I’m Not Going to Do This Every Day

My friend Tony Karon, who is to international geopolitical soccer analysis what KBR is to cost overruns, has a fab bit on the the Iraq soccer team and what their match today means; if you read one bit on this, make sure it’s this one.

UPDATE: Iraq wins the pennant! Iraq wins the pennant!

N’Gai’s gaming blog has several nice posts this week about mothers, kids and gaming, including this good one from Newsweek editor Kathy Deveny about her daughter and a certain pink Nintendo DS Lite:

“For days, I floated around in a DS-induced post-feminist haze, dreaming of the day when Jing would write her first lines of code. I also noticed–for the first time–that there was a GameStop just two blocks from our apartment. Perfect. I bravely walked in and asked for a pink DS. No dice. Sold out. Till after Christmas.”

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Jen Chung, whose Gothamist is one of the earliest, and certainly the best, of the new generation of hyperlocal blogs, finally gets the recognition she so richly deserves in the new issue of Wired. There are some other people on the list that you may have heard of–Arnold, for instance–but if anyone deserves to be a recipient of the 2007 Rave Awards, it’s Jen. Check it out here.

My more-literate colleagues at Newsweek, along with contributions from me, have begun blogging the NCAA Men’s basketball tournament; check it out here.

Oh, and this is cool: Watch the games on your office computer during your, um, lunch hour, for free.

UPDATE: Holy crap, get in line now: The queue to get in to watch this thing is 49,082 people long.

Which is, of course, the date that the brilliant This American Life (produced in part by the even more brilliant (and Exterminating Angels power forward) Alex Bloomberg) adds visuals to the audio. Which is, of course, the Dylan-goes-electric moment of our time. And I hear good things about the other shows on SHO. Plus, if you order now, you apparently can see the first episode already.

In the meantime:

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Jessica Reaves, my brilliant former collegue and friend, is off to Senegal on a fellowship. You can follow her trip at her blog; I’ll let her explain it:

I’m a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, based in Chicago. In January 2007, I began a fellowship with the International Reporting Project (formerly the Pew Fellowship) out of Johns Hopkins-SAIS. The program, which is fantastic (and I’m not just saying that because they’re paying for my trip), sends seven U.S. journalists on reporting trips around the world. My fellow Fellows (oh, the hilarity) are bound for Lebanon, Afghanistan, Liberia, China, Mexico and South Africa, armed with great story ideas, unbridled enthusiasm, and, if they’re like me, increasingly nervous stomachs.

On February 24th, I’m flying to Dakar for a five-week reporting trip through Senegal, Africa’s western-most country and one of the continent’s few success stories in the fight against HIV/AIDS. (To put this in perspective: Recent studies indicate Senegal and the U.S. have similar infection rates).

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Once again, Tony Karon of Rootless Cosmopolitan has one of the smartest first takes on Bush’s Iraq speech:

The Baker Group understood that the only way to salvage anything in Iraq was through a new political deal concluded among Iraq’s major players, and its key neighbors — and that meant acknowledging and accommodating Iran’s considerable legitimate interests in Iraq. Plainly, though, that’s hard to do if you’re planning to attack Iran. And by using the speech announcing his troop surge in Iraq to also announce the deployment of a new carrier strike force and patriot missile batteries into the region (neither of which have any relevance to counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq), Bush clearly wanted to signal Iran that the U.S. is preparing to attack.

So, essentially we’re now being asked to believe that the Iraqi government, dominated by Iran-friendly Shiite religious parties, is going to act in concert with Bush’s plan — and even Bush admitted that their support is the critical factor — giving U.S. forces the green light to take control of Sadr City from the Sadrists and so on, even as Washington moves its assets into position for a military strike on Iran. It may be, of course, that Washington is posturing in order to sweat Tehran into believing that a military strike is coming in order to intimidate the Islamic Republic into backing down, but frankly I wouldn’t bet on the collective strategic wisdom of Cheney-Rice and Khamenei-Larijani-Ahmedinajad combining to avoid a confrontation. And if the U.S. is raising the stakes, you can reliably expect Iran to do the same, probably starting in Iraq.

Read the whole thing here; and, of course, if any administration officials are reading this, the smartest thing you could do is put Mr. Karon in charge of saving Iraq…

To my two readers. Hello. For you, a special plea: Check out Shelterrific, a fine shelter blog from my friend Angela, and, if you like what you see (I’m sure you will!), go here to vote for her at the bloggies. Cheers.

Continuing my longstanding policy of stealing commentary from my wiser, more prolific friends, I must recommend to you this latest post from Tony Karon’s Rootless Cosmopolitan blog, “What the Saddam Lynching Tells Us About Iraq:”

Saddam’s death confirms how little control the U.S. now has over political events in Iraq. And that makes the number of troops it fields on the ground largely irrelevant to the outcome — except, of course, if the U.S. was willing to treble the number of troops it has there now and seize direct political control again. But even if it had the political will, it doesn’t have enough troops to do that.

The problem, I think, in part derives from the fact that Cheney-Bush have not yet reconciled with the inevitability of quitting Iraq — I suspect that they still see those massive permanent bases built in Iraq playing the long-term role originally envisaged in the invasion (Jay Garner compared it to the Phillippines, where the U.S. maintained military bases for a century to fuel its Pacific Fleet; others made clear that Iraq would become the new Saudi Arabia because that country could no longer afford the domestic political cost of hosting massive U.S. bases… either way, it’s clear that Bush went in planning to stay.) I’m not expecting a new strategy from Bush in the coming days; I’m expecting new tactics, and even then, the shifts will be quantitative rather than qualitative.