looks interesting. While we're speaking of books, I just bought one called The Demon's Sermon on the Martial Arts. Quite possibly the strangest and most metaphysical book on the subject I've ever seen. You might enjoy it. :-D

I actually haven't been to Almirida Beach, though I've driven past it a number of times on the way to Rethymno and Heraklion. We've been busy this summer, so most of my beach time is spent at local beaches like Marathi and Kalathas. What I really need to do is take a week of leave and make the trek to the south side. Maybe go see the ruins at Phaistos and then spend four or five days at Plakias. Unfortunately, everyone seems to plan to have their crises and last-minute emergency tasking the second I get too far away from the office (how do they always know?). No rest for the wicked. Not too much hanging out with gorgeous quasi-clad European women for the wicked, either. :-(

Glad to hear the war went well. I've always admired Chamberlain. Thucydides wrote, "Any nation that draws too great a distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards, and its fighting done by fools." Chamberlain seemed to embody that ideal. I'm doing it in reverse, and will trade in my khakis for tweed at some point. Oh, and I haven't fought any epic battles like he did. All of mine have been very minor affairs; hardly worth mentioning. I guess I just have to live with that. I'm going to go immerse myself in seawater now. Take care. :-)