Category Archives: Books

Throes of Democracy

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Throes of Democracy2 One of the best books that I have read over the past several years is Walter A. McDougall’s Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585-1828 (HarperCollins 2004), the first book in McDougall’s planned trilogy on American history (Gordon Wood’s 2004 review of Freedom Just Around the Corner is here).

For anyone interested in the development of the market economy in American society, Freedom Just Around the Corner is essential reading. One of McDougall’s central theses is that most of American society’s dynamic successes (and also many of its failures) are attributable to the creative entrepreneurial spirit of its citizens, and that the source of a considerable amount of tension within American society are the forces that attempt to contain this spirit. McDougall sums up his viewpoint in the preface to his widely-anticipated and just-published sequel to Freedom Just Around the Corner, Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 (HarperCollins 2008):

I believe the United States (so far) is the greatest success story in history. I believe Americans (on balance) are experts at self-deception. And I believe the "creative corruption" born of their pretense goes far to explain their success. The upshot of is that American history is chock-full of cruelty and love, hypocrisy and faith, cowardice and courage, plus not small measure of tongue-in-cheek humor. American history is a tale of human nature set free. So how you, the reader, respond to this book will depend in good part on how you yourself (all pretense aside!) regard human nature.

McDougall has a wonderfully engaging style, which is reflected in the following Freedom Just Around the Corner excerpt about the tragic death of Alexander Hamilton in his duel with Vice-President, Aaron Burr. After the Federalist-but-statesman-first Hamilton undermined the rudderless Burr’s Federalist campaign for New York Governor by supporting Burr’s Republican opponent, McDougall described what happened next (pp, 395-96):

When in April 1804 Burr gleaned just 40 percent of the tally, he invoked the code duello and called Hamilton to pistols on the green at Weehawken, New Jersey. Hamilton’s son had been killed in such an affair just a year before and he was well aware of Burr’s marksmanship. But Hamilton consented in July 1804 to perform one last service for his country. He killed Burr’s career by permitting Burr to kill him.

I’ve just started Throes of Democracy, but I have read enough to know that it is going to be a rollicking good ride. Michael Kazin’s somewhat indifferent NY Times review of Throes of Democracy is here.

Born Standing Up

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born_standing_up.jpgDon’t miss this Smithsonian.com excerpt from comedian Steve Martin’s new autobiographical book, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life (Scribner 2007). Take, for example, Martin’s hilarious description of the implementation of his novel theory of comedy in one of his initial shows:

A skillful comedian could coax a laugh with tiny indicators such as a vocal tic (Bob Hope’s “But I wanna tell ya”) or even a slight body shift. Jack E. Leonard used to punctuate jokes by slapping his stomach with his hand. One night, watching him on “The Tonight Show,” I noticed that several of his punch lines had been unintelligible, and the audience had actually laughed at nothing but the cue of his hand slap.
These notions stayed with me until they formed an idea that revolutionized my comic direction: What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh.

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Importantitis

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Orson%20Welles.jpgTheater critic Terry Teachout made an interesting point the other day in this W$J op-ed about one of the hazards of great achievement relatively early in one’s career:

Leonard Bernstein set Broadway on fire in 1957 with “West Side Story,” a jazzed-up version of “Romeo and Juliet” in which the Capulets and Montagues were turned into Puerto Rican Sharks and American Jets. It was the most significant musical of the postwar era — and the last successful work that Bernstein wrote for the stage. His next show, 1976’s “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” closed after seven performances. For the rest of his life he floundered, unable to compose anything worth hearing.
What happened? Stephen Sondheim, Bernstein’s collaborator on “West Side Story,” told Meryle Secrest, who wrote biographies of both men, that he developed “a bad case of importantitis.” That sums up Bernstein’s later years with devastating finality. Time and again he dove head first into grandiose-sounding projects, then emerged from the depths clutching such pretentious pieces of musical costume jewelry as the “Kaddish” Symphony and “A Quiet Place.” In the end he dried up almost completely, longing to make Great Big Musical Statements — he actually wanted to write a Holocaust opera — but incapable of producing so much as a single memorable song.

Teachout goes on to discuss the career of Orson Welles, another performer who peaked early with “Citizen Kane” and then spent the remainder of his career attempting to scale that peak again. Teachout compares Welles and novelist Ralph Ellison to choreographer, George Balanchine:

Contrast Ellison’s creative paralysis with the lifelong fecundity of the great choreographer George Balanchine, who went about his business efficiently and unpretentiously, turning out a ballet or two every season. Most were brilliant, a few were duds, but no matter what the one he’d just finished was like, and no matter what the critics thought of it, he moved on to the next one with the utmost dispatch, never looking back. “In making ballets, you cannot sit and wait for the Muse,” he said. “Union time hardly allows it, anyhow. You must be able to be inventive at any time.” That was the way Balanchine saw himself: as an artistic craftsman whose job was to make ballets. Yet the 20th century never saw a more important artist, or one less prone to importantitis.

I’ve admired the trait that Teachout notes in Balachine in Texas novelist, Larry McMurtry, who churned out interesting novels and short stories for 25 years or so until he reached the pinnacle of his profession at the age of 50 with his 1985 Pulitizer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove. Even after hitting a grand slam with Lonesome Dove, McMurtry didn’t rest on his laurels; he went back to work producing a novel every several years or so. Although many of those novels and other works (the screenplay to Brokeback Mountain, for example) have been highly entertaining, he has not been able to produce a work on the level of Lonesome Dove. The odds are that McMurtry won’t (he is 72 now), but my sense is that he is much more likely to do so pursuing his craft the way in which he is doing it rather than sitting around contemplating what the next great American novel should be.

China Road

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china_road_cover_inside.jpgClear Thinkers favorite James Fallows, who is currently working in China for The Atlantic, posts a recommendation for China Road (Random House 2007), a new book about China by NPR’s long-time China correspondent Rob Gifford. Inasmuch as one of the best books that I read last year was Adrian Goldsworthy’s extraordinary biography of Julius Caesar, Caesar: Life of a Colossus (Yale 2006), one passage from Gifford’s book that Fallows includes in his blog post intrigued me, particularly given the West’s difficulties over the centuries in maintaining normalized political relations with various Chinese governments:

Chairman Mao was just the most recent of a long line of re-unifiers, and if Emperor Qin were to return to China today, he would recognize the mode of government used by the Communist Party. I have to say that I find this idea rather scary, that two thousand years of history might have done nothing to change the political system of a country. Imagine a Europe today where the Roman Empire had never fallen, that still covered an area from England to North Africa and the Middle East and was run by one man based in Rome, backed by a large army. There you have, roughly, ancient and modern China. The fact that this setup has not changed, or been able to change, in two thousand years must also have huge implications for the question Can China ever change its political system.

Until Proven Innocent

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Until%20Proven%20Innocent.jpgJeffrey Rosen reviews Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson’s book on the angry mob that nearly lynched the lives of several young men in the Duke lacrosse team case:

At least ìmany of the journalists misled by [former DA Mike] Nifong eventually adjusted their views as evidence of innocenceî came to light, the authors conclude. Thatís more than can be said for Dukeís ìactivist professors,î 88 of whom signed an inflammatory letter encouraging a rush to judgment by the student protesters who were plastering the campus with wanted posters of the lacrosse team and waving a banner declaring ìCastrate.î Even when confronted with DNA evidence of the playersí innocence, these professors refused to apologize and instead incoherently attacked their critics. In the same spirit, the authors charge, the president of Duke, Richard Brodhead, fired the lacrosse coach, canceled the season and condemned the team members for more than eight months. The pandering Brodhead, in this account, is more concerned about placating faculty ideologues than about understanding the realities of student life on his raunchy campus.

Does the foregoing remind you of the actions of another group of self-righteous crusaders?

The Blind Side of Big-Time College Football

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Last week, the resignation of my friend, Iowa State head football coach Dan McCarney, prompted this post reflecting on how the pressures of big-time college football prompted a resignation that is quite likely contrary to the long term ability of Iowa State to remain competitive in big-time college football.

As if on cue, George Will, in this NY Times book review, provides his view on the new book by Michael Lewis of Moneyball fame, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game.

In Moneyball, Lewis explored how the small-market Oakland Athletics were able to remain competitive against far richer clubs in Major League Baseball by emphasizing objective evaluation of players and, in so doing, introduced sabremetric statistical analysis to the general public.

As Will notes, Lewis “is advancing a new genre of journalism that shows how market forces and economic reasoning shape the evolution of sports.” Lewis’ latest book involves big-time college football, which — as noted earlier here — has long been a means by which universities in the U.S. have compromised academic integrity to rent athletically-gifted young men to serve as cash cows for the institutions.

As noted in this earlier post, the National Football League reaps the fruits (as if those teams really needed it) of an effectively free farm system that college football provides, while the vast majority of the universities — including Iowa State — either lose money or barely eke out a profit in their football programs.

Moreover, Lewis examines how the winds of change ripple down from the NFL to big-time college football and dictate the course of the college game. One case in point is Lawrence Taylor, who singlehandedly changed the nature of professional football by becoming the prototype of the huge, athletic and extraordinarily fast outside linebacker who could increase the pressure on the quarterback.

At about the same time as Taylor was wreaking havoc on QB’s, Bill Walsh‘s West Coast offense was spreading the field, which made it even more important for teams to find agile offensive linemen to block the likes of Taylor. Most important was to protect the QB’s blind side, so the position of left offensive tackle increased in importance and, as a result, the position’s economic value skyrocketed.

As demand increased in the NFL for the colleges to produce another kind of freak of nature to play what had been an obscure position but now was now one of the most important positions on the field, Lewis explains that the colleges were more than willing to compromise any notion of academic integrity to admit athletes who project to have the physical stature and talent to play the demanding left tackle position.

In short, it’s not just the star QB or running back who gets the royal treatment from the institutions in this day and age — potential left tackles are now included, too. Lewis’ book describes one of those freaks of nature, a freshman tackle at the University of Mississippi with an I.Q. of 80 who bounced from foster home to foster home as a youth.

Just as we should not be surprised that many folks enjoy betting illegally on college football, neither should we be shocked with the corruption in college football that Lewis examines in his book.

One of my uncles who played SEC football during the late 1920’s used to tell me how much money he was paid under the table even in those days. Moreover, there is no question that big-time college football — even as corrupt as it is — is a pretty darn entertaining form of corruption.

As noted in my earlier post, there is a model that would likely minimize the corrupt elements while not affecting the entertainment value of college football much. But it’s going to take leadership and courage from the top of the educational institutions to promote and implement such reform.

Unfortunately, those considerations were not on the minds of the Iowa State administrators last week as they began figuring out how to replace a very good football coach who had just left one of the most difficult jobs in his profession.

Similarly, my sense is University of Miami president Donna Shalala will not be contemplating those matters when she begins her search to replace Larry Coker later this month as head coach of one of the most storied programs in all of big-time college football.

That seems to be the tunnel vision that is generated from the sponsorship of minor league professional football by U.S. academic institutions.

A Good Football Coach Steps Away from a Coaching Graveyard

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Dan McCarney.jpgDan McCarney, the “dean” of the Big 12 Conference football coaches, resigned under pressure on Wednesday as head football coach at Iowa State University after 12 seasons.

The announcement barely made a blip in the local Houston media, but Coach Mac’s resignation highlighted many aspects of the troubling direction of major college football.

I am biased about Coach McCarney, who is called Coach Mac by most everyone. As regular readers of this blog know, Coach Mac and I have been friends since growing up together in Iowa City, Iowa, where we played together on City High School’s championship football team in 1970.

I moved to Houston with my family shortly after finishing high school and Mac went on to play football at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, but we remained in contact over the years as I went to law school and began a legal career in Houston and Mac went on to the Iowa coaching staff after graduating from undergraduate school.

When Hayden Fry was hired to revive the downtrodden Iowa program in 1979, Coach Mac was one of the only coaches who Coach Fry retained from the previous coaching staff.

As with most of Coach Fry’s personnel decisions, retaining Coach Mac was a good one.

For the following decade, Coach Mac was a part of an extraordinary Iowa coaching staff that not only revived Iowa’s football fortunes, but also produced such outstanding head coaches as Wisconsin’s Barry Alvarez, Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops, Kansas State’s Bill Snyder, Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz and South Florida’s Jim Leavitt.

In 1990, Coach Mac followed Alvarez to Wisconsin, where they took over a 2-9 Badger program and, by 1993, had the team winning the Big Ten Conference championship with a 10-1-1 record, which included a Rose Bowl victory over UCLA.

The next year, Iowa State came calling for Coach Mac and the native Iowan was off to Ames for his first head coaching job.

Over the years, Mac and I have laughed many times about the fact that neither of us really had a clue of what he was getting into at Iowa State. We both knew that the university had long been a coaching graveyard and had eeked out a barely-winning record only a couple of times in the previous 15 years.

Ames is nice little college town, but it is in north central Iowa, pretty much in the middle of nowhere in the opinion of most good college football players. As a result, the football program has always struggled to attract good football prospects, who usually have sexier alternatives to living in central Iowa for four years.

The physical facilities of Iowa State’s football program were poor and the entire football budget at the time was just over $3 million, which was by far the smallest of any public school in the then newly-constituted Big 12 Conference that included such far better-funded programs as Texas, Texas A&M, Oklahoma, and Nebraska, just to name a few.

To make matters worse, Iowa State was a clear second fiddle in the state of Iowa to the University of Iowa, which has a far superior football tradition and an athletic budget more than twice as large as Iowa State’s.

Most folks assume that Kansas State was the toughest head coaching job in the United States before Bill Snyder resurrected it in the 1990’s, but I think a good case can be made that the Iowa State job was even more difficult before Coach Mac took over.

To Mac and Iowa State’s credit, they agreed at the outset that turning Iowa State’s program around was going to be a long-term project. As he did at Iowa and Wisconsin, Mac literally threw himself into the job of rebuilding the Cyclone football program, taking on any speaking engagement and going anywhere to promote Iowa State and its athletic teams.

An outstanding recruiter, Mac and his coaching staff began to expand Iowa State’s traditional Midwestern recruiting base to such football hotbeds as Texas, Florida and California. Mac began to challenge Iowa’s traditional toehold on the best recruits in the state of Iowa.

The progress was slow, though — Mac’s teams lost 42 or their 57 games during his first five seasons.

However, by the 2000 season, Mac and his staff had built a solid foundation for the program. Behind QB Sage Rosenfels (yes, the Texans’ backup QB), Iowa State went 9-3 during that season and won the university’s first post-season bowl game in the university’s 108-year football history (over Pitt in the Insight.com Bowl in Tucson).

That started a 40 game run where Mac’s teams were 25-15, a remarkable feat considering that Iowa State was competing in the brutally-tough Big 12 Conference and playing cross-state rival Iowa each season (Mac’s teams won six of their last nine games against their in-state rival).

By the 2004 and 2005 seasons, Coach Mac had his teams on the cusp of the Big 12 North Division title both seasons only to lose them in an agonizingly close final games in each season.

Nevertheless, after Iowa State had gone to only four bowl games in its history before Coach Mac’s tenure, Mac took the Cyclones to five bowl games in six years, winning two of them. Coming into the 2006 season, optimism was high that the Cyclones would again contend for the Big 12 North Division championship and go to yet another bowl game.

Alas, the 2006 season did not turn out as planned.

First, the Cyclones faced one of the toughest schedules in the country, including an initial stretch of Big 12 games at Texas, at home against Nebraska, at Oklahoma and at home against Texas Tech. Iowa State lost all four and were battered in the process, losing six senior starters to season-ending injury.

Lack of depth is a chronic problem at a place such as Iowa State, so a thin and deflated Cyclone team was smoked over the past two weeks by mediocre Kansas State and Kansas teams. That brought out the “what have you done for me lately” crowd in full force, many of whom were calling on Iowa State to fire Coach Mac despite the fact that few of them have any idea how difficult it is to win consistently at the top levels of major college football.

Suddenly, a little over a year after one of Mac’s best wins as a coach, Mac concluded it was not right for him to become a divisive issue for the university. Understanding Spike Dykes‘ advice that “you lose 10% of your support each season” as a college football coach, Mac understood that he was 20% in the hole at Iowa State based on that formula.

So, Coach Mac elected to resign as head football coach at Iowa State, a difficult job that he would have gladly continued to perform for the rest of his coaching days.

Take a moment to watch his performance during the press conference (click the video camera icon on the left side of the page) to announce his resignation — Mac exudes the class and passion with which he handled all of his duties at Iowa State. In this age of cold-hearted and businesslike coaches who are constantly posturing for the “better” job, it is refreshing to watch someone such as Mac, who wears his big heart and humanity on his sleeve.

Thus, 12 years after arriving at Iowa State, Mac leaves the football program in far better shape than he found it.

The football budget has quadrupled in size under Mac, but it remains the smallest of any public institution in the Big 12 Conference (Texas and A&M’s football budgets are at least 4 to 5 times larger than Iowa State’s). Mac worked behind the scenes continually to improve Iowa State’s facilities and they have improved substantially during his time there.

However, Cyclone athletic department officials are now attempting to raise another $135 million for facilities upgrades in an effort to keep up with the seemingly endless arms race of major college football. In one of the more bizarre aspects of Mac’s resignation, that imminent capital funds campaign was one of the key pressure points that prompted the resignation of the best fundraiser in the history of the Cyclone football program. So it goes in trying to keep up with the Joneses in the wacky world of college football.

After coaching the Iowa State team in its final two games this season, Mac will kick back for a few days, but then I suspect that he will back out looking for another opportunity. His motor is always running and he has a passionate love for coaching. Inasmuch as Mac is widely popular among his fellow coaches, I am confident that he will land on his feet.

However, I am not so sure about Iowa State. The institution is caught in the proverbial rat race of attempting to compete with far-better funded programs and the gap between Iowa State’s resources and those of programs such as Texas and A&M are likely to get even larger. The pressure of that competition has now prompted Iowa State’s administration to take what appears to be a huge risk that the program will decline from the solid foundation that Mac painstakingly built over the past 12 years.

Does Iowa State think that it is going to hire someone who will magically recruit better athletes to Ames than Mac? That’s highly doubtful as Mac is one of the best recruiters in the business and Ames is always going to be a difficult sell to all but a few of the best football prospects.

Does the institution think that it is going to hire someone who will coach better than Mac? Maybe, but Mac is a pretty darn good coach and how many more wins does Iowa State really believe it can achieve through slightly better coaching methods? And even Iowa State officials readily concede that it is highly unlikely that they will ever be able to find someone who can match Mac’s tireless enthusiasm for promoting the institution and the football program.

The bottom line is that seasons such as the one that the Cyclones and Mac are enduring this season are inevitable at a program such as Iowa State’s. That is one of the costs of attempting to compete with limited resources at the highest level of major college football.

That’s not a particularly pleasant reality, but it’s dubious decision-making to take big risks based on an emotional reaction to a disappointing result that is inevitable. That appears to be precisely what Iowa State is doing in letting Mac get away. Wouldn’t embracing a good coach who understands the institution’s limitations and has competed effectively in spite of them be far less risky and much more likely to result in continued success?

Ironically, the Cyclone family now finds itself looking for a new head coach who has the depth and characteristics of . . . well, Dan McCarney. Iowa State will be extremely fortunate if they find one.

The NY Times on James Baker’s new book

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baker_19122003.jpgFormer White House Chief of Staff, Secretary of State and Secretary of Treasury James Baker, III, who spends his time these days at the Baker Institute at Rice University, has written a new book entitled ìWork Hard, Study . . . and Keep Out of Politics!î Adventures and Lessons From an Unexpected Public Life.” The title of the book is the legendary advice of Baker’s grandfather, James Addison Baker, who was one of the founders of the venerable Houston law firm, Baker & Botts.
This NY Times review of Baker’s new book belittles the current Bush Administration, even though the book does no such thing. That passes for a book review in the NY Times these days.

Runnin’ with the Dogs at Texas-OU Weekend

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Texas-OU.jpgThe greatest annual rivalry game in college football is renewed this Saturday in Dallas as the Texas Longhorns and the Oklahoma Sooners strap it on at the Cotton Bowl, and this year’s game is highlighted by a new book about the game, Mike Shropshire’s Runnin’ with the Big Dogs: The True, Unvarnished Story of the Texas-Oklahoma Football Wars (William Morrow 2006).
Shropshire’s book is rollicking fun, focusing on the classic 1967 game, which is the first game of the series that he covered. However, the author also vividly develops the culture of the game, which involves a blow-out weekend in Dallas each year during which wild-eyed fans of each team continually confront one another. Legendary coaches such as Darrell Royal, Bud Wilkinson and Barry Switzer are a big part of the book, as are current stellar coaches, OU’s Bob Stoops and UT’s Mack Brown. In this recent Wall Street Journal ($) review of the book, Texas Monthly’s Skip Hollandsworth observes the following about the game’s unique setting:

[T]he atmosphere is so combustible that it really makes no sense to play the game in the hometown of either team. So it’s played at a neutral site: the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. Which means that on the Friday before the game, Interstate 35 coming south from Oklahoma and north from Austin is jammed with frenzied fans, their cars, SUVs and pickups decorated with either red Boomer Sooner or orange Longhorn flags and their back windows covered with semi-obscene slogans decrying their rival’s ineptitude and lack of — how to put it? — manhood and legitimate parentage.
By the time these fans hit the city limits, horns are blowing and beer cans are flying out the windows. The fans either check into hotels (which are booked months in advance) or they barge into the homes of friends and relatives who have ill-advisedly agreed to let them stay. Soon they’re out again on Dallas’s streets, resuming the horn-blowing and can-tossing. I have some Dallas friends who are so determined to avoid the Texas-OU madness that they don’t just leave town; they leave the state.
When the game finally begins, few of these fans have had any sleep. They’re bellowing at the enemy and clutching the flasks of margaritas that they smuggled into the stadium — and those are just the grandparents. As Mr. Shropshire writes in his very entertaining history of the rivalry: “You’ll find audiences more genteel and reserved at cock fights.”

And Hollandsworth passes along one of his favorite anecdotes about the annual rivalry:

In 1976, Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer and Texas coach Darrell Royal were standing with President Gerald Ford right before the pre-game coin toss. An Oklahoma fan, standing nearby, suddenly yelled: “Hey, who are those assholes with Switzer?”

Who can’t love a game that has included players named Wahoo McDaniel (who later became popular on the pro wrestling circuit), the appropriately-named Joe Don Looney (what was the name of that remote island where he ended up?) and the majestically-named Duke Carlisle? Kick-off is at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday.

The view from the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan

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rory stewart.jpgScottish author and diplomat Rory Stewart has packed a lifetime of fascinating experiences into his 33 years. In this interesting interview tucked into the weekend Wall Street Journal ($), the WSJ’s Jeffrey Trachtenberg talks with Stewart, who has become one of the foremost authorities on the day-to-day problems involved in stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan after years of brutal totalitarian governments.
Born in Hong Kong, Stewart went on to receive undergraduate and master’s degrees in Modern History and Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Balliol College, Oxford University, and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Granta and the London Review of Books. After college, Stewart served in the British Army and Foreign Office in a variety of capacities before electing in 2000 to set off on a two-year, 6,000 mile walking journey through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal. He chronicled his journey through Afghanistan during the the winter of 2002 in The Places in Between (Picador/Macmillan 2004), which Harcourt Harvest published this past May in paperback.
Stewart returned to public service in late 2003 as Deputy Governorate Coordinator (Amara/Maysan) and Senior Adviser and Deputy Governorate Coordinator (Nasiriyah/Dhi Qar) in which Stewart established the governance structures of Maysan province, resolved tribal disputes to restore security and consolidate the authority of the Iraqi government and the police, set up NGOs and civil society organizations, ran municipal elections, inaugurated a new Provincial Council in Dhi Qar and saw the province through to the transfer of sovereignty in June 2004. Stewart was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by the British Government for his service in Iraq.
Last week, Harcourt published Stewart’s second book — The Prince of the Marshes — in which Stewart describes his recent experiences in Iraq, including the troubling problem of persuading the Iraqis to embrace the Coalition’s mission there and the abject failure of a Coalition military unit from Italy to come to Mr. Stewart’s rescue when his compound came under a brutal mortar attack. During the WSJ interview, Stewart provides many insights into the practical problems involved in stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan, including the following:

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