Understaffed, Under-funded Diplomatic Corps Nicholas Kristof’s column in ( 8/10/08) New York Times, “Make Diplomacy, Not War” was an interesting piece of journalism, both for what it said and for what it didn’t say.  Kristof makes the case that the American Foreign Service is woefully under-staffed and under-funded.  The US has more musicians in its military bands than it has diplomats. Something is seriously out of whack, he suggests, especially when it comes to fighting terrorism. Firepower Isn’t Effective Against Terrorists The US is still doing the same thing it’s  been doing since 9/11. It has continued a habitual pattern of using firepower against terrorists. We still haven’t learned that this approach is ineffective.

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Book Review:  Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West. Benazir Bhutto. Harper Collins, New York, New York, 2008.                                                                                                       Finished Just Before Her Assassination This book was finished days before Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan last December.  With the publication of this book we can now honor the contribution she made in leaving it to the world.  It is an important work and forwards the reconciliation and democracy building she was engaged in as she lived. I have never read anything as comprehensive as this about the Muslim world.

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(Editor’s Note: While I take a little summer vacation, I thought some of you might enjoy reading this letter I found in my files recently. It is dated 9/22/02 and it is the text of a letter I wrote, but did not send to President Bush in the early days of the build-up to the Iraq War. This blog is much longer than my usual blogs, so read it at your leisure! Headings have been added to make reading a bit easier.  Questions at the end for those who stick around! )                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Dear President Bush; I know you are a man who loves his family, and his country.

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The Instability of Peace  We live in a world in which certain situations are stable and others are not. A coin on the table is stable facing Heads, and just as stable facing Tails, but completely unstable standing on its edge. Peace seems as unstable as a coin on its edge: precarious, easily toppled, its fall a matter not of “if” but “when”. A few, sowing seeds of discord and strife, can polarize the many and set them against each other. I have felt for a long time that the hard question to confront about peace is not how to get there, but how to make peace a more stable situation. In one sense it seems unconfrontable: getting to peace is daunting enough, but staying there?

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Americans today are divided, polarized by political and cultural schisms that are wide, painful and deep. The nature of the issues that divide us are social, cultural, political and religious. In some ways it feels as if we are living in two different countries, depending on where you live and how you describe these schisms and how you vote. The simplest description of this division is to separate the country into the so-called red states and blue states, that is that people in those states vote overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic depending on how they feel about certain cultural or social issues. We can pretty much predict that most people who are pro-choice vote Democratic and most people who are against same sex marriage vote Republican. No surprise there.

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