A Conversation at a Christmas Party

In the past few days I have been attending a series of gala Holiday parties. These parties not only give you a chance to try out all kinds of food that you wouldn't eat the rest of the year, but give you an opportunity to meet people that you never, under normal circumstances, would run across. I met such a guy at a party yesterday, and I am still shaking my head. But I wanted to bring you into the conversation here, just so that you will see that you are not the only person who talks with someone where the conversation just might not "fit."

Exchanging Pleasantries

So, what do you talk about when you meet someone for the first time in that setting? Well, of course, kids and work and family and where you are from. After exhausting this topic quickly, we moved on to a conversation about college football. I don't follow football closely, but I can generally do pretty well on that subject in a conversation. We were talking about Boise State and its road to inclusion in a BCS bowl game. I didn't know all my facts, and so I decided to ask him a question. I said, "What was the controversy relating to whether Boise State would be able to be in a BCS bowl?" He said, "Well, Boise State isn't in the same Division as the other teams in the Top 25. The others are in Division I and Boise State is Division IA, but because Boise State has such a great team, they (the NCAA) decided to let them be eligible for a BCS game." I thought this sounded bogus, but I didn't know immediately how to respond.*

[*I did some research on the subject today, and I clarify the situation for you below. I really don't mind talking to people who think they are informed about something but really don't have their facts straight. If I am not fully "up" on the subject, it provides me an occasion to get my facts straight. In this way, I often learn more from mistaken presentations or poorly-written books than from good ones.]

But one thing I ought to have realized is that when a person starts quoting you "facts" that, as it turns out, really aren't facts, that you should take with a grain of salt anything else he had to say with respect to factual matters. For then we started talking about Iraq.

Turning to Iraq

So, after I was pretty sure he was wrong in his football "facts," we switched our discussion to contemporary politics. Two of his sons had served or were serving in Iraq, and he had some "facts" he wanted to share with me. The "facts" were, as he told me, that 85% of the Iraqi people love us, that it took postwar Germany and Japan seven or eight years to get their acts together, that Americans are just antsy when things don't happen overnight, and that the best thing to do was to "stay the course." Rumsfeld had it right all along, according to my conversational partner.

I was actually grateful to hear him speak in this way because the Northwest is now so anti-Bush and anti-War in Iraq that it was actually refreshing to hear a partisan supporter of the current Administration. But I thought he had either misstated or exaggerated certain facts. I said I didn't think that postwar Germany and Japan were appropriate comparisons, since there were not continuing levels of violence there in the late 1940s and since Germany, especially, had a democratic tradition before Hitler. In my judgment, which agreed with the conclusion of the ISG report, things really aren't going the right direction in Iraq at all. Sectarian violence is up. Baghdad, making up 25% of the population of the country, is a war zone. The national army's annual budget (and their army is about the same size as the US force in Iraq) is equivalent to what the US troops go through in two weeks. I said that the ISG report recognized that major problems only existed in 4 of the 18 provinces, but 40% of the population lived in those 4 provinces.

I questioned him about our rationale for invasion in the first place. He told me that his son had seen some mightly large weapons being transported on trailers. If they weren't weapons of mass destruction, he didn't know what they were. They could easily reach into Israel, he said. I didn't question the latter point--indeed, I think that one of our real reasons for invading Iraq was to buy some protection for Israel. But I asked him, "Well, the weapons of mass destruction didn't turn up. Powell misrepresented the facts in his Feb. 2003 presentation to the UN. After Sept. 2002 we were set on a war footing, and nothing, even a UN report, would convince us that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction. Are you trying to suggest that there really were these weapons but that we just weren't informed about them?" He didn't want to deal with that question.

Then he told me that, in fact, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were just about the same. I said that I didn't think that was true, that the Taliban were ideological Muslims who wanted to organize the society in accordance with Islamic law, while Al-Qaeda were opportunists who just wanted to promote international instability. We disagreed, I guess. He thought that even though the justifications for war didn't pan out, that we should be there, and that we ought to finish the job. By this time, however, I think I just wanted to get some fresh air.

Conclusion

I should have realized that if he got his football facts wrong that he wouldn't do much better on Iraq. In fact, here is the "truth" about Boise State. The Bowl Championship Series this year consists of five games: one for the national title (in Glendale, AZ) and then the Fiesta, Rose, Orange and Sugar Bowls. Ohio State and Florida vie for the national crown on January 8, 2007. That leaves eight teams to "make it" to the remainig four BCS bowls. Automatic berths to one of the BCS bowls go to the winners of six (of the eleven) conferences in Division IA (there is no Division I, by the way). These six conferences are the Pac 10, the Big 10, Big 12, ACC, SEC and Big East. Since Ohio State (Big 10) and Florida (SEC) each one their respective conferences, only four of the remaining spots for BCS games are taken (by the winners of the Pac 10--USC, Big 12--Oklahoma, Big East--Louisville and ACC--Wake Forest). This leaves four "At Large" bids.

The four remaining At Large bids must go out to four teams which finished in the top 12 of the BCS standings. Since one of the teams that will be competing in a BCS bowl finished lower than the top 12 in the BCS ranking (Wake Forest), this means that four teams would be chosen for the remaining four BCS spots from seven remaining teams in the BCS top 12. Thus, the seven teams which didn't receive an "automatic" BCS spot and thus were eligible for an "invitation" to one of the BCS bowl games were the following, in order of BCS ranking: (3) Michigan; (4) LSU; (7) Wisconsin; (8) Boise State; (9) Auburn; (11) Notre Dame; (12) Arkansas. The four of those teams that accepted BCS bowl berths were Michigan, LSU, Boise St. and Notre Dame. Wisconsin and Auburn were "burned," the second arguably less so that Wisconsin. But Boise State therefore got an invitation, not because they were just "so good," but because they were in one of the five Division IA conferences that doesn't automatically send its winner to a BCS bowl, and thus they had to vie for an At Large spot. Which they won.

Phew. Well, I thank my conversation partner who was pretty much wrong on everything he told me yesterday. If he hadn't been wrong, I might never have cleared this up for myself.

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