John Derbyshire has written many quotable and irascible things lately. In this essay he suggests a rough but possibly realistic exit strategy in Iraq-- arm the Kurds, our only friends; give guarantees to the Turks; screw the rest. (Sorry, John, for a rather blunt but I think accurate summary). Who knows but that, with the struggle continuing and support eroding and nobody agreeing on what is happening, we could do worse.
Or maybe we could. In THIS one, he opines, brilliantly, that no pundit or commentator on world affairs, including him-- even on China-- really has any idea what is likely to happen.
The past, seen even through nostalgia, is at least a bit more reliable. Here, in an obituary note on a good friend in Hong Kong, he also reminds us that it is also a different country. "Chan grew up in the 1930s in the household of a grandee in the Foshan distict of Guangdong Province. It was a wild and woolly time, with warlords, bandits, the Japanese, and rapacious government agents stomping around. Noticing that Chan seemed to know a lot about handguns, I once asked him: "Did your father have guns?" Chan: "My father had his own private army." "
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