Political Memo

[nonnihil]

Dear American political class and party members

Comments

[ukelele]

Hernando de Soto had some suggestions in his freakishly brilliant Mystery of Capital, but they're rather long.

[nonnihil]

Al-Sadr is definitely in the theocracy camp: He isn't a dashing figure of grizzled heroism and homoerotic cleanliness like the best of the militaristic fashion. Of course every political party must have a militia, but that doesn't make it an army (no matter how fond it may be of putting "brigade" at the end of its name). I see Sadr as sort of the anti-Chalabi, the antithesis to his thesis (to yield the synthesis of... well, it's going to take a dictator to sort out Iraq at this rate, and dictators are never who you expect -- schoolteachers, artists, farmers, never the big scary generals

[dolohov]

He's a weird sort of theocrat, since he really doesn't have the theocracy chops. (A recent speaker here familiar with Sadr's history said that during his seminary days he brushed off his studies to play video games, and was known among his fellow students as Abu Atari) He's really more of a cult figure than anything -- for that matter, the son of a cult leader, kind of the Islamic Kim Jong Il.

[zmook]

Lovely rant.