Clive Davis

WRONG-SHAPED BALLS

World Cup withdrawal symptoms were so severe last night that the boys and I ended up watching an ancient BBC video, discovered at a fete last week,  of classic goals from the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties.  Including Mick Walsh's 1975 thunderbolt for Blackpool and a suspiciously large number of shots conceded by my team, West Ham. A very odd feeling to see those lumpy pitches, lumpy hairstyles and bustling, all-British line-ups. (Clyde Best was about the only foreign face.)

Now, having admitted all that, I don't have a problem with people who aren't interested in football. But why some American conservatives feel they have to be oafish about it is beyond me:

Penalty kicks? What's wrong with playing overtime until someone scores a real goal? I realize soccer is already a tediously long game in which almost nothing ever happens, and overtime could go on for a very, very long time. But they only play this World Cup every four years, right? Even the French and Italians ought to be able to work this out by, say, 2009, no? I mean, do all forms of overtime violate EU labor laws? Soccer ... something else Europe can keep.

OK, he's trying to be witty. I'll try to forgive him.  John Podhoretz, meanwhile, thinks there's still life in the old joke about the French surrendering at the first opportunity. Sigh. Still, it's funnier than his earlier crack about the Zidane fracas: "I gather that the incident began when the Italian player said, "You know what? I like Jews." Another big sigh...

As for the notion that football talk is more prone to hyperbole than American sports chat, well, it's true that Bernard-Henri Lévy is in a league of his own when it comes to purple prose, but all credit to Podhoretz's fellow-Cornerite, Jonah Goldberg for quoting from this reader's e-mail:

Over the top praise for every aspect of a sport?  Americans talking about American sport do that as easily as we breathe. A practiced windbag like Bernard-Henri Lévy alluding to the Greek pantheon is one thing, but how is he that much worse that the excesses of, say George Will, who writes about baseball as though the Declaration of Indepence were written on the back of Topps cards.

NEW GERMANS

Fans in Duesseldorf during the win against Portgual. Courtesy of Peter Feldhaus...

Over at the Atlantic Review, Joerg Wolf sets the record straight on the words of his country's national anthem. Misconceptions abound. He's irritated, too, by the use of lazy Nazi analogies. Sadly, the old stereotypes linger on.

THE BUCK STOPS...

Back after a short break, Belgravia Dispatch sounds another warning note about how things are going in the Middle East and, well, just about everywhere. He's not doom-mongering, just asking if we know where we're heading:

As scores of Iraqis are routinely massacred in broad daylight by roving gangs of ethnic killing squads, our credibility is increasingly in tatters as credible, competent guarantor of varied security architecture across the globe. That's why Kim Jong Il and Ahmadinejad are basically telling us to eff off, and that's why they will more or less do as they please in the meantime.

Now, the problem is, you have varied dimwits who are prescribing ethnically stoked wars of 'liberation' in Iran (astoundingly idiotic arguments leading bloggers, whose crediblity on foreign policy matters have plummeted of late, link to routinely), or other such ham-handed alternative strategies, if one can call them that, but what is really needed now is centrist, sober strategic thinking  - mostly focused on how to salvage Iraq - so that the next President will be on a firmer footing to tackle the residual mess there, not to mention the looming crises in Iran and North Korea..

PAGES

My review of America Against The World, Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes' survey of global attitudes towards the US, runs in today's Washington Times.

On the same page, Christopher Hitchens praises Peter Galbraith's The End of Iraq:

Galbraith was a direct witness to the early days of the occupation, and has been a participant in many of the subsequent constitutional and electoral negotiations, and his account of the blunders and the missed opportunities is by a very long way the best one published so far....Here at last is a book written by someone who both knows about Iraq, and cares about it. It contains the sort of anecdotal glimpses that make for a fine (and sometimes hair-raising) memoir, and it is written with an apt and wry sense of history. It tells us that much has been lost, but that all is not lost. Its advice is sober and practical. It offers a serious balance-sheet. How one wishes that its author had been listened to in the first place.

A FOURTH OF JULY GIFT

Not that I'm entirely surprised, but a new survey of British attitudes makes very bleak reading:

Britons have never had such a low opinion of the leadership of the United States, a YouGov poll shows. As Americans prepare to celebrate the 230th anniversary of their independence tomorrow, the poll found that only 12 per cent of Britons trust them to act wisely on the global stage. This is half the number who had faith in the Vietnam-scarred White House of 1975.

Most Britons see America as a cruel, vulgar, arrogant society, riven by class and racism, crime-ridden, obsessed with money and led by an incompetent hypocrite.More than two-thirds who offered an opinion said America is essentially an imperial power seeking world domination. And 81 per cent of those who took a view said President George W Bush hypocritically championed democracy as a cover for the pursuit of American self-interests.

What's to blame? The Bush team's sloppy diplomacy must come near the top of the list. Yet as the Telegraph leader observes, that doesn't explain everything:

Americans find themselves damned either way. If they remain within their own borders, they are isolationist hicks who are shirking their responsibilities. If they intervene, they are rapacious imperialists. Indeed, many of their detractors manage to hold these two ideas in their heads simultaneously. Yet a moment's thought should reveal that they are both unfair.

MORE FIGURES

I'm working on a review of Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes' book, America Against The World. Another dose of troubling data here:

  More than a million legal and illegal immigrants enter the United States every year, but when presented with a choice people around the world say they no longer see America as the prime land of opportunity. Asked where a young person should go to lead a good life, no more than 10 per cent of respondents to a 2005 Pew survey in thirteen of sixteen countries recommended the United States. Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and even Germany were all preferred destinations. Only in India was America still the most popular place if one's children were thinking of emigrating.

NEIGHBOURS

I'm going to send Timothy Garton Ash's column to a friend of mine who happens to be a liberal, a proud Canadian and an even prouder America-basher. As Garton Ash is on the Left, she might pay some attention to what he says:

Yet another thing Canadians and Europeans have in common is an obsession with the United States, and with distinguishing themselves from it, often by crude stereotyping. A Canadian writer observes that his compatriots "love to yell about how modest we are". Just like today's Europeans. Canadians and Europeans enjoy wallowing in a sense of moral superiority towards the imperial hyperpower, while doing rather little to improve the world outside their borders.

NOTEBOOK

American foreign policy is complex at its core. At any given moment it is more likely to be the product of a wide and diffuse coalition rather than of a single unitary vision. American foreign policy is at least as complicated to fathom as the elephant was for the proverbial blind men; the tusks are sharp, the tail is skittish, the ears flap, the trunk picks pockets, the feet tread heedlessly on smaller creatures, the breath smells of peanuts, and the creature as a whole is bulky and hard to move - but moves rapidly and violently if endangered, and sometimes merely if it is alarmed by a mouse with a bear, a cigar, and a Spanish accent. But also like an elephant, American foreign policy generally gets what it wants.

Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World.

ALWAYS AT FAULT

At a conference in the Middle East a few months ago, I heard a moderate Arab scholar complaining bitterly about how American policy had alienated the Arab peoples in recent years. A former Clinton official sitting next to him was nodding vigorously but then suddenly stopped when the Arab scholar made clear that by "recent years" he meant ever since 1967.

Another incisive piece from my favourite pundit, Robert Kagan, on the deep roots of anti-American feeling around the world. And a reminder that the Bush team's inept diplomacy - a subject I've banged on about ad nauseum - isn't entirely to blame:

Some folks seem to believe that by returning to the policies of Harry Truman, Dean Acheson and John F. Kennedy, America will become popular around the world. I like those policies, too, but let's not kid ourselves. They also sparked enormous resentment among millions of peoples in many countries, resentments that are now returning to the fore.

[Via Winds of Change]

GROOMING

The Telegraph's man in DC, Alec Russell has good and bad tidings for American readers. Bad news first: the Administration's "enduring hopelessness in marketing America and its policies" doesn't seem to have changed. The good news is that he thinks Americans are politer than Brits:

At lunch at the National Press Club the other day I found myself sitting next to a 24-year-old intern from the DC bureau of a US paper. I was called "sir" by her more times in our 20-minute conversation than in my entire life in the UK.

I am not saying I want to be called "sir", far from it. But "sir" and "ma’am" are bandied about here like well "cheers" and "take care" are in Britain, whether in exchanges with staff on trains, random encounters on the street or wherever.... In short there is a courtesy here that has vanished in Britain.

I'd say that's true, wouldn't you?