Richard Bennett

OK, the Pistons had a good game for a change:

The defending champions summoned the spirit and spunk that had been missing in the first two games of the NBA Finals, changing the complexion of the series in a way many thought impossible.

Spunk not withstanding, Ben Wallace played way over his head last night, and he can’t maintain the pace for another three games.

But isn’t it odd that Miami star Dwayne Wade was seriously injured in the Heat’s playoff series with Detroit, and so was Spurs star Manu Ginobili? Just a coincidence, of course, nobody would accuse the Pistons of being a bunch of thugs.

This is what Detroit hopes to avoid:

The only defending NBA champions who were swept in the Finals the following season are the 1983 and 1989 Lakers.

I’d like to see a Spurs sweep because they didn’t chicken out on the Olympics like the Pistons did. Those big, strong guys were afraid of terrorists, unlike the little girls on the gymnastics team who went. Yeah, their coach was there but so was Popovich.

Go Spurs!

This is for all you muesli-eating Guardian readers:

The author of Wild Swans and her historian husband, Jon Halliday, have torn away the many masks and falsehoods with which Mao and the Communist party of China to this day have hidden the true picture of Mao the man and Mao the ruler. Mao now stands revealed as one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century alongside Hitler and Stalin. Indeed, in terms of sheer numbers of deaths for which he responsible, Mao, with some 70 million, exceeded both.

Far from being the first Chinese communist leader to stand up for the Chinese peasantry and to respond to their needs and lead them out of exploitation, Mao is exposed as a man who disdained the peasants, despite his protestations to the contrary. He is shown during his command of armed forces in the countryside in the late 1920s and early 30s to have lived off the produce of the local peasants to the extent of leaving them destitute. He consciously used terror as a means to enforce his will on the party and on the people who came under his rule. In the course of the Long March, Mao is shown to have had no qualms in sacrificing thousands of scarce fighting men in fruitless diversions to serve no other purpose than to advance his bid for leadership.

His callous disregard for the lives of comrades and fellow Chinese became more evident once he commanded the larger stage of China itself. Against the advice of his commanders on the ground, Mao persisted in prolonging the Korean war in the expectation of tying down hundreds of thousands of American troops, regardless of the disproportionate sacrifice of far greater Chinese casualties. The livelihood of China’s peasants was tightly squeezed through most of Mao’s rule, not simply to meet the needs of industry and the urban population, but also to pay the Soviet Union and the east Europeans for the development of advanced weapons – especially for the development of nuclear weapons.

More people need to know this.

What does it mean when a Brit says something is “fixed?” Mark Memmott speculates:

MARK MEMMOTT: Britain and the United States are separated by a common language, I think is the cliché. To someone in Britain, it’s possible that that phrase, fixed around, could mean attached to or bolted on, not necessarily skewed. It’s possible that that phrase, fixed around, could also mean, well they selectively take good intelligence, and that’s what they emphasize, to build their case. So that’s where the argument comes down to why it’s so important to find out exactly what the person who wrote that meant.

Like we said.

Now the interesting thing about this bad intelligence is this: we count on the CIA to tell the administration what goes on in the world, but we’ve been systematically castrating it since the Carter administration, when we feared it was too powerful and too effective (remember Allende, allegedly deposed by 200 CIA agents?)

Now that we need a serious, bad-ass intelligence service we have a bunch of boy scouts afraid to step on multicultural toes. You try running a country with intelligence agencies feeding you bullshit.

Somebody needs to take a little responsibility for that.

A stopped clock is right twice a day, and even big fat lying liar Al Franken occasionally has a guest worth taking seriously. Larry Diamond is a former CPA adviser in Iraq who’s written on the Administration’s blunders in post-liberation Iraq. Mainly these come down to: 1) Not enough troops to secure order; 2) Disbanding the Iraqi army; and 3) Massive de-Baathification. His essays and books are worth reading because he was there and he saw the screw-ups.

Diamond’s analysis highlights another of our problems in America: we don’t have a serious opposition party. They’re still carrying on about Bush’s chimpiness, the WMDs, and Abu Ghraib instead of dealing with serious issues such as the nation-building task in Iraq. As long as the Democrats are out to lunch, the Republicans get a free pass, and that’s wrong.

The call for a timetable for troop withdrawal isn’t a serious piece of work, it’s just posturing. The Congress should be pushing for achievement of the milestones that will enable us to withdraw.

The main thing we need to do now is get the job done:

Like many CPA officials, I found many Iraqis to have a deep ambition to live in a decent, democratic, and free society and found them prepared to do the hard work that building a democracy will require. Above all else, Iraqis want security: they want to be free from the terror that disfigured their lives under Saddam and that has continued, in a different form, since the war. But most favor achieving this security through democratic means, not under some “benevolent” strongman.

Because of the failures and shortcomings of the occupation-as well as the intrinsic difficulties that any occupation following Saddam’s tyranny was bound to confront-it is going to take a number of years to rebuild the Iraqi state and to construct any kind of viable democratic and constitutional order in Iraq. The post-handover transition is going to be long, and initially very bloody…

The transition in Iraq is going to need a huge amount of international assistance-political, economic, and military-for years to come. Hopefully, the U.S. performance will improve now that Iraqis are in charge of their own future. It is going to be costly and it will continue to be frustrating. Yet a large number of courageous Iraqi democrats, many with comfortable alternatives abroad, are betting their lives and their fortunes on the belief that a new and more democratic political order can be developed and sustained in Iraq. The United States owes it to them-and to itself-to continue to help them.

OK?

On the subject of Mr. Diamond, see his exchange of letters with leftist academic Tony Smith following the publication of the essay we quote above. Smith takes the standard “imperialist aggression” line and Diamond delivers a spanking.