U2's "Wave of Sorrow" & The Ethiopian Famine of 1984

Why Beautiful Women Marry Less Attractive Men

The Trouble With Brand Hillary

"During the general election between Al Gore and George W. Bush, I was a volunteer in the Speakers Bureau of the Democratic National Committee. Among other responsibilities, I appeared regularly on talk radio and occasionally on TV to promote the Gore/Lieberman ticket. I also was called upon to defend President Clinton, as I had done on TV for the previous year, whenever his name was invoked in an attempt to tarnish Vice President Gore."

...Hillary Clinton has waged a campaign based, in large measure, on her national security experience. Her so-called "Day One" readiness. Indeed, she says plainly on the campaign trail that "We need a candidate that can go toe-to-toe with John McCain on national security." (Frankly, I think if Democrats join the issue in that way they are fighting on Mr. McCain's home field and going uphill, but that is a discussion for another day.)

Recently the Clinton campaign released a portion Sen. Clinton's White House daily activity logs. These logs provide the first independent means to evaluate her claim that her White House years provided her the relevant national security/commander-in-chief experience to be president.

A preliminary analysis of these logs has begun to reveal Mrs. Clinton's claims of experience to be overstated. If these logs continue to bear out that she is less experienced than she has claimed, she will, at best, be branded as an exaggerator. She then will face an onslaught that will make the Gore and Kerry attacks look like a walk in the park.

On a related point, Mrs. Clinton has been arguing to primary voters that she is more electable than Barack Obama because "she has been vetted fully so there will be no general election surprises." Well, the recently released tax returns appear to undermine this argument as well.

Specifically, these returns demonstrate the former President Clinton made tens of millions of dollars on the speaking circuit and by helping to broker business deals or make introductions around the world. This is his prerogative as a private citizen. What the returns do not tell us, however, is who paid for these speeches; who his clients were/are; whether he can unwind his business relationships (he is being sued by one of his clients for fraud in state court in California); what conflicts of interest or appearances of conflict reside in his seven-year, private-sector career. (Remember the difficulty Geraldine Ferraro's husband created for her candidacy?). A lot more openness and transparency will be required by Bill Clinton before it is known just how vulnerable Hillary Clinton is as a general election candidate.

Still, the Clinton Library has yet to provide the list of its largest donors, or explain how their donations were solicited; as well it is not yet known whether Hillary Clinton played a role in President Clinton's pardon decisions including the 11th-hour pardon of Marc Rich. The Republican National Committee and related advocacy groups will surely allege a coverup if all this is not disclosed before the general election.

Unless all this material is released and vetted fully before the primaries come to an end, Mrs. Clinton is asking Democrats to make a leap of faith that nothing will be revealed in the general election campaign that could prove fatal. From what is available presently, Mrs. Clinton may prove to be the most vulnerable Democratic candidate in the last three election cycles.

Hillary's slick willies, By Camille Paglia

Sex Education

Would today's college kids rather date the old-fashioned way?

Why Bono is the 'master manipulator'

"It is absurd, if not obscene, that celebrity is a door that such serious issues need to pass through before politicians take note."

-- Bono

Bono, lead man for the famous Irish U2 rock band, took his name from a street sign -- the Dublin hearing aid company "Bono Vox of O'Connell Street."

He shortened it first to "Bono Vox" and then to just "Bono."

Since then, he's gone beyond a "good voice" to pro bono -- Latin for "in the public good."

In 2003, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and in 2005, he shared the cover of Time magazine with Bill and Melinda Gates as Persons of the Year .

Bono (Paul Hewson), at 47, has become the billion-dollar charity man. The singer/songwriter's trademark leather jacket and vividly-tinted wraparound sunglasses (for his light-sensitive eyes and a bit for his vanity) give him a distinctive presence as he twists the arms of the mighty to fight poverty.

Many celebrities, for example Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, give their own money; the Jolie Pitt Foundation donated $8 million in 2006, including $1 million to Doctors Without Borders. Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation aims to rebuild New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward from Hurricane Katrina's devastation.

Bono doesn't give his own money, says University of Waterloo political science professor Andrew F. Cooper. What the musician gives is time and work, his fame and, he says, his "stubbornness" -- digging money out of other people's pockets and out of national treasuries to help Africa and to forgive Third World debt.

Mr. Cooper, in his recently-published anecdote-and quote-rich book Celebrity Diplomacy, has made an excellent study of Bono, the world's No. 1 example of celebrities-turned-diplomat or, in the author's phrase "the Bonoization of diplomacy."

While announcing a $5-billion foreign aid package in 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush said of Bono, who was sitting behind him: "Bono, I appreciate your heart, and to tell you what an influence you've had -- Dick Cheney walked in the Oval Office, he said, '(ultra-conservative Republican Senator) Jesse Helms wants us to listen to Bono's ideas'."

Former president Bill Clinton tells a similar story: "I'll never forget one day during my administration. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers arrives in the Oval Office to announce: 'You know, some guy just came in to see me in jeans and a T-shirt and he just had one name, but he sure was smart. Do you know anything about him'?"

Mr. Cooper, professor and distinguished fellow of the Waterloo-based Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), has studied celebrity diplomats from the early pacesetting Audrey Hepburn and Danny Kaye to dozens of stars and public figures, who include George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, Oprah Winfrey and, of course, Diana, Princess of Wales.

For Bono, it all started in 1984 when U2 played during rocker Bob Geldof's 1984 Band Aid concert for Ethiopian famine relief efforts.

Bono, then 24, and his wife, Ali, went further than those concerts. They went all the way to Wello, Ethiopia, and worked for six weeks at an orphanage.

"You'd wake up in the morning and as the mist would be lifting, you'd see thousands and thousands of people who'd been walking all night to our food station," Bono recounted.

"You'd walk out of your tent and you'd count bodies of dead and abandoned children. Or worse, the father of a child would walk up to you and try to give you his living child and say, 'You take it, because if this is your child, it won't die.'

"My experience there was very hard to forget, but ... I did.

"We went back to our daily life in Ireland and me being in a band, but we'd always hoped we might be able to look at the structure of the problem. There's a certain kind of poverty that is structural, not just misfortune, and so when I heard about this plan to use the millennium as an opportunity to give the poorest countries a chance to start again (with their international debt forgiven), I thought, 'This is major, and it's the right thing to do'."

Bono's charity work is inspired partly from his own story. He grew up in Ireland during "The Troubles" with a Roman Catholic father and a Protestant mother. She died of a brain hemorrhage at her father's funeral when Bono was 14.

Religion drives and sustains him along with a healthy dose of "Catholic guilt." (He, guitarist David Evans "The Edge," and drummer Larry Mullen belonged to a charismatic Christian group called Shalom in their early years.)

He has added skills. "Bono stands out as a master manipulator, unlike his counterpart, Bob Geldof," says Mr. Cooper. The two have often teamed up on world leaders using Bono's smooth-talking good-cop approach to Geldof's rough-edged, scruffy and irreverent bad-cop style. Mr. Cooper calls Mr. Geldof "the antidiplomat."

Brilliantly successful in raising money, Mr. Geldof commandeered a global audience of 1.5 billion who tuned 93 per cent of the world's TVs to one of his benefit concerts. The 15-hour concert and recording raised $100 million.

Mr. Cooper analyses Bono's success.

One, Bono is a wordsmith -- from his musical lyrics to the media sound bites that are music to the journalist's ears.

For example: "It is absurd, if not obscene, that celebrity is a door that such serious issues need to pass through before politicians take note," Bono said. "But there it is. The idea has a force of its own. We're making it louder. Making noise is a job description, really, for a rock star."

(It took Diana, Princess of Wales, to catalyze interest on a treaty to ban landmines. Canada's then-foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy had championed the cause with U.S. activist Jody Williams. She and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines shared the Nobel Peace Prize.)

Two, Bono does his homework -- seeking out, for one, Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University economy professor and one-man NGO, who gave him a crash course in international debt.

Mr. Sachs was "amply repaid," says Mr. Cooper, when Bono wrote the forward to Mr. Sach's bestselling book The End of Poverty. Mr. Sachs also travelled to Kenya with Angelina Jolie -- another fact-getter in her job as UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which helps 20 million refugees in 120 countries.

Bono joined the London-based group Jubilee 2000 to support "the idea of the poorest countries having their debs to the richest ones cancelled out" and then launched his own foundation, DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa.).

Three, he targets pivotal people and (judiciously) throws their words back at them. He also speaks their language. With Jesse Helms, he quoted scripture, describing AIDS as "the leprosy of our age." With U.S. legislators, he talks security and terrorism: "Africa is not the frontline on the war -- but it could be soon."

Four, he mentors other celebrities.

Five, he praises and criticizes. In 2003, he showed up to celebrate Paul Martin's win at the Liberal leadership convention. Two years later, he washed his hands of prime minister Martin for backing down on his promise to raise Canada's foreign aid to 0.7 per cent of GDP.

Where would Mr. Cooper -- if he were a celebrity -- direct his star power?

"Clean water," he answers instantly. "I'm always amazed celebrities don't choose it." One exception is actor Matt Damon, main champion and co-founder of the H2O Africa Foundation (www.h2oafrica.org) whose network of NGOs and corporations builds clean water projects across Africa. Despite Mr. Damon's star status and water's crucial tie-in to poverty, disease and degraded environment, the Damon campaign has had only small-scale accomplishments, says Mr. Cooper. The foundation has found it "hard to translate its work into big clout." Clean water needs "new and more celebrity advocates," he says "diligent and committed personalities to act as its champions." Thus Ottawa-based WaterCan (www.watercan.com), whose honorary president is Margaret Trudeau, "does seem to be filling a gap." Each day, dirty water and lack of sanitation kill 5,000 children in the Third World. Globally, pathogen-infested water infects one in every three people with diseases. The diseases kill 2.2 million of them.

Donna Jacobs is an Ottawa writer; her e-mail address is donnabjacobs@hotmail.com

Rejected MLB T-shirt slogans

There is no shortage of T-shirts available to show your support for your favorite MLB team. For example, the Tigers' online team shop lists 36 different men's T-shirts for purchase. Of course, not all T-shirts pass the final inspection from MLB officials. Like these rejected ones Page 2 recently discovered in a warehouse in New Jersey ...

Cueto simply sensational

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

By one measure, in fact, Cueto’s debut was the best in team history. He became the first Reds pitcher since 1900 to strike out 10 in his first outing.

Cueto retired the first 15 batters he faced, gave up a solo home run – which broke up his perfect game – and then retired six more.
Cueto, a 22-year-old Dominican right-hander, threw 92 pitches, 68 for strikes. He did not go to a three-ball count all day.


Reader John Perin sent this to me: With regards to Johnny Cueto's first-time appearance, here is some information on two other Reds' pitchers and their major-league debuts:

Gary Nolan - April 15, 1967. Went 7.1 innings, gave up six hits, three runs, struck out eight and walked two against Houston at Crosley Field. The Reds won 7-3. In that game, Nolan struck out the side in the first inning, walking only Joe Morgan around the three strikeouts.

Wayne Simpson - April 9, 1970 - Went nine innings, gave up two hits, no runs and no walks and struck out two against Los Angeles at Dodger Stadium. The Reds won 3-0.


The Reds were not surprised by Johnny Cueto's one-hit, one-run, 10-strikeout, seven-inning debut. But they were giddy. Some examples:

Bronson Arroyo: "I never saw Pedro (Martinez) throw in his younger years in person. But he reminds me somewhat of him -- smaller guy, Dominican, throws the ball on a really low plane, 94 to 96, not an unbelievably big curveball -- Pedro's is bigger -- but a pitch to get them off the fastball and then good change. It was an unbelievable debut. A young guy, great circumstances -- not much of crowd, more of spring training feel -- any way you cut it it's a nerve-racking day. To do what he did, especially command-wise. When someone's throwing that hard, you'd expect them to be up in the zone a lot. He was just painting at the knee all day. Pretty nasty. The only debut I saw that came close to that was (Jonathan) Papelbon. He's turned out to be pretty damn good."

Francisco Cordero: "Unbelievable. Everything was downhill. Everything was a strike. He attacked the hitters. He made the pitches he wanted to make. Even the home run pitch wasn't bad. The guy just put a good swing on it. It was just amazing. I just wanted to get my job done so he got the win. When you pitch like that, you deserve a win, especially in your big debut."

Adam Dunn: "He's fun to play behind. He gets the ball and throws. He doesn't take a lot of time between pitches. He throws strikes. He's one of those special guys. You can tell it on the mound. He's total different on the mound than he is in the clubhouse. I don't know how describe it."

Paul Bako: "He's tough. He's going to be tough for quite a long time. It was nice to see him come out and be himself, not try to do too much. He obviously wasn't rattled. It really doesn't surprise me. It was very nice to see. Just the way he handles himself, the confidence he has and the ability he has, it doesn't surprise me. He's nice and cool and collected. He knows he's good. He doesn't exude cockiness but he's got confidence about him that just every time out we're going to have a chance to win."

Mike Lincoln: "That was a special outing. But we saw that in spring. He's got that kind of stuff to be able to pitch like that every start. You can see it in him. He's a competitor and he has the stuff to carry him to another level."

Dusty Baker: "What can I say about Johnny Cueto? Great debut. He threw strikes. The linescore says it: Seven innings, one run, one hit, 10 strikeouts. That is some debut right there."


Cueto went seven innings, allowing the one hit. He struck out 10 and walked none. According to Elias Sports Bureau, he is the first Reds pitcher since 1900 to have 10 strikeouts in the his major league debut. That's as far back as official stats go.

He hit 95, 96 mph on his fastball. His slider was 87, 88, 90. 92. He mixed in an occasional 84, 85 mph changeup. He did not go to a three-ball count. He threw 92 pitches, 68 for strikes.

According to Elias, Cueto is the first pitcher to throw at least five perfect innings in his major league debut since Seattle’s Ken Cloude threw 5 1/3 perfect innings on May 9, 1997, against the White Sox.

Karl Rove Likes What He Sees

The Failed Dynasty - 1990 Reds: The Nasty Boys

AP Photo/Rusty Kennedy

Nothing Succeeds Like Success

Americans have regularly changed their minds in the midst of their ongoing wars—and not just once, but often. War is a volatile enterprise. Tactics, strategies, and commanders must be sorted out amid death and destruction before the proper combination is found to defeat the enemy. In the meantime, the reasons for going to war, the manner in which the war is fought, and the objectives for which it is waged are constantly being weighed at home against the costs of conducting it. As a result, impatient democracies—and Americans are nothing if not impatient—are liable to suffer alternating fits of unrestrained optimism and utter despair.

This volatility has certainly characterized our current engagement in Iraq, but it has been no less true before. In the early days of the Civil War, a confident North was sure of quick victory in a righteous cause. After the slaughters of 1862 at Shiloh, Antietam, and Frederickburg, the North then fell into collective querulousness and despair. By the summer of 1863, the North was ebullient again as its armies won crushing, near-simultaneous victories at both Gettysburg and Vicksburg. A year later, after the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, Lincoln and all he stood for were reviled. Stalemate or concession seemed imminent—until General Philip Sheridan ran wild in the Shenandoah Valley and William Tecumseh Sherman took Atlanta on September 2, 1864.

Lincoln’s war aims were largely the same in April 1865 as they had been in April 1861. It was not his policies per se that lost, regained, lost, and once more gained public support but rather the perceived progress, or lack thereof, of Union arms. And these mercurial reactions have likewise been the norm in our later history. In World War II, well after the initial gloom of 1939-42 had disappeared with the turnaround in 1943 and 1944, near-shock set in over the horrendous Allied slaughters at the Bulge and Okinawa—only to be set aside within a matter of months when the war ended victoriously.

In the Korean war, to take another example, Seoul changed hands four times. Harry Truman, who had won support for the deployment of American troops in the summer of 1950 and then lost it with the massive Chinese invasion of December, left office in January 1953 with a 22-percent approval rating. But his successor Dwight Eisenhower, without materially changing American strategy or war aims, mustered fresh support for stabilizing the situation once General Matthew Ridgway had succeeded in restoring an autonomous South Korea below the 38th parallel, and in preventing further Communist aggression.

In the first two years of the Vietnam war (1963-65), the struggle was generally deemed to be essential to our national interest and, what is more, winnable. By 1967, however, the war was beginning to be seen as a quagmire; by mid-1968, it had been written off by many as a disaster. Then, five years later, in 1973, it was grudgingly judged to have been settled by the Paris peace accords—before being lost in 1975.

_____________

And Iraq? Three-quarters of Americans favored the initial decision in October 2002 to remove Saddam Hussein. In the wake of our brilliant three-week victory in April 2003 and the initial, relatively quiet months of the postwar occupation, the public maintained its strong support. This remained the case even after it became clear that we had not found arsenals of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), one of the chief reasons offered by the Bush administration for going to war.

By late 2006, however—after the Abu Ghraib scandal, the pullback from Falluja, the withdrawal of some members of the original coalition, and increased internecine violence between Shiites and Sunnis, and in the face of some 3,000 American combat fatalities—only about a third of Americans still thought the war was worth the price or favored its continuation. By late summer 2007, of the 27 Democratic Senators who had voted to authorize hostilities in October 2002, only one, Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, was still on record as supporting the effort. Former President Bill Clinton, who in 2002 had boasted, “I don’t think it will be a big military problem if we do it,” and who reiterated his support in May 2003, announced last year that he had been against the war “from the beginning.”

But we appear to have entered lately into still another cycle of re-interpretation, clearly the result of a new array of converging developments. Among these, the successful “surge” of U.S. troops, the appointment of General David Petraeus as senior theater commander, and the tactical switch from counter-terrorism to counter-insurgency are no doubt the most salient. These days, although there is no great public elation at our improved prospects, or appreciation that al Qaeda by its own admission is in disarray in Iraq, we see or hear very little of antiwar groups like Code Pink or the Cindy Sheehan brigades, and none of Hollywood’s recent antiwar movies—Lions for Lambs, Redacted, Rendition, Valley of Elah—has made a dent at the box office. At the very least, many Americans seem tired of being told that the United States is the culpable party in the war.
As we see improved chances for an eventual U.S. victory and a stabilized Iraq, it is therefore worth returning to the most controversial issues of the war—not in order to re-fight it, but to gain some perspective on the relationship between battlefield developments and perceptions of the worthiness and achievability of American aims.

_____________

The Bush administration, like Congress in its authorizations of October 2002, advanced many arguments for going into Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s possession of WMD, his links with al Qaeda, his genocidal actions at home and abroad, his harboring of terrorists, his non-stop violations of UN mandates and of the accords struck after the first Gulf war from 1991 onward. Of these, we may begin with the first two, the only ones to become issues mired in acrimony.

Upon their arrival in Iraq, U.S. forces found no arsenals of WMD. Accordingly, when the occupation took a deadly turn, a new slogan emerged: “Bush lied, thousands died.” The United States, in other words, had gotten itself into a hopeless and vastly destructive war over a nonexistent cause. Yet now that things are improving in Iraq, does that verdict hold up or can we look back and see larger considerations at stake?

The case of Libya offers the most compelling reason to view the question afresh. Only upon our invasion of Iraq did we learn about Libya’s own nuclear-weapons programs, the existence and dangerous extent of which had not been previously discovered by our intelligence services. Instead, we learned about them thanks to Muammar Qaddafi’s sudden promise to give them up. Was Qaddafi’s precipitous action the consequence, as diplomats boasted, of a longstanding Western effort to isolate Libya diplomatically and economically, or was it rather the consequence of the recent and unexpected demonstration of victorious American might in Iraq? The timing of the announcement—in December 2003, a week after the much-photographed capture of a haggard and bedraggled Saddam Hussein—suggests the latter.

Nor was this the only coincidence of timing. Take the case of Iran, which, according to the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007, may have halted elements of its own nuclear-weapons program in the fall of 2003. If that is true—the accuracy of the NIE as a whole is highly questionable—we have here another instance of the inhibiting effect of vigorous American action on the nuclear ambitions of rogue states.

This is not to suggest that the Iraq war was fought in order to pressure Libya and Iran into desisting from their quest for WMD. But had we not gone into Iraq, it is all too easy to envision a scenario in which Libya and Iran would now be proceeding to process weapons-grade uranium and we would still be as unsure about Iraq itself as we and the international community had been throughout the 1990’s. And this is to say nothing of a related development in Pakistan—where, at almost the same moment as Saddam’s capture, Dr. A.Q. Khan was abruptly detained and subsequently confessed to having been involved in the covert international proliferation of nuclear-weapons technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea.

_____________

In this connection, we might also pause to consider another “lesson” of Iraq that only yesterday was thought to have been resolved for all time. In the heyday following the quick removal of the Taliban and preceding the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration released a National Security Strategy document embracing the doctrine of preemptive war against suspected enemies, especially those with the capability of developing WMD. “We will not wait,” George Bush declared in his March 6, 2003 address to the nation, “to see what terrorists or terrorist states will do.”

But then, after we failed to find WMD in Iraq, and the violence in that country escalated, preemption, too, was added to the growing indictment sheet of the administration’s supposed record of arrogance and incompetence. Does that charge, in light of where we are today, still stand?

Retrospectively, the legitimacy of preemption can be confirmed (if not precisely in the terms its backers expected) by the Libyan announcement, the possible cessation of enrichment in Iran, and the detention of A.Q. Khan. All three are examples of changes in the balance of power that did not require the direct application of preemptive American force but were the results of its preemptive application elsewhere.

Prospectively, as we ponder Iran’s ongoing violations of the international inspection regime and the failure of diplomatic efforts to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, preemption seems to have become once again thinkable, winning to its side such unlikely converts as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and NATO ministers who recently declared their own willingness to embrace preemptive strategies, including nuclear options, against states that threaten NATO members with state-sponsored terror and deadly new weapons. And as for Pakistan, which already has a sizable nuclear arsenal, political figures as diverse as Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee have suggested preemptive incursions in order to find Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants—a proposal scarcely conceivable just two years ago when our “unnecessary preemptive war” in Iraq had allegedly landed us in a quagmire.

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Which brings us back to the second highly controversial reason adduced for the war in Iraq—namely, the existence of links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. A loose affinity between the two men was widely accepted as canonical in late 2002. In the words of the joint congressional authorization, bin Laden’s operatives were “known to be in Iraq,” and Senator Hillary Clinton confirmed that “intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein . . . has given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.” Buttressing this assurance were a number of established facts: Saddam’s knowledge of or assistance to the al-Qaeda affiliate Ansar al-Islam in Kurdistan; the presence in Baghdad of Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the architects of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center; and the flight to Iraq of one of bin Laden’s followers, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, after the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But when intra-Iraq violence increased in 2004-5, and when the 9/11 commission found no evidence of formal cooperation between al Qaeda and Saddam, the “link” was pronounced another fabrication—more proof that our presence in Iraq had nothing to do with defeating the people who had killed thousands of Americans on September 11. Instead, the new narrative had it that, simply by being in Iraq, we had created an army of terrorists who would have otherwise never existed or never have been drawn there.

Today, the issue is being slowly re-framed. True, there may never have been a formal working relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda, but some natural affinity there was. Certainly, once Saddam’s Baathist remnant found itself without an army, it had no difficulty looking to al Qaeda to import one post-haste. Since 2003, al-Qaeda fighters have operated in conjunction with the Saddamist insurgents. Only now, and with the help of former Baathist and Sunni extremists whom we have persuaded to turn against their erstwhile allies, are American soldiers on the verge of inflicting a thorough defeat on al Qaeda in Iraq—a development with major strategic implications for the war against Islamic terrorists and one, moreover, that is taking place, as originally intended, at a safe distance from our own shores.

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Still another point of reexamination relates to the status and image of the U.S. military. If the spectacular three-week victory over Saddam in 2003 led to a kind of temporary triumphalism, the four years of hard fighting, long rotations, and casualties that followed it prompted a deep-seated revisionist pessimism. Our military was said to be worn out, poorly led, and prone to crimes like Abu Ghraib and the Haditha “massacres.” The Pentagon was indicted as having been fatally blindsided by the ingenuity and ferocity of enemy attacks. Enlistments were said to be to be falling below manpower targets, with no end in sight.

Today’s perception is once again different. Thanks to the success of our counter-insurgency tactics and the consequent drop in violence—during 2007, ethnic fighting in Baghdad decreased by over 90 percent—ordinary Americans are beginning to grasp that our military forces, and especially the Army and Marine corps, are within sight of accomplishing a task that is still confidently pronounced impossible by some prominent public figures.

As of December 2007, enlistments in the four services have exceeded manpower goals, and entirely new combat brigades are being created. Our officers and their troops, however weary they may be from repeated tours, are now acknowledged to be the world’s most sophisticated practitioners of counter-insurgency warfare. Their competence is on display not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan, where American veterans of the Iraq war have proved far more adroit against the Taliban than their unseasoned NATO allies. Like the emergence of Sherman’s Army of the West in the autumn of 1864, which renewed the North’s faith in its military prowess and in the wisdom of Lincoln’s war planners, the Petraeus command in Iraq has prompted a new appreciation of our military’s talents.

What about troop deployments, an issue much agitated among supporters of the war no less than among opponents? If the 2003 lightning strike on Saddam was tendered as confirmation of the efficacy of Donald Rumsfeld’s “revolution in military affairs,” the subsequent bloody occupation was taken as a rebuke not just to the Rumsfeld doctrine, but also to the entire notion of an expeditionary war conducted with a small local footprint. For much of 2004, former generals, antiwar politicians, and some proponents of the war insisted that too few troops had been committed in 2003 and far too few allotted for the subsequent occupation. Initial calls for a corrective surge in 2004, voiced by stalwarts like John McCain, stipulated reinforcements in numbers ranging from 80,000 to 100,000 troops. But by mid-2007 a much smaller compromise figure of 30,000 was reached—the maximum number considered to be politically palatable, sufficient to support a change in tactics, and, given other American military deployments around the globe, just barely doable.

So we have gone from a general feeling in 2003 that 200,000 was the right number to execute our brilliant defeat of Saddam Hussein, to a subsequent consensus that it was veritable insanity to commit a mere 150,000 troops to pacify a country of 26 million, to an acknowledgment that, after four years of fighting, a surge to 160,000 was large enough. The point is hardly to suggest there is no correct answer to the question of numbers or that manpower needs do not change with the pulse of battle, but rather, in the light of today’s good news, to cast doubt on the fiercely held revisionist orthodoxy of 2004-06 that the total size of the needed deployment of American occupiers lay in several hundreds of thousands.

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Finally, there is the future. As early as April 2003, some observers had begun to speak of an unstoppable American juggernaut, which, having already destroyed two extremist regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and on the brink of establishing stable reform governments in those countries, could now quickly shift its attention to such other terrorist-sponsoring states as Syria and Iran.

This confidence, dashed by the insurgency and sectarian strife in Iraq, was soon supplanted by a new conventional wisdom. Far from being able to decapitate other enemy nations, it was said, we had further empowered them. Iran in particular, its regional ambitions no longer checked by Saddam, and newly emboldened by perceived American setbacks, was declared the real “winner” of our folly, carving out a rump Shiite state in southern Iraq, boldly exporting jihadists all over the region from Iraq to Lebanon, and on the verge of acquiring the bomb. Syria under Bashar Assad was proceeding methodically to choke Lebanon to death.

Now all this has begun to be rethought once more. By the end of 2007, Moqtada al-Sadr, the chief local surrogate of the Ayatollahs, evidently sensing a change in the local balance of power, had prudently withdrawn from his violent anti-American and anti-Sunni activity. Meanwhile, the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad was beginning to restore domestic funding to Sunni communities in Anbar province and to be inching toward a more genuinely representative system. Perhaps, it was being whispered, Iraqi Shiites valued their Iraqi and Arab identity over their sectarian Shiite allegiance after all, and might be prepared to resist Iranian encroachments on their sovereignty. Regionally, too, there have been signs, however halting and uncertain, of a growing Arab desire to contain Iran. Could it be that, provided the nuclear threat can be disposed of, the long-running grip of Khomeinism might be better challenged in the landscape of a post-Saddam Iraq?

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So far, none of these gradual reversals of opinion has affected overall judgments of the Bush administration, whose approval ratings, according to most polls, still hover around 35 percent. This continued unpopularity has prompted some among the President’s supporters to compare his tenure with that of Harry Truman, who as we have seen exited office in 1953 with even lower ratings. Only later, with the dramatic turnabout in Korea and the gradual emergence of a successful South Korea, did Truman achieve his lasting reputation as the executor of the cold-war strategy of containment and a hugely consequential President.

Such positive revisionism can take years to develop. Assessments from the battlefield must be digested, partisan distortions rectified, and volatile news cycles balanced by the more measured perspective that comes only with time.

The optimism of 2003, it is good to remember, was itself not just a product of the spectacular removal of Saddam and the Taliban, but a dividend of other successful interventions dating back decades: Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf war, the successful Balkan bombing campaign against Slobodan Milosevic, and the rapid removal of the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. By the turn of the millennium, an almost antiseptic notion of American war-making had been created in the public mind. In turn, the bitterness over Iraq, whose symptoms peaked last year in the attempt by congressional Democrats to force a precipitous withdrawal of American troops, resulted from four years of unrelievedly pessimistic reporting from Iraq—reporting that itself owed much to a media template forged decades earlier in Vietnam. If the success of the surge continues through 2008, and culminates in a stable Iraqi government, we can assume the gradual emergence of a new consensus, and perhaps, with time, even a change in the current low public regard for the administration and its war aims.

It would be folly to think, however, that one can sit by and wait for history to deliver a smiling verdict. Shifting judgments about the causes, conduct, and consequences of America conflicts are indeed the norm in American history. These ongoing swings depend in large part on whether the United States is thought to be winning or losing, and are finally codified only at war’s end or well afterward. But for the cycle to play out, there must be a persistence of spirit and a willingness to see a war through to the end, as well as a bedrock confidence in both the capabilities of America’s armed forces and the righteousness of the American cause.

After our aberrant defeat in Vietnam, we may have collectively forgotten that even successful wars of long duration undergo many incarnations, with accompanying swings of mood that alternately damn and support aims, methods, costs, and benefits. But this is in fact the pattern, and it has once again been discernible in Iraq. The road to defeat lies only in the willful denial of this elementary fact.

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (Random House).

Anatomy of the Surge

Peter D. Feaver, a new contributor, is the Alexander F. Hehmeyer professor of political science and public policy at Duke University and director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies. He is a co-author of Getting the Best Out of College, to be published by Ten Speed Press in June.

Over the past sixteen months, the United States has altered its trajectory in Iraq. We are no longer headed toward a catastrophic defeat and may be on the path to a remarkable victory. As a result, the next President, Democrat or Republican, may well find it easier to adopt the broad contours of this administration’s current strategy than to jeopardize progress by changing course abruptly.

That would be an ironic, but satisfying, outcome to the tortuous journey on which the Bush administration’s policy toward Iraq, and this nation’s views of Iraq, have been traveling over the past three years.

The administration’s description of the long-term American goal—a democratic Iraq that can defend itself, govern itself, and sustain itself, and will be an ally in the war on terror—has remained consistent from the time the war was launched in 2003 until now. What has shifted, due to sobering experience, is its sense of how long it might take to achieve this goal: a time frame that has stretched from months, to years, and even to decades.

I witnessed the shift first-hand. For two years, from June 2005 to July 2007, I left my teaching position at Duke to join the National Security Council staff as a special adviser for strategic planning, and in that capacity I worked closely on Iraq policy. By the middle of 2005, it was painfully obvious to everyone involved that the only decisive outcome that could be achieved during President Bush’s tenure was the triumph of our enemies, America’s withdrawal, and Iraq’s descent into a hellish chaos as yet undreamed of.

The challenge, therefore, was to develop and implement a workable strategy that could be handed over to Bush’s successor. Although important progress could be made on that strategy during Bush’s watch, ultimately it would be carried through by the next President. This was the reality behind the course followed by the administration in 2005-2006, and it remains the reality behind the new and different course the administration has been following since 2007.

This new and different strategy, now called the “surge” but at one point called by insiders the “bridge,” emerged out of a growing recognition over 2006 that our critics were right about one thing: our Iraq policy was not working. At the same time, however, and whether knowingly or ignorantly, many of those same critics were insisting that the answer lay in pursuing precisely the same strategy we already had in place. That is, they were telling us that we needed (a) to push Iraqi government officials to come together politically and (b) to train Iraqi troops so that they could take over from American forces. We had been doing exactly these things for a year, and we had been driven to the brink.

This was no solution at all. The results on the ground in Iraq made it clear that, without a dramatic change, the President would be leaving his successor with an untenable mess, if not the prospect of a catastrophic American rout. A review of administration policy was therefore launched that led to the dramatic course revision we have seen unfolding over the past year-and-a-half.

This month, the military leader of the surge, General David Petraeus, and America’s chief diplomat in Iraq, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, will present their second report to Congress on the surge and its effects. Prudent and circumspect men, they will surely not advance bold claims on behalf of the policy the United States has been following under their leadership. But I expect they will speak more optimistically about the future than many thought possible eighteen months ago. Their testimony will demonstrate that, at last, the United States has a sustainable strategy for Iraq with a reasonable chance of success, and one that George W. Bush will be able to turn over with confidence to the next incumbent of the White House.

How we got here is a story in itself.

_____________

In the summer of 2005, General George Casey, the theater commander in Iraq, was pressing a military campaign whose primary goal was the training and maturing of Iraqi security forces. At the same time, Iraqis had designed a national constitution that would be the subject of a countrywide referendum in October, to be followed (assuming the constitution’s ratification) by national elections in December.

Here at home, administration policy was inundated by criticisms on every front. Much of it was reckless, but not all of it. From “skeptical supporters” of the war like Senator John McCain and the military analyst Fred Kagan came the charge that the number of American “boots on the ground” was far from sufficient to accomplish the mission. Although our military commanders in Iraq kept assuring the White House that this was not the case, the criticism flitted like Banquo’s ghost in the background of every internal discussion about the war.

Some Democrats in the “loyal opposition”—i.e., those who were not simply advocating an irresponsible strategy of defeat and withdrawal—made the same point, but more often they took a different tack. Charging that the administration had no strategy beyond “staying the course,” they proposed instead that the United States pressure the Iraqis to bring the sullen and disaffected Sunni minority into the political sphere. This would siphon support from the insurgency. In addition, the Pentagon needed to accelerate the training of Iraqi security forces to handle more of the load against the enemies of the new Iraq. And the State Department had to lean on Iraq’s neighbors to do more to help.

This counsel seemed maddeningly sensible to us. It was, to the letter, the administration’s strategy at that very moment. Still, exasperating though it may have been to be told that we should do what we were actually doing, this line of criticism also seemed to contain potentially good news. Perhaps, we thought, we could find common ground with these Democratic critics—their number included Senators Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden, and Carl Levin—and forge a consensus on how to move forward.

That was the background to a decision in the fall of 2005 to release an unclassified version of General Casey’s campaign plan, along with a document explaining how all elements of American power were being mobilized to assist in its realization. The full document was called the National Strategy for Supporting Iraq, the name of which changed somewhere along the way to the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq (NSVI). There was nothing new here. The release of the NSVI, bolstered by a series of frank presidential addresses, was simply an attempt to make public a number of details about our approach and offer a reasonable response to our reasonable critics.

The effort was doomed. It was overtaken by political events or, rather, by one specific event: a press conference, on November 17, 2005, by John Murtha, a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania.

Murtha was a veteran of the Vietnam war and a hawk on defense spending—someone generally thought to be at home with the old “Scoop” Jackson wing of the Democratic party. When it came to Iraq, he turned out to be something else. “Our military has accomplished its mission and done its duty,” Murtha summarily declared at his press conference, and now it was time to bring the troops home—as soon as possible, but no later than in six months.

Murtha was not calling for a gradual transition to Iraqi control. To the contrary, he was advocating the wholesale abandonment of Iraq. As he well knew, moreover, six months would be the fastest possible withdrawal under the most optimistic timetable, with our forces working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to pull out all of the equipment and materiel we had brought in over the previous three years. This was not a brief for haste but rather a recipe for panic.

Unlike those critics who lambasted our policy and then commended it to our attention, Murtha was presenting an unambiguous alternative. The left wing of the Democratic party and its supporters in Moveon.org had finally found a spokesman with credentials on national security to make the most extreme case for the war’s end.

The media lauded the Murtha plan, but they did not examine it closely. I spent hours with reporters in a futile effort to persuade them to show Murtha the respect of subjecting his scheme—including his bizarre notion of redeploying troops 5,000 miles away on the island of Okinawa in the Sea of Japan—to the same level of scrutiny they lavished upon administration policy. One key reporter told me, “We don’t scrutinize Murtha’s plan because none of us takes it seriously.”

Inside the White House, we joked bitterly that the only way we could get people to see the flaws in Murtha’s proposal would be to offer it as our own.

_____________

In the end, however, even if we had managed to secure some kind of bipartisan support for our strategy, it would have made little difference. Over the course of 2006, the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq collapsed.

We had assumed that steady political movement would drain Sunni support for the insurgency by giving Sunnis a stake in the new Iraq—and that such political progress could be completed before the safety of the Iraqi population had been secured. Alas, the stunningly successful constitutional referendum of October 2005 and the national election two months later were followed by a dreadful stalemate. It took Sunnis nearly six weeks to acknowledge that the vote had been free and fair, and then squabbling within the Shiite community paralyzed its politicians in turn. Month after month, the nascent Iraqi political class found itself unable to form and seat a government. Almost a half-year of political momentum was forgone.

No less worrisome was the discovery that the Iraqi security forces were not yet in any condition to shoulder an increasing portion of the burden—to “stand up” so that coalition forces could “stand down.” At the same time, the security challenge became far grimmer. In February, al-Qaeda terrorists blew up the Golden Dome mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest Shiite shrines in Iraq. Shiite militia groups responded just as the terrorists had hoped, launching retaliatory strikes against Sunni citizens. A bloody pattern—sectarian atrocity, sectarian reprisal, sectarian counter-reprisal—took hold. Each week, attack levels reached new heights. Since even the vastly more capable U.S. forces seemed unable to tamp down the violence, there was no chance that fledgling Iraqi security forces might do so any time soon.

With the situation deteriorating throughout the spring, the administration might have begun the full-fledged reconsideration of the National Strategy for Victory that it would conduct later in the year. But suddenly the existing strategy appeared to receive a boost. After months of wrangling, the Iraqis finally installed a unity government under the leadership of the little-known Nouri al-Maliki. And U.S. special forces killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the charismatic leader of al Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind behind its strategy of fomenting civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. Hope rekindled that the chaos could be brought under control.

But the boost proved illusory. General Casey launched a new effort to regain control of the capital, but within weeks it foundered when several of the Iraqi units on which it depended simply failed to show up for the fight. A revised version of the Casey plan likewise came a cropper when the new Maliki government interfered with efforts to go after rogue Shiite militias that were now rivaling al Qaeda in Iraq in wreaking havoc.

Over the summer, doubts began to grow among White House officials working on Iraq; by September the NSC staff initiated a quiet but thorough review of strategy with an eye to developing a new way forward. The review, which soon expanded beyond the confines of the National Security Council, became a matter of public knowledge after Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s departure in November, the day after the landslide Democratic victory in the midterm elections. The election underscored the fact that, at a minimum, the administration would have to reposition the Iraq mission in the minds of the American people. Our review confirmed that it would take more than a change of face to rescue the possibility of victory—it would take an entirely new strategy.

The idea was for our proposed change in course to be completed in time to take advantage of the release of another document. This was the much-awaited report of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan commission co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton. Inside the White House, we hoped that the report’s recommendations would be palatable enough to blend with whatever new approach the President decided to adopt. The long-sought holy grail—a bipartisan consensus on the way forward in Iraq—seemed again within reach.

_____________

It was not to be. While sharply criticizing the lack of progress thus far, the Baker-Hamilton commission essentially recommended back to us an accelerated version of the strategy envisioned by the NSVI: stand them up so we can stand down. While there was still some support inside the administration for continuing on that path, the interagency team on which I served was of a different mind. The situation in Iraq had eroded beyond the point envisioned by the Baker-Hamilton report; under the horrific conditions now at play, we concluded, Iraq’s security forces were far more likely to crack under the strain than to “stand up.” And those forces were the essential glue of a stable, unified future. If they went the way of Humpty Dumpty, neither they nor the new Iraq could ever be put back together again.

The Baker-Hamilton report did offer theoretical support for a short-term surge of military forces—something the President and the interagency team were also looking at very closely—but this was mentioned only in a brief passage and was far from the document’s central thrust. The White House never succeeded in shifting the conventional wisdom in Washington that Baker-Hamilton provided an alternative to current policy. Nor, unfortunately, were we ready with our own genuine alternative when the Baker-Hamilton report was released on December 6, 2006. That put paid to the idea that we could use the occasion as a means of securing bipartisan support for a new approach. By the time the President announced the surge in January, the climate had turned frostier still.

By then, the leadership of the newly triumphant Democrats on Capitol Hill had already determined that the war was irretrievably lost and that the only responsible course was to get out as quickly as possible. Signaling the emphasis the Democrats meant to place on ending our involvement in Iraq quickly, Nancy Pelosi, the new speaker of the House, sought to make Jack Murtha her principal deputy.

As for the President’s new strategy, the Democrats labeled it “an escalation”—no doubt because polls and focus groups showed that this would make it seem least palatable to the American public. The administration countered with the proposition that we were sending “reinforcements.” The media settled on “surge.” Each of these labels had the unfortunate side-effect of obscuring the many other changes contained in the new strategy and focusing attention exclusively on the increase in military troops—certainly the gutsiest element in terms of our domestic politics but by no means the only important one.

Week after week, the Democrats attempted to use their control of Congress to suffocate the surge in its cradle. Various proposals were advanced to hobble General Petraeus and render implementation impossible. In April, just as the 30,000 new surge troops were entering the country, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared peremptorily: “This war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything.”

Reid was wrong. While the political standoff in Washington worsened, the situation in Iraq began to improve. Not right away or all at once, of course. In fact, to judge by the measures of greatest salience to the American media, the situation only eroded in the first half of 2007. Attacks rose in number, as did American fatalities. But Petraeus was steadily refining and adapting the new strategy, and his efforts became especially productive after the full complement of new forces was on the ground and the “surge in operations” could begin in earnest by the beginning of June.

By September 2007, when Petraeus and Crocker gave their first report to Congress, the trend line toward success was discernible. Still, the matter remained debatable—to the point where Senator Clinton felt confident enough to inform Petraeus and Crocker on national television that “the reports you provided to us require the willing suspension of disbelief” and to characterize the two men as “the de-facto spokesmen of what many of us consider to be a failed policy.”

A few months after that showdown, however, the progress was all but indisputable. By now, indeed, we can see that the surge has bought precious time for the United States and the nascent Iraqi state to progress meaningfully toward five specific objectives.

First is extirpating the inciters of sectarian violence: al Qaeda in Iraq among the Sunnis and the rogue militias among the Shiites. Second is building up a larger, more capable, and more integrated Iraqi Security Force than existed in 2006.

At the same time, Iraqis are being given the opportunity to create the means of political accommodation locally and from the “bottom up,” in ways that reflect the realities of life inside the highly complex mosaic of their country. The achievement of this third goal is the precursor to the fourth, which is to make the central, “top down” government in Baghdad more responsive to the nation’s eighteen provinces by opening its pocketbook for projects that will improve the economic and living conditions of the country’s citizenry at large.

The final goal is, perhaps, the trickiest: pushing Iraqi politicians to pass legislation on a number of important measures, including the sharing of oil revenues, the funding of infrastructure projects, the reform of de-Baathification laws, and the like. These are the notorious “benchmarks” mentioned by the President in his January 2007 speech and subjected to much derision by skeptics.

A year after Bush first announced the new strategy, progress on the first three objectives has exceeded everyone’s expectations, even those who helped design the surge. Al Qaeda in Iraq has been gravely wounded. The rogue elements within the Shiite militias are being pruned away. The Iraq Security Force is growing in size and reliability. And, following the decision of Sunni tribes to turn on al Qaeda and throw in their lot with the United States and the new Iraq, local political accommodation is proceeding at a remarkable pace.

There has also been some movement toward linking the Iraqi parliament’s spending to the needs of localities, but so far this is less impressive. As for the benchmarks on political reconciliation from the top down, it is useful to recall that we once thought such political change should precede everything else. That approach did not work. Our new strategy was based on the contrary assumption that security came first, and that parliamentary progress would lag significantly behind other elements. Of course, this has hardly prevented the President’s critics from seizing on the failure of the Iraqi government to have completed all of it benchmarks as putative evidence of the surge’s overall failure. Even here, however, there has been a measure of progress on the ground: in February, for example, the Iraqi parliament passed legislation addressing several key benchmarks, notably including deBaathification reform and the facilitation of provincial elections as well as of better relations between the provinces and the central government.

_____________

The Petraeus-Crocker report to Congress will no doubt offer further evidence that the new approach is working but is far from having completed its assigned task. No fair-minded observer could conclude otherwise. Petraeus has already indicated that the central military element of the surge—the increase of 30,000 troops—will end by summer 2008. At that point, U.S. forces in Iraq are set to decline to pre-surge levels, roughly 130,000. The question Petraeus will now have to answer is: how long will troop levels need to stay there, and when can they start moving down?

What Petraeus must have uppermost in his mind is the record compiled by his predecessors in trying to produce results with just enough troops to come close but not enough to succeed. A premature drawdown would, by definition, cause the forfeiture of his hard-won gains. And the political reality is that once those troops left Iraq, they would not be coming back.

In a slide presentation that accompanied his September 2007 testimony to Congress, Petraeus gave a picture of what he considered an appropriate drawdown. In his reckoning, after remaining at 130,000 for some time, American troops could decline in number to approximately 115,000, then by slow and measured steps to around 100,000, then perhaps to 85,000, and so onward. The closer the troop levels came to 100,000 (or fewer) the more manageable the deployment would be militarily. At those levels, our ground forces would be able to return to a peacetime rotation schedule, which would put far less strain on the all-volunteer force.

In other words, a substantial American presence in Iraq is sustainable militarily over the long term. The great unknown is whether such a commitment would be sustainable politically here at home.

The evidence of the past sixteen months is that the American people are likely to support, or at least tolerate, a reduction in American numbers gradual enough to preserve the gains of the surge. A President McCain, for example, would probably have no trouble taking advantage of this sustainable strategy and bringing our mission in Iraq to the most successful end achievable.

What of a President Barack Obama or a President Hillary Clinton? If one were to attempt an answer to this question from the two candidates’ words and conduct during the long primary season, one would have reason to conclude that both, in promising a rapid “end” to the war with an equally rapid withdrawal of American forces, are bound and determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of at least partial victory.

But it is not impossible to imagine that these vital matters would appear differently to a Democratic President considering Iraq’s and America’s future from a seat at the desk in the Oval Office rather than from the stage of a college gymnasium filled with delirious Democratic primary voters. One might even permit oneself to hope that, while continuing to speak derogatorily of George Bush’s years as the shepherd of our Iraq policy, such a President would come to know, privately and in time, that he or she had been bequeathed something very different from a fiasco: the promise of a better outcome for Iraq, for the Middle East, and for the American people.

60 Minutes: Bill James

Reds Honor Nuxhall

Members of Cincinnati Reds line up wearing jerseys bearing the name and number of former player and long time Reds radio broadcaster Joe Nuxhall before the start of their game with Arizona Diamondbacks in their opening day MLB National League baseball game at Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati, Ohio, March 31, 2008. Nuxhall passed away during the off season.

Opening Day 2008

Flip through spring training

Enquirer photographer Jeff Swinger compiled nearly 2,700 photographs into this special online presentation.
Interactive: Nine innings with the Reds

The Reds begin the 2008 season with several questions. Take a look at some of the most pressing ones in this interactive graphic.
'The Kid'

Even though there's a 22-year-old pitcher in the Reds' starting rotation, and a 20-year-old center fielder-in-waiting in Louisville, 26-year-old Brandon Phillips is still this club's "Kid."
Young once himself

New Reds manager Dusty Baker was playing in the big leagues by the age of 19. He calls on that experience when dealing with his young players.
A minute with Mr. Redlegs

He's the senior mascot of America's oldest professional baseball team. But how well do you really know Mr. Redlegs?
First pitch

How to get there? Where to watch? Where to park? Here's everything you need to know about Opening Day 2008.



Joe Nuxhall Book

Old School Exhibition: Red Sox vs Dodgers

The baseball diamond at the Los Angeles Coliseum is being prepared for the Los Angeles Dodgers exhibition baseball game against the Boston Red Sox Saturday. The Dodgers are celebrating the 50th anniversary of their move to Los Angeles.

The Dodgers said Friday that the full allotment of 115,300 tickets—with all the proceeds going to ThinkCure, the Dodgers’ official charity—have been sold, including about 25,000 for standing-room only behind the lower fence in right and center fields. Two big-screen TVs will make it possible to watch the action.

Baseball’s current world record is an estimated 114,000 for an exhibition game between the Australian national team and an American services team during the Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia, in 1956.

Old-school exhibition

March 29, 2008

Ode To A Burrito

"Chipotle Mexican Grill is the Bono of the fast-food business."

The ingredients that make Chipotle the hottest fast-food chain on the planet.

Chipotle Mexican Grill is the Bono of the fast-food business. Hardheaded financial analysts love it; do-gooders do too. "Chipotle has done a wonderful job of meeting people's sociological need to eat food that's healthy for the planet," says Dean Haskell, a senior VP at equity researcher Morgan Joseph. Bernard Rollin, a distinguished professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University, gushes about Chipotle's focus on hormone- and antibiotic-free meat that is humanely raised. Then he adds, "Have you eaten there? It's really good."

Good food wrapped in a socially responsible message has created legions of Chipotle fans -- and a superhot business. Acquired by McDonald's in 1998 when there were only 14 Chipotles, the company went public in 2006 with 500 stores and watched its stock rise from $22 to $110 in 18 months. The now-independent outfit is enjoying an 80% revenue run-up over three years, and by year's end, it will have 840 stores and top $1 billion in annual sales.

A rough day

Handing out the hardware before the season starts

How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong