As you'll see if you read the menu below the fold, I had some delightful veal this week, supposedly naturally raised from Whole Foods. Of course, there is a relatively weak taboo against veal, for various reasons. The chief among them , as I understand it, is that getting veal the right color necessitates (or, at least, has necessitated) keeping the young animals in a severely constricted environment. Indeed, as I read somewhere, the paradigmatic white of the most extreme veal is achieved by bleeding the calf daily. This doesn't sound too appetizing, but I'm basically unmoved. If I eat foie gras, (and I do), and if foie gras is made by ramming massive amounts of grain down the throats of geese and ducks, than I really ought to have no problem with veal either.

The more interesting kinds of taboos, I suppose, are the strict ones- in our culture, for example, the taboo against eating dogs, which is so strong as to border on the almost absolute taboo against cannibalism. Till now I have managed to avoid eating my family's scottish terrier, but I wonder about the revulsion most people feel when the idea of eating any dog is raised. If I was in a dog-eating culture, and at a dinner where my host presented dog, I'm reasonably certain I'd eat it. And it seems clear that one can eat that dog without feeling any compulsion to eat your family dog. I'm currently reading a book called Eat not This Flesh by Frederick Simoons, which treats this subject at length. I'll report back afterwards.

Onwards to the menu:

Lunch: I'm a terrible sucker for what we call lebne. That is to say, strained yogurt, made by leaving full fat yogurt in a cheese cloth over a strainer overnight. This is eaten on bread, drizzled copiously with olive oil, and with olives.

Dinner:

2x - sauteed veal in breadcrumbs, fried in oil. The first night I had it by itself, with a wedge of lemon. The next night it was accompanied by a gratin of onions and mushrooms in cream.

2x - pasta with red sauce - I hadn't had a pasta in a long time, so I made a tomato sauce. In the winter, of course, it is much preferable to use good tinned tomatoes for your sauce. Processing it after simmering for half an hour or so is nice aesthetically, but not at all necessary.

1x - Oh, damn, I forgot dinner pasta - Occasionally, I'll forget to plan my fifth meal of the work-week, so I'm left short. But that's just a great occasion to eat something simple and delicious. This week, that was a great bowl of white pasta, topped with fridge cold European butter and mounds of freshly grated parmesan. Also, I tipped some left-over cream over the whole thing.

My mother once told me that the secret to a successful marriage was separate bank accounts and separate bathrooms. Amber Taylor is apparently in favor of the former but against the latter. (To be fair, my mother meant bathrooms in a house; Amber wants unisex bathrooms in public life). Phoebe Maltz, meanwhile, approves of joint bank accounts and does not appear to mind unisex bathrooms. Matthew Yglesias and Tom Sylvester both chime in on the bank account debate (Yglesias wants separation, Sylvester wants unity) as does Heidi Bond but none, so far as I know, has entered the bathroom debate.

Both of these topics for blogospheric debate come, of course, from the New York Times-- this column by David Brooks and this article by Patricia Brown.

My own takes: In his column, Brooks seems to champion joint accounts not because it makes joint expenditures easier to account for but because he thinks that individualism and private property are dangerous to married life. I am dubious-- problems of scarcity do not go away, so there still have to be answers when the question is "who gets to use which toothbrush?" or "should the extra money be spent on a bottle of wine or a football game?" However much one wishes, two utility functions do not become one via marriage ceremony. So one still needs a method of intra-family allocation, and it seems to me that private property is helpful to that. I also endorse almost all of Heidi's and Amber's thoughts here.

What of bathrooms? I don't have strong feelings-- I mildly prefer gender segregation here, but if my preferences must be overriden in the interests of desegregation/equality, I would not care that much. Better still are the single-user unisex bathrooms tucked away in low-use areas, although in high-traffic areas they create intolerable waits.

Via Jon Last, historical erasure over at The American Scene! No more R-Dog. Isn't this a bit... Stalinist?

This Reuters article, and this Boston Globe article, both of which tout a significant shift in United States policy towards Iran, represent a broader turn in American foreign policy since the reelection of President Bush, and a hint that the loyal, morally vigorous realism of Condoleezza Rice's State Department will be far more effective than Colin Powell's was in modulating the face of American idealism abroad. Partly, Rice won this internal argument because Putin was determined to undermine nuclear non-proliferation in Iran regardless of his Bratislava meeting with Bush; but there is reason to think that this new policy of engagement means that the Bush team has developed its understanding of the complex relationship between Iranian nationalist and governmental interests.

Prior to Rice's Tuesday meeting in London with the European countries who are directing the Iranian non-proliferation effort, the signals from the Bush camp suggested that they viewed nuclear ambition as indistinct from the hardliner's anti-liberal tyranny and state support of terrorism: that to oppose the mullahs on one line was to oppose the remnants of dismal revolution on all three. But this simply isn't true. Iranians identify their leaders' nuclear ambition as being a core national value, a measure of independence and military prowess. Much as in Pakistan, even the Iranian secular elite, the bulwark of straining Iranian liberalism, regards nuclear development as a matter of national pride, and the hardliners have certainly used this nationalist sentiment to their advantage. Elements in the Judicial Council and among Khamenei's inner circle have continued to press the nuclear issue as a political battering ram against reformist Majlis and more liberal elements of Iranian society. They have publicly parsed the West's criticisms of Iran's nuclear program as anti-Iranian, both to bolster their own anti-reformist policies and promote general anti-Americanism.

And, as a result, Bush and Europe have been left with few options to promote non-proliferation. If Bush wants to support a nascent liberal movement in Iran, he cannot, as in Iraq or Syria, thunder on about Weapons of Mass Destruction. For one thing, there is no Iranian Halabja or Hama; while Iranians resent their government, they do not regard it as murderously antithetical to their people. Additionally, Iranian WMD would not belong to a Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti or an Alawi Bashar Assad (both tribal or religious minorities), but, at least symbolically, to the Iranian people at large. The WMD lessons of the Iran-Iraq war and of the First and Second Persian Gulf wars have not been lost on Iranians either; WMD can serve as both a tactical defense and a strategic guarantee of sovereignty. Cognizant of this understanding, Iranian hardliners like Yahya Safavi, the Chief of the Revolutionary Guards, have been using the threat of possible United States military action against the Iranian nuclear program to tamp down local dissent (the Revolutionary Guards being perhaps the most anti-liberal organ in Iran).

While the Bush foreign policy team clearly believes in the application of transformational military power to jump start democratization, it also understands that in the absence of a present threat to national security (the core of the preemptive doctrine) or an immediately compelling state moral failure (such as genocide) [and the varying degrees to which these cases were made before the invasion of Iraq illustrates the strength of the realist element inside the Bush White House], the continual use of American armed forces abroad is impractical. Bush's approach towards Iran also reflects his team's understanding of the successful democratization of the former Eastern Bloc nations. There has never been a clearer sign that this administration understands the benefits of soft power after its hard installation: of a Reaganesque firmness of will in the rightness of democracy and the evils of tyranny, paired with the continual kindling of civil society in the nations under our aegis. With our troops astride the Fulda gap, and our Pershing missiles in the capitals of Europe, the important work of the Cold War depended upon the watchful deployment of our military, but was fought by Czechs in the streets of Prague, by shipbuilders in Gdansk, and with the unfailing moral leadership of John Paul II.

There are strong realpolitik motivations for offering significant economic incentives (WTO membership, and Airbus parts) to the Iranian leadership in exchange for non-proliferation and liberalization. By opening dialogue with Iran, the United States should further separate Syria from the community of nations. The continual isolation of Syria (soon to be surrounded by a Christian/Sh'ia/Druze, a Jewish, a Turkish, and a Sh'ia state) hopefully will pay dividends, both reducing Hizb'allah's military and financial support, and crippling the last outpost of Baathist tyranny in the Middle East. Five years ago, Syrian politics looked like the norm, with Bashar Assad's ascendancy seen as possibly liberal; five years from now, if the Iraqi project is successful, Syria will look like an outlier, the only country in the former Ottoman aegis without nominal democracy. In addition, a rising standard of living and opened trade in Iran can only weaken the mullah's control. Unlike that of a state like China, with more totalitarian attitudes towards popular cultural consumption, the Iranian media, and especially its community of Farsi bloggers, is not nearly as controlled as one might think; a surfeit of satellite dishes and web cafes ensures access to the outside world and to avenues for reformist self-publishing. Trade can only increase this valuable constituency. And while Khamenei's government is anti-liberal, there are no vast state moral abuses to justify a sanctions regime—one, that if experience is any guide, would hurt Iranian citizens far more than its rulers. Commercial comity and rhetorical thunder may be read as hypocrisy at home, but it will be understood in Iran as it was understood by the East Germans during Honecker's term as Chancellor.

In many ways, our evolving policy towards Iran and the rest of the Middle East reveals the falsehood of the popular theoretic dichotomy between foreign policy idealism and realism: they are often merely different tactical representations of a shared strategic end. In Iran, realistic engagement will not prolong the mullahs' reign, but neither will it directly achieve significant desirable political outcomes. Its strength will be in the continued liberalization of Iranian society. American post-war success in the foreign policy arena hasn't walked softly and carried a big stick (the credo of jingoist bullies everywhere); it has struck decisively and then strode forwards. This has meant compromising with rightist tyrannies during the Cold War; it will mean compromising with secular tyrannies during this war: but the lessons of the Phillipines, of Chile, of Central America, of South Korea, and of Indonesia suggest that our moral leadership has as much of an effect on our allies as it does on our enemies.

Nor is this mere conservative boilerplate. Our rhetorical leadership must be representative of a real moral integrity. As President Kennedy said in his inaugural address:

We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of these human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge--and more.

We must continue that pledge. America can survive the horrors of war; we should not discountenance the necessary horrors of Dresden, Hiroshima, or Falluja. What we cannot do is sanction the dilution of our moral authority, whether at home or abroad. This is why our current detainment policy is so damaging. Every Abu Ghraib is not only morally repellent, but directly endangers the opportunities for freedom for which American men and women have spilled their blood. Nor should we tolerate weakness in our greatest friends or blindness in our necessary allies, and Rice's dispassionate clarity with Sharon, and Bush's firmness with Putin are good indicia—but this course must be maintained. It may indeed be more difficult to reform our Sunni allies (Egypt, the troubled House of Saud) than with Iraq and Iran, whose majority Sh'ia populations have an engrained cultural and religious distrust of state power. But it would not be possible at all as long as our allies had the real threat of our enemies' presence as justification for their illiberalism.

Ultimately, whatever the fate of liberal Iran, the project of national Iran will be first in the minds of its people. In their resistance to hereditary Arabization (our fatal error in supporting the Pahlavis) and in their vast cultural legacy, the fate of Iran lies not in the choice between reformist Khatami and hardline Khamenei, but with the seventy percent of Iranians under thirty: pragmatic, Islamic, and Persian. Khomeini's grandson, himself a mullah, told Christopher Hitchens in late 2003 that "there was an important distinction between what the Quran said and what an ayatollah as head of state might say" [italics mine]. There is room for America to win the war of ideas in Iran, and elsewhere, and we must wage it carefully over the next generation. Khameini will fall, but his replacement is by no means guaranteed to share our ideals. This is why discord within our domestic political parties about the nature of our struggle is so serious; we risk a soft accomodation to a fatal nihilism born out of poverty and the perversions of religion and state. As Kennedy articulated, our struggle is not for the spoils of empire, but for peace, and a Democratic commitment to internationalism could rectify many of the grave errors of this administration, which currently cannot allow itself to admit wrongdoing because its opposition is so righteously wrongheaded.

In many ways, it is tragic that the slaughter of 9/11 and security concerns have overshadowed what should have been part of the continuing foreign policy legacy of the United States in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Rather than a response to terror, Bush's campaign should be viewed as an extension of the constant American struggle for liberty. Rather than shrinking from the eventuality of a nuclear Iran, we should think of ways in which to make proliferation contingent on the development of a liberal Iran. This is not to dismiss legitimate security concerns. But terrorism alone will not destroy the West, and the West's best defense against nuclear proliferation is with state engagement rather than criminal interdiction. Iran is not a failed state, like North Korea. North Korea's problems are so manifest precisely because it is the only remaining Stalinist state, and its sponsorship of terror (or any other policy) has little to no ideological or rational ground. No other nuclear or pre-nuclear power resembles this freakish model. But it still suggests a hard truth. We cannot guarantee non-proliferation without military action, no matter the external political pressures we bring to bear. If the leaders of a nation are strong-willed enough, they will build nuclear weapons. But, if we continue to engage Iran or other states that are truly national—that is that reflect the will of their people (rather than a God-like King or tyrannical minority)—within the framework of our century long drive towards liberty, making assistance contingent upon popular freedom rather than military guarantees, we will lay the groundwork for a state that cannot fathom their use.

UPDATE:

Greg Djerejian at Belgravia Dispatch has a great post up about movements within Iran. What is most interesting is Michael Ledeen's exchange with Djerejian within the comments section. Again, with nations like Iran, the realist/idealist disjunction is more nuanced than one might think; Ledeen strenuously insists that he is not for military intervention in Iran (although I think one could probably play gotcha over at AEI/NRO/WS). And therefore the distinction between Pollack/Takeyh and Ledeen is over the precise nature of engagement. More interestingly, Ledeen notes that while rhetoric is important ("the sort of speech that any good American should give about tyrannical enemies"), the foot soldiers will be Iranians whose weapons are "ideas and passions, not missiles and bullets." This distinction between active ideological support for resistance and general political pronouncements in support of liberty is interesting, but ultimately I wonder whether Ledeen opens up the Pandora's box of Iranian expectation of military support for revolution, much as Bush pere's calls for a Sh'ia uprising against Saddam in 1991 were heard by Iraqis. And Ledeen himself recognizes the full Cold War strategy of ideological engagement in proxy battles; he should similarly realize that the Eastern Bloc took forty years to liberate. This is a generational struggle.

Still, Ledeen recognizes the benefits of liberal transformation over mere containment. He notes:

Most importantly, there is a huge difference between atomic bombs in the hands of fanatical mullahs, and atomic bombs controlled by a pro-Western and democratic country. Mr. Will says it is "surreal" for Condoleezza Rice to discuss the Iranian nuclear program in terms of what we can "allow" Iran to do, I suppose because he is convinced we have no plausible path to prevent it. That may or may not be true; I don't know if there is a politically acceptable military option, and I agree that diplomacy cannot possibly derail the mullahs' mad atomic march. But it is at least equally "surreal" to dismiss the prospects of democratic revolution in Iran, and thereby join the ranks of the appeasers.

This seems to me to be an exact summation of the current situation in Iran, which makes our liberalization efforts all the more important.

Update, part deux.

Without going into the long demographic history of Lebanon, per hat-tip Jeff Hauser, Lebanon is no longer majority Christian (although Christians are guaranteed 50% representation politically under the Ta'if agreements). The last few days have shown Syrian rejectionism writ large in the form of Hizb'allah protests; Yglesias and Adesnik have opposing round-ups of the significance.