I'm purely shocked that you're not paying more attention to Barbaro's mental stability in light of his career ending ankle surgery. Where's your sense of national equine affinity?!
Icould point out your hypocircy of not taking the word of the one and only Iraqi citizen any of you have come in contact with... from your associate blog Debating IR...
http://irdebate.blogspot.com/200...aqi-and-
me.html
According to IR Debate's Johnny B, This man has been elected to office in free elections, say's things are BETTER NOW than before the war and (according to johnny B) believes American troops must not "cut and run".
I could point out the partisanship in how you choose to believe other pundits over a man who lives there and who's story your own people blogged.
but I won't 'cause (like you) I'm gonna' take the "high-road".
-red
RS, a quick primer. If you don't know these words or distinctions, please avail yourself of relevant resources:
- Group Blog
- Blog Roll vs. "Associate Blog"
- Anecdotal evidence
- Biased sample
Thanks! Looking forward to spirited debate in the future.
Red, try googling Riverbend, Iraq.
As a matter of fact, I had an Iraqi student this past fall in one of my classes. And?
The reference you cite is interesting, but anecdotal -- from a student at two of my co-bloggers' universities. I'm sure the student is honest, but there are all sorts of reason for an Iraqi visiting Washington to be disingenous. Plenty of government officials, for example, depend upon the occupation to keep their jobs or current status.
Scholars are trained to sort through evidence meticulously, try to determine its veracity and meaning, and (typically) to draw fairly tentative conclusions until our (shared) understanding is quite clear.
Oh, and then even those ideas are contested and debated.
That's primarily why I posted this as a comment to a blog -- and didn't give this as a lecture or submit it as an article for peer review publication.
That said, I'm still not sure which pundits you think I'm relying upon in this post. The direct quotes are from Bush himself. My analysis is informed by what I've read, sure, but very little of it was written by "pundits."
Have you read the ISG report? Do you keep up with the Brookings Iraq updates? Do you follow the regular Pentagon reports about conditions on the ground? What about the scholarly data that has been assembled and analyzed?
News flash: life in academe does not consist of sitting around, writing polemical commentary. Even when I pen opinion pieces -- on my own time and for a limited readership blog -- I try to use the tools of my trade.
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