The Opinionator: A blog at the NY Times by Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellentrop

August 20, 2007, 5:45 pm

Regarding Syria

By Tobin Harshaw

Tags: Joe Lieberman, syria

Faiz Shakir at Think Progress tells us that Senator Joe Lieberman wrote in today’s Wall Street Journal “that the U.S. ‘road to victory’ in Iraq goes through Damascus.” Well, not exactly, but Lieberman did say that the United States must begin “focusing on Syria, through which up to 80% of the Iraq-bound extremists transit. Indeed, even terrorists from countries that directly border Iraq travel by land via Syria to Iraq, instead of directly from their home countries, because of the permissive environment for terrorism that the Syrian government has fostered.”

There were varying degrees of supportive bellicosity on the right. John McCain held a conference call with bloggers this morning and, according to Michael Goldfarb at The Worldwide Standard, said that “one of my great and enduring heroes is George Shultz, who said ‘Never point a gun at anybody unless you intend to shoot it.’ We’ve got to stop pointing our guns but be prepared to shoot. I’m not sure I would bomb the [Damascus] airport but I would certainly make it clear to the Syrians…I would probably go back to the Security Council…but we have to make clear that there are consequences.”

“I agree with Lieberman that it’s long past the time that we dealt with pressuring Syria to stop harboring and aiding terrorists,” insists MacRanger at Macsmind. “President Bush long ago said that we would deal with any country who does so and while we are now beginning to address Iran through a reclassification of the the Revolutionary Guard, we should also show Syria that we will not tolerate their complicity any longer.”

Anton Efendi, a graduate student who writes the Across the Bay blog, does his best to calm things down: “I have long discussed on this blog the Assad regime’s collusion with jihadi movements in Iraq and Lebanon and elsewhere, regardless of the useless, and easily disproved, conventional ‘wisdom’ that somehow Assad’s ‘secular’ regime simply ‘cannot’ work with jihadists, just like somehow Iran’s Shiite theocracy absolutely ‘cannot’ work with Sunni jihadis, even when we know that they do and have done so in the past … In the ongoing discussion about non-state actors in the Middle East, it’s crucial not to ignore the role of states. In this case, to quote Barry Rubin again, Syria along with Iran are essentially functioning as, or are basically the closest thing to, state sponsors of al-Qaeda jihadism.”

Well, certainly Lieberman intended the piece to be provocative — and the fact that the most reasoned response I found to it included four instances of scare quotes in the first sentence would seem to indicate that he succeeded.

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August 21, 2007, 10:53 am

Death to the SAT

By Tobin Harshaw

Tags: worth a click

The controversial social scholar Charles Murray, writing at The American magazine’s site, feels it’s time to abandon the SAT test. His complaints aren’t totally new: “The image of the SAT has done a 180-degree turn. No longer seen as a compensating resource for the unprivileged, it has become a corrosive symbol of privilege. ‘Back when kids just got a good night’s sleep and took the SAT, it was a leveler that helped you find the diamond in the rough,’ Lawrence University’s dean of admissions told The New York Times recently. ‘Now that most of the great scores are affluent kids with lots of preparation, it just increases the gap between the haves and the have-nots.’”

More interestingly, Murray sees the test as being about more than just getting into a good college:

The final benefit of getting rid of the SAT is the hardest to describe but is probably the most important. By getting rid of the SAT, we would be getting rid of a totem for members of the cognitive elite. People forget achievement test scores. They do not forget cognitive test scores. The only cognitive test score that millions of people know about themselves is the SAT score. If the score is high, it is seen as proof that one is smart. If the score is not high, it is evidence of intellectual mediocrity or worse. Furthermore, it is evidence that cannot be explained away as a bad grade can be explained away. All who enter an SAT testing hall feel judged by their scores.

Worse yet, there are few other kinds of scores to counterbalance the SAT. Of the many talents and virtues that people possess, we have good measures for quantifying few besides athletic and intellectual ability. Falling short in athletic ability can be painful, especially for boys, but the domain of sports is confined. Intellectual ability has no such limits, and the implications of the SAT score spill far too widely. The 17-year-old who is at the 40th percentile on the SAT has no other score that lets him say to himself, “Yes, but I’m at the 99th percentile in working with my hands,” or “Yes, but I’m at the 99th percentile for courage in the face of adversity.”

Conversely, it seems to make no difference that high intellectual ability is a gift for which its recipients should be humbly grateful. Far too many students see a high score on the SAT as an expression of their own merit, not an achievement underwritten by the dumb luck of birth.

Hence the final reason for getting rid of the SAT: knowing those scores is too dispiriting for those who do poorly and too inspiriting for those who do well. In an age when intellectual talent is increasingly concentrated among young people who are also privileged economically and socially, the last thing we need are numbers that give these very, very lucky kids a sense of entitlement.

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August 20, 2007, 5:45 pm

Regarding Syria

By Tobin Harshaw

Tags: Joe Lieberman, syria

Faiz Shakir at Think Progress tells us that Senator Joe Lieberman wrote in today’s Wall Street Journal “that the U.S. ‘road to victory’ in Iraq goes through Damascus.” Well, not exactly, but Lieberman did say that the United States must begin “focusing on Syria, through which up to 80% of the Iraq-bound extremists transit. Indeed, even terrorists from countries that directly border Iraq travel by land via Syria to Iraq, instead of directly from their home countries, because of the permissive environment for terrorism that the Syrian government has fostered.”

There were varying degrees of supportive bellicosity on the right. John McCain held a conference call with bloggers this morning and, according to Michael Goldfarb at The Worldwide Standard, said that “one of my great and enduring heroes is George Shultz, who said ‘Never point a gun at anybody unless you intend to shoot it.’ We’ve got to stop pointing our guns but be prepared to shoot. I’m not sure I would bomb the [Damascus] airport but I would certainly make it clear to the Syrians…I would probably go back to the Security Council…but we have to make clear that there are consequences.”

“I agree with Lieberman that it’s long past the time that we dealt with pressuring Syria to stop harboring and aiding terrorists,” insists MacRanger at Macsmind. “President Bush long ago said that we would deal with any country who does so and while we are now beginning to address Iran through a reclassification of the the Revolutionary Guard, we should also show Syria that we will not tolerate their complicity any longer.”

Anton Efendi, a graduate student who writes the Across the Bay blog, does his best to calm things down: “I have long discussed on this blog the Assad regime’s collusion with jihadi movements in Iraq and Lebanon and elsewhere, regardless of the useless, and easily disproved, conventional ‘wisdom’ that somehow Assad’s ‘secular’ regime simply ‘cannot’ work with jihadists, just like somehow Iran’s Shiite theocracy absolutely ‘cannot’ work with Sunni jihadis, even when we know that they do and have done so in the past … In the ongoing discussion about non-state actors in the Middle East, it’s crucial not to ignore the role of states. In this case, to quote Barry Rubin again, Syria along with Iran are essentially functioning as, or are basically the closest thing to, state sponsors of al-Qaeda jihadism.”

Well, certainly Lieberman intended the piece to be provocative — and the fact that the most reasoned response I found to it included four instances of scare quotes in the first sentence would seem to indicate that he succeeded.

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