Any fish bite if you got debate

Drones

Bob Schieffer actually did, contrary to all expectation, ask a drone question, but he asked Romney instead of Obama. Romney, sticking with his basic strategy for the evening, quickly agreed that Obama was right about whatever it was Romney didn't want to talk about and started talking about something else, how Iran is "four years closer to a nuclear weapon" etc. Obama was glad to pick up that baton and start running with it further away than ever. Oh well.

I don't understand why Obama doesn't mention that Iran is not "four years closer" to building a nuclear weapon—since they have converted a large proportion of their 20% enriched uranium to solid form, for use in the medical reactor, they are strictly speaking a good deal further away.

Kandahar airfield. Photo by GlobalPost vis PBS.

Geeky linguistic sidelight:

@mattyglesias had an issue during the debate that wasn't really about foreign policy:

Inconsistency between Obama's pronunciation of "Pakistan" and "Afghanistan" always drives me nuts.
— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 23, 2012

That used to bother me too, the way he says the heavy vowels in "Pakistan" the way they say can't in the UK and in "Afghanistan" the way we say can't in the US—until I heard myself doing pretty much the same thing.

Now I think I know what it's about. "Pakistan" is a relatively new word, coming into general use only after the country itself came into existence in 1947; "Afghanistan" is an older one, known to English speakers since maybe the mid-18th century (first official UK use was 1801). So it's had time to evolve a universal English pronunciation whereas "Pakistan" has not. I imagine younger people like Matty (that's what his Twitter address always makes me think of, "Matty Glesias") are more likely to pronounce the two the same way. Just as my grandmother used to pronounce "endive" in French—it was still an exotic vegetable to her, but to me it sounded hysterically bourgeois.

The afghan Emir Sher Ali Khan with his "friends" Russia and Great Britain. Punch, November 30, 1878

Route to the sea

Romney earned a lot of laughs with his strange concept of Middle East geography:

Syria is Iran's only ally in the Arab world. It's their route to the sea. It's the route for them to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon, which threatens, of course, our ally Israel. And so seeing Syria remove Assad is a very high priority for us. Number two, seeing a — a replacement government being responsible people is critical for us. And finally, we don't want to have military involvement there. We don't want to get drawn into a military conflict. (Transcript from NPR)

First, of course, Iran doesn't need a route to the sea, since it has plenty of coastline of its own; and secondly Syria is not its route to anywhere, on account of the countries between the two, Iraq and Turkey.

However, in Romney's defense, he's not the only one: a lot of highly respectable people believe this without being aware that they believe it: those who discuss how Iran supplies the Hezbollah militia with arms. I used to wonder a lot about this, during the Iraq war, every time I'd see a story about it: how did they get the stuff across Iraq, when Iraq was occupied by US troops?

Duh. That's the answer. Iraqis allow them to, and the US can't do anything about it (the administration has been entreating Maliki to close the air corridor, without success). It is because of the Iraq war that Iran is able to send arms to Syria and Lebanon. Iran did not have a route to the Mediterranean, but George W. Bush gave them one. One of his many little gifts.

The Mechanics of Destruction cartoon series, by Vincent Kelly (I'm pretty sure Gideon is UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, but it was mainly the headline and the woman I liked)