Author Page for Robert Farley

What do you mean "Special Provenance: Christianity and the American Republic" doesn’t fill my social science requirement?

Urgh. Fortunately, I missed this.

The suit, scheduled for a hearing on Dec. 12 in Federal District Court in Los Angeles, says many of Calvary’s best students are at a disadvantage when they apply to the university because admissions officials have refused to certify several of the school’s courses on literature, history, social studies and science that use curriculums and textbooks with a Christian viewpoint.

The lawyer for the school, Robert Tyler, said reviewing and approving the course content was an intrusion into private education that amounted to government censorship. “They are trying to secularize private Christian schools,” Mr. Tyler said. “They have taken God out of public schools. Now they want to do it at Christian schools.”

[...]

A lawyer for the Association of Christian Schools International, Wendell Bird, said the Calvary concerns surfaced two years ago when the admissions board scrutinized more closely courses that emphasized Christianity. In the last year, the board has rejected courses like Christianity’s Influence in American History, Special Provenance: Christianity and the American Republic, Christianity and Morality in American Literature and a biology course using textbooks from the Bob Jones University Press and A Beka Book, conservative Christian publishers.

The suggestion that refusing to recognize as legitimate quasi-courses built around Christianity constitutes unfair discrimination is rather new to me. As far as I’m concerned, Christians should feel free to educate their children in any manner they see fit, and if their courses fail to measure up to collegiate standards, then too bad. This is what happens when you decide to wage war on secular knowledge and general education standards. The price of demanding absolute ideological conformity from your kids is idiot children.

I’m certainly not looking forward to that first student who asks why I haven’t included any texts on the special place of the American Republic in God’s plan in my American Foreign Policy class. Since I predominantly teach graduate and professional students, hopefully it will be quite a while.

Via Jaundice James.

Friday Cat Blogging… Bud

New Look

We have a new look. If you notice any serious problems (causes seizures, can’t read the font, won’t load up or looks really weird on a particular browser), please advise in comments.

Aesthetic comments are also welcome.

UPDATE: And thanks very much to Shakes’ Sis for the nifty new logo!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Turkey Day, all. Expect light posting until Sunday or Monday.

Two Level Game?

Fascinating:

Thousands of low-income Massachusetts residents will receive discounted home heating oil this winter under an agreement signed Tuesday with Venezuela, whose government is a political adversary of the Bush administration.

A subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company will supply oil at 40 percent below market prices. It will be distributed by two nonprofit organizations, Citizens Energy Corp. and the Mass Energy Consumer Alliance.

The agreement gives President Hugo Chavez’s government standing as a provider of heating assistance to poor U.S. residents at a time when U.S. oil companies have been reluctant to do so and Congress has failed to expand aid in response to rising oil prices.

Wow.

I wonder what Chavez’ angle on this is. I suppose that one could hope that supplying poor Americans with oil would lead to constraints on US diplomatic aggressiveness. On the other hand, it seems like this could just piss Bush and the wingnuts off beyond all reason. Think about it; what move could be more calculated to make a wingnut’s head explode than the prospect of an alliance between Venezuela and Massachusetts?

Kentucky Kernel

With this mention in the Kentucky Kernel, I’d like to think that my reputation as a public intellectual is secured. Look out, Christopher Hitchens.

For the record, I seem to recall my statements being more coherent than what the paper indicated. Damn, dirty MSM.

Chinese Missiles

Budding Sinologist has put together an excellent post on Chinese ballistic missiles and their presumed effect on Taiwanese resistance. Long story short, it is extremely unlikely that China could defeat Taiwan through a ballistic missile attack alone.

Simply put, the combined warhead capacity of 467 CSS-6 and CSS-7 SRBMs (1,100 pounds each) is the equivalent of only 9.5 Vietnam era B-52 sorties (54,000 pounds each). Even if all 700 SRBMs were used and all reached their targets, it would only equal 14 sorties. To look at it another way, the 700 SRBMs would only total 385 tons of high explosives, compared with the hundreds of thousands of tons dropped on Vietnam, for example.

One implication of this is that it makes little sense for Taiwan to spend its defense money on ballistic missile defenses, since the expected return would appear to be minimal.

I do have a couple caveats. First, I’m curious about the hardness of the targets that China would be attacking. It goes to reason that an attack on Taiwan would focus on political, military, and perhaps commercial centers. I would expect that buildings of the first two types will be resistant to high explosive warheads, and thus that damage may be less significant than what the Chinese hope. If the Chinese focus on commercial or symbolic targets they probably need to be a little bit less worried about target resilience, but they’ve also given up just about any hope of victory. Terror bombing never wins wars.

My second question involves the use of ballistic missiles in conjunction with an invasion of Taiwan. My guess is that in the event of an invasion China will focus its ballistic missile resources on the destruction of Taiwanese command and control. I would really like to know how disruptive such an attack might be, but it is, unfortunately, a very hard question to answer.

Phosphorous and Uranium

Armchair Generalist has had an outstanding series of posts on the use of white phosporous munitions in Iraq. I tend to concur that this isn’t much of a story; WP munitions are not WMD by any definition, and while their use may be unwise, it’s certainly not illegal. AG has gives a nice discussion of the use of depleted uranium in munitions, which I view as another non-story.

Falluja, and the rest of the war, is bad enough without having distracting conversations about the use of particular chemicals in combat. Really, it doesn’t matter that much whether someone gets torn apart by lead or incinerated in a building. The problem has another source.

UPDATE: Good discussion of white phosphorous here. Also, forgive me for posting this cool picture.

On National Resistance and Inevitability

jonst poses a good question, one that echoes other arguments made about the Iraqi insurgency:

I would argue there is nothing in Iraq’s history…at least since the fall of Ottoman Empire, that indicates occupation by outside (non-belivers at that)forces it will be met by anything other than resistance.

There’s something to be said for this, but I think it’s wrong. Given that I sat on a panel on the future of the Iraq War put on by the College Democrats and UK Leftist Student Union (who knew?) on Friday, it’s probably worth working through why.

First, I’m suspicious of any argument about inevitability. I think that there was more cause to view widespread Afghani resistance to occupation as likely or inevitable than Iraqi resistance. However serious the conflict in Afghanistan remains, we have not seen a widespread anti-US insurgency. The elements fighting against the central government in Afghanistan would be fighting regardless of the presence of American and European troops. Indeed, the relatively wide acceptance of US and European occupation in Afghanistan has been the (only?) pleasant surprise of the War on Terror. It’s very hard to argue that national resistance was more likely in Iraq than Afghanistan.

More importantly, we simply haven’t seen a national resistance movement in Iraq. It’s possible that, if the United States remains there for ten years, wide swaths of Shiite and Kurdish opinion will turn against the occupation and people will begin to take risks to force it out. However, with the exception of some flare ups in Shiite areas, this hasn’t happen. Shiites may not like the occupation, but by and large they seem willing to tolerate it, especially as it is consistent with their own political goals. Now, I think that the United States could do a lot of things that would result in Shiite opposition, but that hasn’t happened yet. So, in answer to jonst’s point, the occupation already has been met by reaction other than resistance.

Right now the war is not between the United States and Iraq. It is between the United States, US allies in Shiite and Kurdish regions, and a Sunni insurgency. That’s not national resistance; it has the character of a civil war with an ethnic/religious component with control of the Iraqi state as the spoils. In this context, tactics and operations matter. We’re not fighting all Iraqis. The Iraqis we are fighting are popular with some elements of the Iraqi population and not popular with others. It’s possible for the US Army and Marine Corps to adopt and execute tactics that will be more likely to defeat elements of the insurgency.

None of this means that withdrawal from Iraq isn’t the best option. I think that it probably is. Counter-insurgent forces will be weaker without direct US support (although I believe that, in any case, the United States will continue military support for Shiite and Kurdish factions), but insurgent forces may also be considerably weaker. The Sunnis cannot win in the long term, if winning means taking back control of the Iraqi state. Without the occupation to inflame Sunni (and Shiite) opinion, some form of reconciliation may be possible. Moreover, a continued long term occupation may (and I think will) test the tolerance of the Shiite population of Iraq. Its goals are currently similar to our goals, but that situation may not hold if we give no indication of a willingness to leave.

The panel Friday went well. The speakers included two anti-Iraq War liberal hawks and two scholars whose views could be characterized as more dovish. My biggest applause line was, oddly enough, a stirring defense of Canada’s record in the two world wars. Who knew that Canada had so many friends in Lexington?

We Need a New Word for "Hack"

Mickey went for a few days without saying anything staggeringly stupid. Then he decided he needed to make up for it:

Murtha has now established exactly the worst context for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. By making his (understandable) teary concern about the injuries to our soldiers his central motiviation, he makes it seem, if we pull out now, that the Sunni/Zarqawi strategy has worked–that we’ve been run out of Iraq because we couldn’t tolerate the casualties the insurgents were inflicting. That will encourage Al Qaeda operatives around the globe. Isn’t it a lot better if we start to withdraw, after a successful Iraqi election, while plausibly claiming that we’ve done our job? That’s why Hastert’s stunt yesterday to put down Murtha’s proposal was amply justified. It makes it easier to withdraw if it doesn’t seem to be a response to Murtha’s cry of pain. … 2:06 P.M.

Argh. Everything that’s wrong with Kaus as a blogger can be distilled through this paragraph. First, we’ve got the utter inability to view politics and political events through anyone’s eyes but his own. It doesn’t even occur to him that people might interpret the same event in different ways. Second, we have the desperate need to seem clever by interpreting an event in double-back fashion. Victory for the Democrats is actually defeat; what seems to be one way is actually another. Finally, and most infuriating, the complete unseriousness of it all, the treatment of politics as if it were no more than a game, and no more important than the internal workings of a Hollywood studio.

In response to this particular abomination, Mickey needs to be reminded that, if insurgents or terrorists still exist in Iraq after we leave, they will declare victory regardless of the status of various House resolutions. They are, I suspect, utterly indifferent to machinations of Murtha, Hastert, and everyone else in the US House of Representatives. Moreover, if they’re smart and well informed enough to care a lot about how John Murtha thinks, then they’re certainly smart enough to see through an effort as transparent as Hastert’s.

The implication of Kaus’ argument, of course, is that SAYING that the troops should be withdrawn MEANS that it will take longer for them to leave. It’s unclear, given this, how Mickey thinks that one should express a preference for troop withdrawal, especially given that he seems to agree it might be a good idea. The best way to criticize George W. Bush, it seems, would be to embrace him. That will really teach the terrorists…