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More travel 

Tomorrow’s another travel day as I work my way back to London. Unless I encounter a wireless connection during one of my transfers, there will be no posts until I reach London on Thursday.

New maths, Foreign Affairs style 

Felix Salmon has alerted me to a post of his on MemeFirst, which he correctly reckons is up my alley.

“Carole Adelman has an innovative take on foreign aid in the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs. Never mind that the US ranks dead last in terms of the percentage of GDP it spends on official development assistance, she says. Look at all the private help that the US is giving to foreign countries! Look how much it costs to go to college in the US – if a foreign student gets a scholarship, that’s probably $40,000 a year in foreign aid right there! What about all those drugs that pharmaceutical companies give away in Africa? Let’s add them in to the mix, at full US retail price, of course. And then there are all those remittances from Ecuadorean busboys in New York back home to their families – billions and billions in private foreign assistance. The upshot? ‘All in all, the United States is most generous.’ I’m counting the milliseconds before this article starts getting cited in Congress as a reason to cut the foreign aid budget.”

What’s particularly sad about Adelman’s argument is that it appeared in Foreign Affairs, which was once a voice of reason — very centrist reason, but reason nonetheless. The foreign policy establishment should switch its allegiance to Moises Naim’s far livelier Foreign Policy.

Diaspora 

One of the many interesting aspects of Mexico is the extent to which it is a melting pot country, something generally ignored in US views of the country. This was powerfully brought home at the summit soirée which was held in Veracruz’s Lebanese cultural centre. It seems both Veracruz and Mexico City have a significant Lebanese-Mexican population. It’s certainly large enough to support a quite magnificent building here.

Needless to say, the evening was filled with wonderful Mexican music and dancing (danzón again!), and something new to me: modern Mexican cuisine. A very good thing.

The general and the literary critic 

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an extraordinary op-ed by literary critic Harold Bloom on Wesley Clark. Because the Journal is subscribers only, I think it’s worth quoting at length.

“I have been rereading Edmund Gibbon’s ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ which I recommend to anyone in search of wisdom relevant at this moment. Gibbon attributes decline and fall to many varied factors, but the characters of specific Roman emperors — good, bad and indifferent — are viewed by him as crucial in the self-destructiveness of Rome. It is not at all clear whether we are already in decline: Bread is still available for most and circuses for all. Still, there are troubling omens, economic and diplomatic, and a hint or two from Gibbon may be of considerable use. I trust it is clear that I am not deploring our deposing of Saddam Hussein, though its motivations remain obscure. Our decimation of the Taliban, and continued pursuit of bin Laden, are inevitable responses to Islamic terrorism. But our wars with fundamentalist Islam will continue, and will broaden; others will be attacked. We have no option except imposing a Roman peace. The question I bring forward is: What is the proper training for our imperial presidents?

“We need, at just this time, a military personage as president, one who is more in the mode of Dwight Eisenhower than of Ulysses Grant. In Wesley Clark, we have a four-star general and former NATO commander who is a diplomatic unifier, an authentic hero, wise and compassionate. That Gen. Clark saved tens of thousands of Muslim lives in Bosnia and Kosovo is irrefutable, despite current deprecations by worried supporters of the president. They are accurate only in their anxieties. Gen. Clark is highly electable for 2004; the other Democratic candidates are not.”

The same issue of the Journal has the most extensive article I’ve yet seen on how the Dean campaign is using the Internet. The page one headline: “Behind Dean Surge: A Gang of Bloggers And Webmasters”. “Jesse Ventura was the hop. John McCain was the skip. And Howard Dean is the quantum leap,” is the great quote from Michael Cornfield of George Washington University’s Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet.

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