The Aug. 11, 2005 issue of The New York Review of Books has an exceptional number of articles/reviews of political interest:

• Peter W. Galbraith: Iraq: Bush's Islamic Republic. This is how it works when an anti-democrat like Bush tries to bring democracy to Iraq: you get a state dominated by Islamic clergy with close political and religious ties to "Axis of Evil" charter member Iran. These topics have been covered elsewhere, notably by Juan Cole, so there isn't much new here. One thing I don't understand about the western media in Iraq is that, if they can't get out of their hotels to cover Iraq, why don't they at least try to cover the supposedly secure Green Zone? They pick up stories planted by the U.S. spin squad -- the latest accuses Iran of smuggling shaped explosives (anti-tank weapons) to the Sunni-Islamist resistance, which makes absolutely no sense. But they're unable or unwilling to dig under the surface and figure out what the Americans are really up to. One of the biggest questions in Iraq these days is what the real relationship is between the U.S. and Iraq's so-called sovereign government. But since Bremer skipped out of town, the U.S. has taken a low political profile (although the U.S. military seems to still be unhampered in their program to wreck the place).

• John Gray: The World Is Round. A review of the Thomas Friedman book. Gray's big point is that Friedman is guilty of crass Marxian technological determinism. That sort of Marx-baiting seems unfair to Friedman, and Marx too for that matter. At this stage in history, it seems to be that if you can't put Marx in context, you're better off leaving well enough alone. Friedman has plenty of his own problems without trying to nail him to an ideological framework. For one thing, he's an idiot. Why anyone should think otherwise is beyond me.

• Christopher de Bellaigue: New Man in Iran. A profile of Iran's new President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the elections that brought him to power.

• Tim Flannery: Endgame. A review of six books on environment issues, with a survey by Harvey Blatt (America's Environmental Report Card: Are We Making the Grade?) and a more pointedly anti-Bush tract by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy) the most prominent. The synopsis from the Blatt book is most useful and rather scary. This is probably the best piece in the issue.

• Brian Urquhart: The New American Century? A review of a book by Richard N. Haass, The Opportunity: America's Moment to Alter History's Course. Haass is a veteran foreign policy bureaucrat with credentials of having worked under every President from Carter through the latest Bush. His assessment of what the U.S. could and should be doing differently makes for a devastating critique of what Bush is actually doing. Haass, of course, is still wrapped up in the idea that the U.S. is somehow indispensible to the proper function of the world -- a previous book was called The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States After the Cold War. Such ideas will continue to be seductive as long as they are flogged by the likes of Bush (and Bolton, whose subterranean U.N. Ambassador appointment should be considered in view of someone like Haass as an alternative option), but they actually carry a comparable dose of arrogance. There are two basic ideas about elites: one is that reasonable elites are the sane path to reform because they have the interest -- preserving their elite status -- and the power to effect truly necessary reform; the other is that elites aren't reasonable or flexible, and reforms can only be made by moving them out of the way. I sympathize with the former position, mostly because I dislike bloodshed and prefer rational to political argument. But there's little evidence that elites are more rational or less political than anyone else, and their tendency to view reform as a zero-sum loss ensures that most will lean conservative until they fall.

• Tim Judah: The Waiting Game in the Balkans. A report from another festering trouble spot. It's hard to keep up with them all.

• Max Rodenbeck: The Truth About Jihad. A review of five books on political Islam with or without terrorists, including one I've read and recommend: Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West. I found this piece annoying at first, but eventually it began to pay off, especially in this quote (discounting the Marxian babble): "Modern jihadists have also borrowed the classic revolutionary idea that the most effective way to rouse the cowed masses is to goad their masters into acting rashly, so revealing the supposedly true, exploitative nature of their relationship. Terrorism forces 'bourgeois' society to strip off its mask, bare its fangs, and thus alert the proletariat -- or in this case the Muslim Ummah or nation -- to the real peril facing it." This is a key point, which we seem to be utterly incapable of grasping: the real purpose of Al-Qaeda's attacks on "the far enemy" is to provoke us into rash and stupid acts. The quote goes on with an amusing example: "In this light, it is interesting that extensive references to Menachem Begin's 1951 autobiography, The Revolt, were found among the computer files captured at an al-Qaeda safe house in Kabul. As leader of the paramilitary Irgun group in the 1940s, the future Israeli prime minister advocated using terror to jump-start politics."

• Caroline Moorehead: Letter from Darfur. Another trouble spot I know little about, nor care much about, in large part because the U.S. has little to do with it, and therefore it has little to do with us. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are reflected in the U.S. -- in many ways they are reflections of domestic politics here, and they have significant repercussions here. The Israel conflict is another case where the U.S. is heavily involved and invested, and this takes a real toll here: in particular, our attachment to Israel reduces our ability to tell right from wrong, and that loss of judgment hurts us in every aspect of our political lives. Darfur, on the other hand, is just a remote tragedy (one of many in Africa). I wish we had nothing better to do than help out there, but responsibility begins at home, and we have our own problems to sort out first. Until we do, we wouldn't be much help anyway.

• Michael Kinsley/Mark Danner: The Memo, the Press, and the War: An Exchange. On the Downing Street memos, which Kinsley dismisses as non-news, and Danner regards as significant. They are non-news in the sense that many of us already believed that the Bush administration had lied coming and going to promote its war in Iraq, and that the so-called intelligence on Iraq had been systematically sifted, sorted, and selected to serve those narrow political aims, at considerable expense to the truth. What matters about the Downing Street memos is that they don't disprove this view -- they actually deepen the story. I don't know what to think about Kinsley: I think his "big babies" hypothesis has a lot of truth to it, but his career as a professional liberal talking head never generated much value -- I've thought on occasion that casting him as the voice of liberalism was a dirty trick. Haven't read much by him lately.

I'm a little too busy to do even a news rundown at this point, especially with the Israel news which mostly reminds me that I'm having trouble getting back to my big essay on that conflict. Also backlogged are a couple of movies and many books.