Some Doings at Other Blogs

• I've generally stayed away from the Mearsheimer and Walt controversies since they preceded the era of this blog, but Stephen M. Walt offers an "I Don't Mean I Told You So, But . . ." response to Tony Blair's testimony on the roots of the Iraq war. [UPDATE: See the comments for Martin Kramer's rebuttal link to the Walt post. Let's let both sides have at it.]
  

• The indispensable Qifa Nabki has a post he calls "Matters of the Heart." The basic story and his comments thereon:

  “A member from the Zoaiter family fired two RPGs in the air in Baalbek’s Sharawneh neighborhood after he failed to kidnap a girl.”

  I love these guys. Anybody else would just shrug his shoulders if he failed to kidnap a girl. But not the Zoaiter boys. They don’t repress their rage; they express it in a healthy cathartic exercise involving shoulder-launched anti-tank weapons.

  And “kidnap”? Really? I think that’s a little bit much. What it sounds like to me is that this guy asked a girl out on a date, and she told him to get lost. So he put a bag over her head and tried to stuff her in the trunk of his car, but she kneed him in the groin and fled. I’d hardly call that attempted kidnapping. As a friend wrote to me this morning, “In my day, we called it ‘a-courting’…”

  I’m waiting for some enterprising graduate student to write a dissertation on the place of RPGs in the tribal customs of the Bekaa valley. Getting married? Graduating from high school? Celebrating a golden anniversary? An RPG makes everything just a little bit more meaningful.

• From a poster known as Alex at Syria Comment, a lengthy, closely argued post on "The Case or Syria." Is it pro-Syrian? Yes. Will everyone agree? Of course not. But it's detailed and worthy of your attention.