How to feel really, really ignorant:

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Historically sovereignty of a nation is bestowed upon and symbolically dwells within the person of the monarch -constitutional or not Zoe Finch "All Ogle, No Cash -- It's Not Just Annoying, It's Un-American" Mar 31, 2003 1:44:09 pm EST

Yea. but in the case of England the bestowal in the gift of parliament and people.

It could be revoked by them (John Locke's Second Treatise on Government)

and It had been been so from before time immemorial

The best English rulers understood this. The Stuarts with their Divine Right of Kings schtick didn't.

If one was so inclined (and I might be so) one could argue that The Glorious Revolution was restoring the Saxon Monarchy which had been usurped by the Frenchman William the Bastard from the recently elected king Eadgar Ætheling in 1066.

[topic?; uh "Well, maybe that's how they do things in *Britain*, they've got that royal family and all kinds of problems, but here at Sunnydale nobody leaves campus while school's in session. Are we clear?"]

FayJay - no I'm glad you clarified that; I actually had misunderstood you in the way you feared. I'm sure you were clear, and I simply did not understand you properly.

How to feel really, really ignorant:

Well, I only exchanged Mali and Niger, but I have to confess I guessed wildly on all of the -stans and on which one was Armenia and which one Azerbaijan. So, pretty good.

I realise that we've stirred up a hornet's nest and I don't know whether bringing troops back would worsen matters.

William Raspberry had a column today about when to end the debate on the war. He quotes someone who has an interesting view on the "Hornets nest."

Marshall's piece disturbs in a quite different way. His thesis, in a nutshell, is that far from ignoring the things some of us fear will result from our venture in Iraq -- radicalization of the Arab world, new waves of terrorism, transformation of the conflict into a species of religious warfare -- the administration's hawks are actually counting on such an outcome.

"In their view," he writes, "invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination [would be] an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East."

Not because they are hopelessly monomaniacal but because they see it as essential to an effective war on terrorism.

He then goes on to talk about theories about the roots of terrorism and says that.

On the other hand, the administration's plan, says Marshall, is "to use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism."

He says that he thinks that this is probably dangerously wrong, but to stop debating it means that we are accepting a continuous incrimental resturcturing of the region through force.

He boils it down to this.

Marshall likens the strategy to whacking a hornet's nest in order to get the hornets out in the open and force a showdown. You can have a spirited debate over whether such a strategy ought to be supported.

"The problem," he says, "is that once it's just us and the hornets, we really won't have any choice."

I embarrassed myself beyond belief. Africa? What Africa? Oh, you mean that entire continent full of countries which are not Egypt?

Me too, Betsy. I am deeply ashamed.

I had an atlas phase when I was a kid. Some of it's stuck. (So really you can't blame me for the stans, because when I was a kid they were all part of the Big Red Blob.)

I did much better on Africa and the nearer countries. Out past Turkey I had no idea.

Also, we had map quizzes in my college Intro to the Middle East course.

Great course. Had the professor as my preceptor, lovely man, spent real time on our essays. Also featured my favorite "we live in different worlds, don't we?" moment ever. There were two women from Turkey in my precept, and during the week that we spent on Turkey we discussed, among other things, the rise in Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East and whether they thought that was likely to happen in Turkey. (This was, um, 1994 or 1995.) They said that they weren't worried about it, because if it did the Army would just stage a coup and everything would be fine.