Friday, March 23, 2007

The real central front in the war on terror

Responding to yet more reports of Pakistan-linked terrorism --

Glenn Reynolds:
Pakistan. It just keeps coming up.

National Review's Stanley Kurtz:
Pakistan Keeps Coming Up

Indeed it does. An issue that both of them might want to take up with George W. Bush and his project in Iraq.

Kurtz also asks, in the context of flows of people between the UK and Pakistan --

Imagine that the great immigrations to the United States from Europe in the early twentieth century had been followed up by regular yearly visits of a month or two in length back to Italy, Poland, Ireland, by most American immigrants. Then imagine that a big part of the purpose of these visits was to arrange marriages between relatives in the home country and American immigrants. And imagine the whole system going on for decades. Obviously, under these circumstances, the entire project of American assimilation would have been cut off from the start.

While the focus on home country marriage in the UK-Pakistan linkage does seem high, Kurtz seems unaware that there was two-way traffic even in the days of the great migration from Europe. Consider for example the life of Eamon DeValera.

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