Niall Watch

Alas, I neglected to post this essay by Mark Steyn on Niall Ferguson when it originally appeared...but it tastes just as good after some time in the fridge! Maybe even better!

This is particularly so because The Doc's "Favorite Historian" was at the time (April, when Sadr's Militia took to the streets) that the Shiite Uprising had Begun, as any Old Imperial Hand could have predicted, but those Stupid Yanks just don't read history, particularly enough of his own.

And, pray, where is this Shiite uprising? Hmmm...it seems to have gone the way of the ferocious Afghan winter. Waiter, crow for Dr. Ferguson.

Or, alternatively, a bit of salt from Dr. Steyn's shaker:

I was sorry to see Niall Ferguson, currently living high off the hog in the bosom of the Great Satan, reduced to peddling the Max Hastings bloody-ignorant-Yanks-blundering-around-the-world line in Saturday's Telegraph. He trotted through a brisk precis of the 1920 Iraqi uprising against the British and then wrote confidently: "I am willing to bet that not one senior military commander in Iraq today knows the slightest thing about these events."

I'll take that bet! What do you fancy? Ten thousand bucks per commander, rising commensurately as we go down the ranks? Last year, at a roadblock in the desert between Rutba and Ramadi, I spoke to a humble sergeant who, on discovering I wrote for this great British newspaper, said: "Wow! You guys got into some serious shit here, right?" On the passenger seat I had my copies of the Karshs' Empires Of The Sand and David Fromkin's A Peace To End All Peace. "That's a great book," he said of the latter.

Professor Ferguson's thesis is that the "ignoramus" Yanks are so hung up on theories of American exceptionalism that they decline to learn from the British experience. This accusation might more usefully be bandied closer to home, where London's governing class has, in little more than a generation, cut loose its imperial inheritance. If one were to pursue the parallel further, one might argue that the British Establishment is so hung up on theories of European exceptionalism it's shrugged off its own history.

Do read the rest of it. It still has the requisite bite, snap and crackle on the palate, mixed with the smell of prickly yet juicy raspberries, characteristic of the best years of the Steyn vintage.