Bethlehem Shoals observes: “Duncan’s deviousness has been obscured because his game is all old-school fundamentals, causing the media to inaccurately label Duncan the individual as stoic and wholesome. Indeed, his Chinese fans call him the ‘Stone Buddha’. In reality, Duncan is more similar to Sun Wukong, the Chinese Monkey King, who liked to play pranks and acheived greatness through craftiness.” Indeed. Which seems like as good a time as any to mention Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book which, unfortunately, I was first assigned to read as part of a tedious “let’s read books by minority authors” course and toward which I therefore adopted the knee-jerk hostile attitude of the 19 year-old white dude.

In fact, it’s a great book that, yes, is about the perplexities of Chinese-American identity but also so much more. The motif of Sun Wukong the Monkey God-King is, suffice it to say, important to the narrative. As is Vertigo. Googling around I see that there’s a website with the funny name: “Tripmaster Monkey: Home of Yellow Journalism.” It’s a “cheeky news site for the Asia-savvy” and I’m not sure I really qualify as Asia-savvy.

UPDATE: That’s Brown Recluse I’m quoting, not Shoals. Apologies for the error.

One long-running on-the-horizon flashpoint in Iraq is the future of Kirkuk. At the insistence of the Kurdish parties, the Iraqi Constitution mandates that there will be a referendum on whether or not the Kirkuk region should be brought under the umbrella of the Kurdistan Regional Government. This has created a lot of incentive for KRG-aligned forced to try to push Arabs out of the area. Scot Maclead notes an International Crisis Group report on Kirkuk:

With every day and each exploding bomb that kills schoolchildren or shoppers, hopes for peaceful resolution of the Kirkuk question recede. The approach favoured by the Kurds, constitution-based steps culminating in a referendum by year’s end, is bitterly opposed by Kirkuk’s other principal communities – Arabs and Turkomans – who see it as a rigged process with predetermined outcome. Their preference, to keep Kirkuk under federal government control, is rejected by the Kurds. With all sides dug in and the Kurds believing Kirkuk is a lost heirloom they are about to regain, the debate should move off outcomes to focus on a fair and acceptable process. For the Kurds, that means postponing the referendum, implementing confidence-building measures and seeking a new mechanism prioritising consensus. The U.S. needs to recognise the risk of an explosion in Kirkuk and press the Kurds, the Baghdad government and Turkey alike to adjust policies and facilitate a peaceful settlement.

My motto is: People should listen to the ICG. They have a much better track-record than do many higher-profile organizations that policymakers and media elites prefer to listen to. In this case, however, while I think they’re right about this, I’m far from convinced that it’s really possible to implement the IGC’s alternatives at this point — how much leverage do we really have over the Kurds at this point? — but it would be worth a try. The last thing Iraq needs is a new conflict zone.