ONE MAN'S OPINION

If I have time to read only one news web site in the evening, I read the BBC. But if I have time for two, lately I've been adding Juan Cole's Mideast blog. I'm not sure what to think of him yet, but as a history professor he is good at supplying context I'd otherwise miss. From his April 5 entry on the prior weekend's hostilities in Najaf:

'If you want irony, and provocative irony, it turns out that the Plus Ultra base where the Sadrists protested was called "al-Andalus." That is a reference to Arab Spain, to which the Catholics of the Reconquista put a bloody end in 1492. Although much has been written about the Jews forcibly converted to Christianity in the aftermath, it is not realized that many more Muslims stayed and were forced to convert under the watchful eye of the Inquisition. For the Plus Ultra to call their base Andalus is in incredibly bad taste, and shows the sort of triumphalist mentality that has accompanied the Bush administration's rehabilitation of "empire." Unfortunately, naming things is not as hard as actually controlling imperial subjects.'