DOMINO THEORY:

US for Abu Mazin as Palestinian leader (Anwar Iqbal, 2/28/2003, UPI)

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said Friday that senior Palestinian official Mahmud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazin, would be
acceptable to the United States as a replacement for Yasser Arafat. [...]

Armitage did not say whether the Israelis would also accept Abu Mazin, but he was a key figure in the Oslo negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians that led to the peace agreement. The Israelis regard him as a moderate member of the Palestinian leadership.

He remains secretary of the Palestine Liberation Organization executive council and one of Arafat's close aides, but he is no longer active having distanced himself from the Palestinian leader in July last year when it became obvious that Arafat was no longer acceptable to Israel and the United States. [...]

Armitage said that if a change in Iraq brings about a Shiite government, the United States would have no objection.

"If the majority of the people of Iraq elect a Shia as a leader than so be it." said Armitage, adding: "If you have a representative government, then all the people of Iraq will decide who they want to rule ... no matter their ethnic or religious identity."

He said, "The Shia population is a prominent population of Iraq, which has been very badly treated by Saddam Hussein."

Armitage said the United States was not afraid of the possibility of a Shiite-run Iraqi making an alliance with Iran, which is so far the only Shiite majority country in the world.

Asked if the United States was worried about such a possibility, he said: "No we are not. I don't think you can make those fine adjustments. If you are going to have a representative government, that's what it means."

Odd how we already think of the current configuration of the Middle East in the past tense--no wonder Syria and Libya are scared.

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ADVENTURES IN OLD EUROPE:

Girls Terrorized in France's Macho High-Rise Ghettos (Catherine Bremer, 2/28/03, Reuters)

A short bus ride from Paris, a world capital of romance, teen-age girls trapped in soulless, Soviet-style housing complexes are too scared to wear skirts and balk at the idea of dating.

Imprisoned behind yellowed curtains that hang limply at windows, they stay indoors to avoid the jeers, bullying and the ominous risk of rape that lurks in dingy stairwells where gangs of boys of mostly North African origin hang out.

"It's everywhere, all the time. Beatings, rapes, the lot. The worst is the names they call you, especially if you're dressed in a girly way which makes you a slut," says Amel, 21.

Home to many immigrants from the Maghreb, such suburbs have seen a rise in radical Islam that has turned attitudes toward women even harsher. Pressure is mounting for Muslim women to wear veils and forced marriages that snatch girls from college and a career are now commonplace. [...]

Long criticized for creating ghettos of jobless immigrants in a nation where equality was a founding principle, the state housing projects thrown up around France's cities from the 1960s have always provided a breeding ground for violence and crime.

Known in French as "cites," the high-rise estates, crumbling citadels of poverty turned in on themselves, provide would-be gangsters with a maze of shady basements where drug trafficking, dealing in guns and intra-gang fights are rife.

This is an early glimpse of Europe's future, because they won't assimilate these immigrants and they'll eventually be outnumbered by them. Unless, of course, the French and Germans decide to handle it the same way they did their "Jewish problem".

MORE:
The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris (Theodore Dalrymple, Autumn 2002, City Journal)

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MISEDUCATION:

Hey girls, just don't do it: Chastity might be great protection against pregnancy and disease but critics claim America's "no-sex revolution" is leaving teenagers dangerously at risk (Caroline Overington, March 1 2003, Sydney Morning Herald)

Here is a little quiz. What is the best way to avoid pregnancy? What is the best way to avoid contracting a sexually transmitted disease? If you are between 20 and 50, chances are you answered both questions by saying: "Use a condom." That is the lesson that Australians have been taught, in school and via magazine advertising and billboards, for more than 30 years.

If you were an American teenager, however, your answer might be different. Americans know a better way to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases: sexual abstinence. Unlike condoms, it's 100 per cent effective. But is it realistic? Who can stop teenagers having sex?

Well, it seems that Americans can. In fact, if the polls and statistics are correct, the US is in the middle of a sexual counter-revolution. Across America, teenagers are rejecting the safe-sex message, telling parents to take back the condoms and contraceptive pills. They'd rather be virgins. Chastity is chic.

Ms Overington might at least pause to note that Australians have been taught to accept an objective falsehood.

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WHEN YOU'RE SCORING POINTS, KEEP PUSHING THE BALL UPFIELD:

A New Move on Estrada: The White House challenges Democrats to put up or shut up. (Byron York, February 28, 2003, National Review)

In perhaps its most forceful effort yet to break the stalemate over the appeals-court nomination of Miguel Estrada, the White House has now invited every member of the Senate who has doubts about Estrada's legal views to submit written questions to Estrada by the close of business Friday. In a letter delivered Thursday to all 100 senators, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales said Estrada will respond by next Tuesday.

"He would answer the questions forthrightly, appropriately, and in a manner consistent with the traditional practice and obligations of judicial nominees, as he has before," Gonzales wrote.

Gonzales also renewed a White House offer to set up personal meetings between Estrada and any senator who wants to have a one-on-one talk. "We continue to believe that such meetings could be very useful to senators who wish to learn more about Mr. Estrada's record and character," Gonzales wrote.

Finally, Gonzales asked that Democrats with questions about Estrada's work "immediately ask in writing for the views of the Solicitors General, United States Attorney, and judges for whom Mr. Estrada worked and ask them to respond by Tuesday, March 4." Gonzales specifically named appeals-court judge Amalya Kearse, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, former United States Attorney Otto Obermaier, and former Solicitors General Ken Starr, Drew Days, Walter Dellinger, and Seth Waxman.

The last three names - Days, Dellinger, and Waxman - are particularly significant. All were high-ranking appointees of President Clinton, and their inclusion on the list suggests that the White House is confident they will not voice any objections to Estrada.

Mr. Gonzales was on Fox Sunday last week and was compelling. They should get him out in front of the public on this.

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BLANK SLATE:

Desert Shields: Is it wrong for Saddam to put civilians in the crosshairs? (Michael Kinsley, February 27, 2003, Slate)

Saddam Hussein, it seems, is not just a dictator and mass murderer. He is a bounder as well. While we amass hundreds of thousands of troops and billions of dollars of military equipment near his borders, with the frank intention of removing him from power and probably from life, he is welcoming a few dozen
scraggly Western war protesters to act as "human shields" by planting themselves next to potential bombing targets such as power plants. It's just not cricket,
complains Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Using civilians as human shields "is not a military strategy." It is "a violation of the laws of armed conflict."

Rumsfeld's indignation is fey. Since the premise and justification for our imminent invasion of Iraq is that Saddam is evil and ruthless, which is certainly true, it would be remarkable if he played the game of war according to Hoyle. Why should he? It's not going to improve his reputation and will do nothing for his life expectancy either. Indeed one of the big surprises of the build-up to Gulf War I was Saddam's sudden decision to release the Western civilians he had initially forced to live near military targets. That certainly made America's job easier. And as a practical matter, it may have cost more civilian lives than it saved, by giving us more freedom to bomb.

Like "terrorism" and like "weapons of mass destruction," the anathema on the use of human shields is an attempt to define certain methods of war as inherently illegitimate, whether the cause for which they are used is legitimate or not. It's a noble effort, but difficult to sustain and may require more intellectual consistency than the current American administration, at least, is capable of. There have been well-documented reports during the past year, for example, that the Israeli army has used Palestinian civilians as human shields. The U.S. reaction has been muted and generalized mumblings of disapproval and calls for all parties to resolve their differences by negotiation in good faith. No high horse to be seen.

Then, too, it is a bit problematic to be invoking international law and insisting on your right to ignore it at the same time, in the same cause, and with the same righteous indignation. International law says, "Thou shalt not use human shields." It also says, "Thou shalt not use military force without the approval of the Security Council--even if thou art the United States of America and some idiot long ago gave veto power to the French." The test of a country's commitment to international law--and the measure of its credibility when it accuses other countries of flouting international law--is whether that country obeys laws even when it has good reasons to prefer not to.

If International Law really does say that only the Security Council can commit American forces that would violate the Constitution. In the words of James Madison:

The Constitution expressly and exclusively vests in the Legislature the power of declaring a state of war [and] the power of raising armies.

Meanwhile, you could hardly ask for a better illustration of where moral relativism leads than Mr. Kinsley's presumably feigned inability to determine whether it is right or wrong for Saddam Hussein to use human shields.

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THE SLOW MOVIE:

Cold Comfort: The misrepresentation at the center of The Fast Runner (Justin Shubow, 2.28.03, American Prospect)

Since late last summer, The Fast Runner, the first feature-length movie made almost wholly by the aboriginal people of the Arctic, has been playing to packed houses. Released on DVD earlier this month, the film tells the story of an ancient Inuit legend and unsentimentally portrays the hard, grimy life of some of the region's native residents. Audiences weren't the only ones to embrace the film: Expressing an enthusiasm that characterized many reviews of the movie, The Washington Post's Desson Howe wrote that the film was "as close to authentic myth as cinema has ever gotten." In fact, nothing could be further from the truth: During the more than six months since the film's release, it seems to have gone almost completely unnoticed -- by reviewers and audiences alike -- that at the film's core is a crucial lie. [...]

Following his return home from involuntary exile -- after barely escaping an attempt on his life -- the film's protagonist, Atanarjuat, has the opportunity to avenge the murder of his brother and the rape of his wife. He cunningly sets up the three culpable men so that they are utterly at his mercy. After knocking down his nemesis -- the group's ringleader who is both a murderer and rapist -- Atanarjuat raises a bone club and strikes. Except instead of the evil man's skull, he smashes the ice just next to it. Atanarjuat exclaims, "The killing stops now!" -- proving that he could have taken revenge but chose not to do so. Thus we are meant to believe that a 1,000-year-old Inuit myth of lust, betrayal and violence climaxes with a surprisingly pacifistic turn.

I just didn't buy it. Knowing some basic world myths, I was expecting vengeance akin to Odysseus' bow-and-arrow heroics during his homecoming. Moreover, in a society such as the Inuit's -- one without laws, police or prisons -- violent retribution would have not only been highly likely, it also might have been justified.

And my hunch was right. I discovered that the original legend ends -- to use the words of Norman Cohn, one of the film's producers -- "with everybody's brains all over the floor." I asked Zacharias Kunuk, the film's director, whether the movie alters the Inuit myth. "The only thing that we changed was the ending," he said. "In the actual story Atanarjuat smashes [the villains'] heads." Explaining the decision, he said, "Every generation has their version. It was a message more fitting for our times. Killing people doesn't solve anything."

Tried watching it the other night and it was painful, but we've addressed the noble savage myth elsewhere.

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PRE-EMPT OR APPEASE?:

Secret, Scary Plans: The scariest work under way in the Pentagon these days is the planning for a possible military strike against nuclear sites in North Korea. (NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, 2/28/03, NY Times)

Dick Cheney and his camp worry, not unreasonably, that the greatest risk of all would be to allow North Korea to churn out nuclear warheads like hotcakes off a griddle. In a few years North Korea will be able to produce about 60 nuclear weapons annually, and fissile material is so compact that it could easily be sold and smuggled to Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and Al Qaeda.

The hawk faction believes that the U.S. as a last resort could make a surgical strike, even without South Korean consent, and that Kim Jong Il would not commit suicide by retaliating. The hawks may well be right.

Then again, they may be wrong. And if they're wrong, it would be quite a mistake.

The North has 13,000 artillery pieces and could fire some 400,000 shells in the first hour of an attack, many with sarin and anthrax, on the 21 million people in the "kill box" — as some in the U.S. military describe the Seoul metropolitan area. The Pentagon has calculated that another Korean war could kill a million people.

So if the military option is too scary to contemplate, and if allowing North Korea to proliferate is absolutely unacceptable, what's left? Precisely the option that every country in the region is pressing on us: negotiating with North Korea.

Ironically, the gravity of the situation isn't yet fully understood in either South Korea or Japan, partly because they do not think this administration would be crazy enough to consider a military strike against North Korea. They're wrong.

North Korea has and has had one of the two or three worst governments on Earth. It's committed terrorist acts itself, never mind sponsoring them. It sells weapons to anyone and it has both a nuclear weapons and a ballistic missile program. If we won't attack a country like that pre-emptively then why would any other nation that considers its interests to conflict with ours not pursue the same policies? Does the risk go down in a few years when there are many North Koreas?

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GOOD RIDDANCE:

Giscard warns of dangers to EU treaty: Valéry Giscard d'Estaing issued a stark warning of the problems facing his convention drawing up a constitution for the European Union. (Daniel Dombey, 2/28/03, Financial Times)

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing on Thursday issued a stark warning of the problems facing his convention drawing up a constitution for the European Union.

Mr Giscard d'Estaing, head of the 105-member convention, said European divisions over Iraq had complicated the process and he was concerned at the large number of amendments to the drafts of the first articles.

The former French president dismissed many of the 1,087 amendments put forward by convention members, saying much bigger issues were at stake.

"If Europe had a common reaction [over Iraq], perhaps Europe could have played a decisive role," he said. "But the attempt was barely made." Mr Giscard d'Estaing said divisions were so deep that it was fruitless to discuss foreign policy issues and dropped a broad hint that the convention might need more time to reach a satisfactory result.

If nothing else comes of war with Iraq but the crumbling of the EU it will have been well worth the price.

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ABSOLUTELY THE LAST GRAMMY NOTE (EVER):

Ravi Shankar's daughter makes splash in jazz world (Mary Pat Hyland, 10/07/02, Gannett News Service

Daughter of legendary sitar player Ravi Shankar, Norah Jones was born in New York City but soon moved with her mother to Grapevine, Texas. She displayed musical talent early, singing in the church choir at 5, starting piano lessons at 7 and studying alto saxophone in junior high school. Her musical influences include Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Etta James.

The Wife got hooked on this disc early, but apparently Ms Jones was long estranged from her dad so it wasn't until yesterday with this story, -Ravi Shankar says he can’t take credit for Norah Jones, that we realized who he was. It's a big old strange world out there, eh?

MORE:
-OFFICIAL SITE: Norah Jones
-Blue Note: Norah Jones
-VH-1 Norah Jones: Inside Track
-Unofficially Norah Jones
-Anoushka Shankar

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TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE:

The right man to reform and revive Japan: The appointment of Toshihiko Fukui as governor of the Bank of Japan is a positive step (Richard Katz, 2/28/03, Financial Times)

It is hard to see how Japan's economy can reform and recover unless reformers are put in charge of vital policymaking institutions. That is why the appointment of Toshihiko Fukui as governor of the Bank of Japan is a positive step. His view is straightforward: deflation cannot be stemmed through monetary easing alone, which makes structural reforms more important than ever.

Even some of those who want the bank to inject "unconventional stimulus" acknowledge it cannot revive the economy by itself. Heizo Takenaka, minister for economic policy and financial services, has made it clear that monetary easing will not suffice without the disposal of bad debts. So has John Taylor, undersecretary for international affairs at the US Treasury.

Mr Fukui will bring more to the table than the reformist philosophy he shares with Masaru Hayami, his predecessor. Even critics acknowledge his political acumen, flexibility and a dense network of supporters in politics and business. These assets could make him more effective than Mr Hayami in building consensus for action on bad debts supported by monetary easing.

The main alternative is the futile hope that massive money-printing, like government spending on "bridges to nowhere" in the past, can substitute for real reform. Critics claim that the BoJ could create 3-4 per cent inflation at will and that this inflation would, in turn, revive private demand. Some advocates of inflation targeting even suggest that the bank buy up assets used as collateral for bank loans, from equities to office buildings.

While many economists sincerely believe such measures would help, it is the opponents of reform who are the most fervent advocates. They hope that raising the price of stocks and property can make bad loans good without restructuring "zombie" borrowers - companies that are essentially bankrupt. The more Japan's leaders grasp at monetary straws, the less likely they are to undertake true reform.

Japan's deflation is not the cause of weak demand but a symptom. Prices are falling because the economy is operating at 4-5 per cent below capacity. The bank cannot create steady, manageable inflation just by printing more money. It has tried. It has increased the monetary base by almost 40 per cent since March 2001. Interest rates have responded - the yield on a 10-year government bond is now at a record low of less than 0.8 per cent. But little else has improved. The rest of the broad money supply has barely changed. Meanwhile, bank loans, prices and nominal gross domestic product have all kept falling.

You can't have 0% or less population growth, low immigration, and peoples' money socked away in savings accounts and still manage to reflate your economy. If the Japanese were serious about salvaging their economy and their society, rather than dying out in comfort, they'd criminalize abortion, reward fertility, encourage immigration and create mechanisms like 401ks and privatized retirement accounts. But Bill Emmott and others identified these problems twenty years ago and they've done nothing about any of them--so don't hold your breath.

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PRIVACY UBER ALLES:

How Civil-Libertarian Hysteria May Endanger Us All: Congress was stunningly irresponsible in hobbling a program aimed at catching terrorists. (Stuart Taylor Jr., February 25, 2003, The Atlantic Monthly)

Someday Americans may die because of Congress's decision earlier this month to cripple a Defense Department program designed to catch future Mohamed Attas before they strike. That's not a prediction. But it is a fear.

The program seeks to develop software to make intelligence-sharing more effective by making it instantaneous, the better to learn more about suspected terrorists and identify people who might be terrorists. It would link computerized government databases to one another and to some nongovernment databases to which investigators already have legal access. If feasible, it would also fish through billions of transactions for patterns of activities in which terrorists might engage. [...]

The problem with the near-ban on TIA—sponsored by Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and known as the Wyden amendment—is that rather than weighing the hoped-for security benefits against the feared privacy costs, and devising ways to minimize those costs, Congress was stampeded by civil-libertarian hysteria into adopting severe and unwarranted restrictions. The Bush administration shares the blame because the person it put in charge of TIA research is Adm. John M. Poindexter, whose record of lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair does not inspire trust.

"There are risks to TIA, but in the end I think the risks of not trying TIA are greater, and we should at least try to construct systems for [minimizing] abuse before we discard all potential benefits from technological innovation," says Paul Rosenzweig, a legal analyst at the Heritage Foundation who has co-authored a thoughtful 25-page analysis of the TIA program, including a list of muscular safeguards that Congress could adopt to protect privacy and prevent abuses. Instead of weighing such factors, Rosenzweig says, Congress has "deliberately and without much thought decided to discard the greatest advantage we have over our foes—our technological superiority."

When the 9-11 attacks occurred and it became clear how closely the terrorists fit a seemingly obvious profile--national origin, immigrant status, flight training, health club memberships, purchase patterns, etc.--everyone beat their chest and demanded the heads of folks at the FBI and CIA who'd failed to pick up on these signs. Now the government comes up with a daring and innovative plan to just possibly--though, this being the government, one doubts it--notice such connections next time and people demand it be stopped lest one more computer somewhere know what many other corporate computers already know about them. That may be a rational choice, to trade societal safety for a bit of personal privacy, but it is the choice being made--a selfish preference being placed ahead of the very purpose for which government is constituted--and those who support doing so need to take responsibility for it, not look to scapegoat government when future attacks occur.

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HARVEY DENT REPORTS:

Blix draft says Iraq disarmament "limited" (Reuters, February 27, 2003)

Chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix faults Iraq for not having made greater efforts to cooperate with inspectors, saying the results so far have been "very limited," according to his draft Security Council report.

But the draft, excerpts of which were obtained by Reuters, acknowledges that Baghdad had increased its activity to help inspectors carry out work in recent month.

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NO HONOR AMONG THIEVES:

A Security Council on the Run (Ian Williams, February 27, 2003, AlterNet)

With its vaguely worded "second resolution" proposal for the UN Security Council, the United States is showing contempt for the UN and laying down a humiliating dare to any Council members who would defy it. If and when it is passed, it will also hand Washington's only real ally, Tony Blair, an opening to claim UN authorization for attacking Iraq -- although the proposed wording does no such thing. [...]

But since the administration has decided it wants a second resolution as a fig leaf for a decision it has already made, Washington is resorting to diplomacy, Texas-style. While Turkey, adroitly exploiting its strategic position, is chewing on billions of juicy carrots, the rest of the world is getting the stick -- though in the case of the major players like Germany, Russia, and France, the big-stick approach has already provoked more resistance than cooperation. For example, sending uber-aggressive Undersecretary of State John Bolton to Moscow is the type of diplomacy that started the Hundred Years' War, not ended it.

Sadly, though, the stick does work well with many UN members, and the degree of resistance put up by a country is generally in inverse proportion to its GDP, but also strongly correlated with its trade ties to the United States. With Bulgaria, Washington emphasized the need for Senate authorization of its NATO membership. But if it toes the line, Bulgaria has also been promised that the new democratic and independent Iraq will pay off its pre-Gulf War debts. When Paris promptly pointed out the potential difficulties it may face in gaining entry into the European Union, the poor Bulgarians looked like rabbits caught in the headlights -- as indeed do many of their colleagues at the moment.

So will this resolution pass? Certainly not if it were a secret ballot! But even so, France has certainly sent a number of clear signals indicating its willingness to compromise. Neither French President Jacques Chirac nor Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin has rejected the military option. However, Washington is not interested in offering easy climb-downs for uppity Europeans and may yet provoke a very reluctant France to use its veto. If France does not veto the resolution, then the Russians and Chinese almost certainly will not do so.

In fact, Chirac is probably fervently hoping that Saddam Hussein refuses to destroy the Al-Samoud 2 missiles as ordered by Blix. It would provide a great opportunity to climb down from the pole of principle up which he has climbed, and which he can't otherwise slide down because of all the other countries that followed him up there!

It's not principle if you're looking to ditch it, but it's nice to see that even those who temporarily find themselves siding with the French don't trust them.

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THE DESERVING BORED:

Is boredom bad?: Forget novelty. Trying to escape monotony makes it worse. (Roy Rivenburg, February 22, 2003, LA Times)

Curiously, boredom seems to be a modern ailment. The word didn't even exist in the English language until after 1750, says Patricia M. Spacks, author of "Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind" (University of Chicago Press, 1995). "If people felt bored before the late 18th century, they didn't know it," she writes.

Once the concept had a name, it became universal. Philosophers ruminated over it. Teenagers whined about it. And psychologists churned out a blizzard of research.

"When we are bored," one scholar concluded, "our attitude toward time is altered, as it is in some dreamlike states. Time is endless, there is no distinction between past, present and future. There seems to be only an endless present." [...]

If TV isn't driving the boredom boom, what is? Theories abound. The alleged culprits include capitalist conspiracies, the decline of Christianity, repressed emotions and the Declaration of Independence (apparently, that nonsense about the pursuit of happiness has inspired the masses to seek constant pleasure and grow restless in its absence).

A more plausible hypothesis involves the rise of leisure time. For most of history, daily survival took so much effort that people didn't have the luxury of being bored, Beaber says.

Another crucial factor was a shift from people believing boredom was their own shortcoming to believing it was caused by outside forces. The transition began in the 1800s, says Spacks, who analyzed books, letters and other literature of the period. Boredom mutated from a personal failure ("It is our own fault if we ever know what ennui is," Thomas Jefferson wrote in a 1787 letter to his daughter) to something that was inflicted by teachers, pastors, small-town life or other external influences. [...]

One way out of the trap was suggested by the late poet Joseph Brodsky in a 1989 college commencement address on the virtues of monotony. "When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom," he said. "The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface."

That's what happened to Kristen Brooks. As part of the PBS series "Frontier House," she spent several months living like an Old West pioneer in Montana -- without TV, radio, telephone or Internet.

She compares the experience to that of a drug addict going sober. "During the first month, I felt almost a craving for diversions and excitement," she says. "I think the boredom was like going through withdrawals."

Once she got past it, an amazing calm and fulfillment settled over her. "I felt like I've never felt in my life," she says. "The clutter in my mind cleared out."

She adds: "The best part was after the show ended, because I still had all that calm and tranquillity from the frontier, but now with the luxuries of the modern world -- like hot showers and being able to go out to dinner."

Brooks, 29, was so enthralled by the experience that she has become a life coach, trying to steer others toward inner harmony "without them having to sell their possessions and go live in nature."

Riding out monotony long enough to reach "the other side of boredom" isn't easy, but it can be enlightening, according to psychologists, monks, Broadway actors and others who've done it.

Instead of rushing to fill the void with a new DVD or other distraction, people should "stop and reflect on the true reason for their boredom and then take appropriate action," psychiatrist Winter writes. "We can learn and grow from it."

Anthropologist Bateson says the constant quest for novelty means people miss out on the world around them: "It's a mistake to assume things are only stimulating if they're new. If you're in a meadow filled with birds singing and plants and insects, that's a stimulating place to be even though it'll be the same tomorrow." The trick is learning to experience familiar things in new ways, she says. The person who channel-surfs through life is "like the guy who goes from one woman to another. He's never going to learn to have a sustained relationship."

I'm with Jefferson on this one though for reasons that include leisure time. It does seem likely that in the past, when subsistence required maximum effort, folks presumably worked hard enough or were exhausted enough that they had little time to contemplate themselves. We, on the other hand, don't have much to do and are stuck with ourselves most of the time. For many (most?) people that must be a disheartening experience because, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, there's no there there. They're unlikely ever to have thought deeply about anything, nor are they likely equipped to do so, neither intellectually nor educationally.

Why shouldn't it be terrifying to realize how shallow you are, how little you're made up of beyond your desires? And so folk glut themselves with drugs, alcohol, tv, the internet, whatever--anything to avoid thinking and avoid, especially, the thought of themselves.

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RACIAL SPOILS:

Blacks have good cause to oppose war in Iraq (Derrick Z. Jackson, 2/26/2003, Boston Globe)

BLACK FOLKS do not want to invade Iraq. The question for Americans is whether to view this as unpatriotic or as a tweet of sanity that warns us we are about to walk into a horrific explosion. According to a poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 44 percent of African-Americans support the use of military force in Iraq. That compares with 73 percent of white Americans. Other polls show black support to be far less.

Earlier this month, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution/Zogby America poll found that only 23 percent of African-Americans strongly or somewhat supported a war, compared with 62 percent of white Americans. In January, a Gallup poll found that 37 percent favored an invasion, compared with 58 percent of white Americans.

Back in October, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which generally does the most extensive polling of African-Americans, found that only 19 percent of African-Americans supported a war with Iraq.

The reasons are obvious. African-Americans are 12 percent of the general population but make up 21 percent of military personnel and 30 percent of Army enlistees. They made up 23 percent of the troops sent to the 1991 Gulf War. The Department of Defense recently attempted to downplay those disproportionate percentages, reporting that African-Americans were more likely to be in administrative and support jobs and therefore were less likely than white soldiers to be killed on the front lines. White soldiers made up 71 percent of the troops in the 1991 Gulf War but suffered 76 percent of the deaths. [...]

African-Americans understand that there are times when all of us are under attack. They solidly supported at least the short-term military response against the terrorists of Sept. 11. But history has also taught African-Americans to be wary. That wariness could be a warning, should Americans choose to hear it. A White House that is not committed to opportunity in Illinois must be questioned about Iraq. An America that remains comfortable with discrimination in Baltimore must be questioned as to how discriminating it will be in bombing Baghdad. An America that has not been true to black patriotism might want to question just how true the White House is to them.

A lot of white Americans may not care for affirmative action, but we all care about the economy, which Bush is all but handing over to business interests. The low enthusiasm by African-Americans for a war in Iraq might be the most patriotic act yet. It ought to be the act that makes us think what our nation is promising to the rest of the world when there are promises to keep right here.

Even setting aside the dubious proposition that blacks unfairly bear the brunt of combat Mr. Jackson seems to be writing approvingly of what one would think must be a rather troublesome standard, that it is appropriate to judge a government action by how it will affect various races. It's hard to see him writing that whites should oppose affirmative action because they'll be disproportionately harmed by it and that their opposition sends a warning that all America should heed, isn't it? Does it really not matter to him that there's a moral case for war (or against it, for that matter)? Is race all that matters in his calculations? And, if it is, why shouldn't race be determinative for the rest of us?

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SELF WORTH?:

Militant Aborigines embrace Islam to seek empowerment (Kathy Marks, 28 February 2003, Independent)

Militant young Aborigines are converting to Islam in increasing numbers, and some are flirting with the fundamentalist ideologies that have inspired recent terrorism.

There are an estimated 1,000 indigenous Muslims in Australia, including new recruits and descendants of mixed marriages. Some Aborigines are embracing Islam for spiritual reasons, but many say it gives them a sense of worth that they have lacked as members of an oppressed minority.

Somehow one doesn't normally associate elevated self-worth with suicide bombing.

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SHOCKING:

Saudi billionaire supports use of force to oust Saddam (Rowan Scarborough, February 27, 2003, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

A Saudi billionaire with close ties to the royal family in Riyadh has sent a private letter to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell endorsing the forcible removal of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

U.S. officials say the letter from hotel magnate Mohamed bin Issa Al Jaber illustrates that while the oil kingdom's rulers take the public position of opposing war, many prominent Saudis want Saddam removed by force.

"The regime of Saddam Hussein is vicious and has to be removed as a first step," Mr. Al Jaber says to Mr. Powell in the Feb. 19 letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.

"After that, reformers in other countries will take heart and the balance of power will shift to trade liberalization, democracy and human rights. Above all, the youth of the Middle East will be liberated once and for all."

Mr. Al Jaber wrote that he was "moved" by Mr. Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council in which the secretary delivered an impassioned speech on how Baghdad continues to defy U.N. edicts to disarm.

Mr. Al Jaber is one of the world's richest men and is a significant figure in Saudi society. He has business and social ties to the ruling royal family, owns businesses with assets of more than $3 billion, and operates scholarships and foundations to educate poor Arabs in prestigious schools.

You needn't like their way of doing business, but this is why the Administration feels little need to confront Saudi Arabia for its "non-cooperation"--behind the scenes they're more than happy to collaborate with us.

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HELL ON WHEELS:

What Would Satan Drive? (Jean Jennings, Automobile)

We love sport-utility vehicles. They move us and the vast stuff of our lives. They welcome our dogs and their kennels, our kayaks and bicycles built for two, our armoires and armaments. They are more convenient than renting trailers or shuttle buses. You can drive them through the woods. You can drive them through deep snow. You can see the road ahead. They just fit.

So when did sport-utility vehicles become the work of the devil?

When did it become time to repent, time to ask yourself, "What would Jesus drive, you ignorant, gas-guzzling, war-mongering, earth raper?" It's a question we've heard asked and answered in the name of the Lord so many times in the past couple of months that we've gotten a little slap-happy about it.

We may not know for sure what make of car Satan drives, but we know what's on the bumper:

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THE EXTREMIST ON THE COURT:

Racketeering Conviction of Anti-Abortion Groups Voided (LINDA GREENHOUSE, 2/27/03, NY Times)

The Supreme Court today overturned a federal racketeering judgment against a coalition of anti-abortion groups that conducted a widespread campaign of disrupting and blockading abortion clinics during the 1980's. The protesters' actions, although in some instances criminal, did not fit the federal definition of extortion that was the basis for the lawsuit against them, the court said.

The 8-to-1 decision ended a 17-year-old case that dated to the peak years of violent demonstrations at abortion clinics, when abortion providers sought a legal theory that would allow them to attack what they saw as a nationwide conspiracy to shut down their operations.

In a lawsuit brought by the National Organization for Women and two abortion clinics, they turned to the federal racketeering law and specifically to the Hobbs Act, which outlaws obstructing commerce "by robbery or extortion." Violating the Hobbs Act on at least two occasions can demonstrate a "pattern of racketeering activity" that entitles the victims to triple damages under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO.

But what happened at the clinics was not extortion, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote for the majority today. Parsing the federal definition of the crime — "the obtaining of property from another" by force, threat of force, or violence — the chief justice said that the protesters had not "obtained" the clinics' property. To obtain property, he said, meant to acquire it and not simply to deprive the lawful owner of its use. [...]

The lone dissenter today was Justice John Paul Stevens, who said the court had adopted an unduly narrow interpretation of the property right that the Hobbs Act protects. He said the statute protected "the intangible right to exercise exclusive control over the lawful use of business assets," including "the right to serve customers or to solicit new business."

"The use of violence or threats of violence to persuade the owner of a business to surrender control of such an intangible right is an appropriation of control embraced by the term `obtaining,' " Justice Stevens said.

One can't help but feel that had Scalia or Thomas been the lone dissenter in an abortion case there would be a flurry of columns about his extremism.

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HEADS WE WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE:

Strategists See Victory in Stalemate Over Nominee (CARL HULSE, February 27, 2003, NY Times)

President Bush and his fellow Republicans complain about Miguel Estrada's treatment at the hands of Senate Democrats, but some also see a political advantage for their party in the continuing fight over his nomination to an important appeals court.

Party strategists say they believe that determined Democratic resistance to a nominee of Hispanic heritage would help Republicans make inroads with a voting bloc crucial to their hold on power. And if the Honduran-born Mr. Estrada is confirmed, so much the better, these strategists say, putting Republicans in what a top Senate aide called a "win-win situation."

"I would say Republicans are on the high ground on Miguel Estrada," Senator George Allen of Virginia, chairman of National Republican Senatorial Committee, said this week as Democrats continued to oppose a vote on President Bush's nomination of Mr. Estrada to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. "I surely think it will help us with Hispanic voters." [...]

The national executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a major Hispanic membership organization that has endorsed Mr. Estrada, said he believes Hispanic voters are paying attention.

"I would be surprised if those that are engaged with this debate are not disappointed with the Democratic Party for not giving this nominee a chance to be confirmed," the director, Brent Wilkes, said. He said similar "diversity" issues have drawn traditionally Democratic Hispanic voters to Republicans in recent elections in New York and Texas.

Sergio Bendixen, a veteran Hispanic pollster in Miami who was at first uncertain what impact the issue would have on Latino voters, said he had seen an escalation of the coverage in Spanish-language news media and that Republicans might be scoring points.

Reinforcing his impression about news coverage, Cuban-American House members from Florida who joined Republican senators at a press conference this week to criticize Democrats slipped into Spanish to conclude their remarks to get their message more easily onto the Spanish-language networks.

Did it really take the Times five months to figure out that this helps Republicans? Any day now they may notice that the Trent Lott thing helped too.

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"YOU MEAN THEY REALLY BELIEVE THIS STUFF?":

Journalists' skepticism hinders religion coverage (DAVID SHAW, February 23, 2003, LA Times)

Television news programs virtually ignore religion, and even good newspapers with weekly religion pages and full-time religion writers don't consistently give religion the kind of serious attention throughout the paper that would seem warranted by the "powerful role" it plays in the lives of most Americans, says Doug Underwood, in his recent book "From Yahweh to Yahoo!: The Religious Roots of the Secular Press."

"Members of the faith community are on target," Underwood writes, "when they complain about the incapacity or the unwillingness of journalists to take seriously the importance of the spiritual dimension in the lives of so many people."

Indeed, media coverage of not just religion but also of politics, science, psychology and technology, among other subjects, would be "much better if journalists better understood the role religion plays as a motivating force in so many areas of society," says Underwood, a former reporter, who's an associate professor of communications at the University of Washington.

This is especially true now, of course, when the threat of terrorism and the seemingly intractable hostilities in the Mideast have their roots, at least partially, in religion.

Although Underwood says journalists' moral and social justice values often spring from the same motivation as those 64% of Americans who say they attend weekend worship services at least once a month, most journalists tend to be less traditionally religious.

Surveys show that Americans are among the most devout people in the world, and spirituality is routinely cited as one of the most important forces in their lives. But Robert Bellah, a professor of sociology at UC Berkeley, once told me that most journalists are "simply blind to religion. They think it's ... something only ignorant and backward people really believe in.

"This is not necessarily a conscious judgment," Bellah said, just part of most journalists' "general worldview."

How can it not be detrimental to news coverage that the people doing it don't even understand their fellow Americans' beliefs? You can especially see the shortcomings when it comes to someone very much in the public eye. How long did it take for the Press to figure out that George W. Bush's faith informs his politics--about four years? Remember when the GOP candidates were asked their favoirite philosopher and he said "Jesus Christ"? Reporters said he'd obviously been stumped by the question and just grasped at a name that would win favor on his Right? Who now doubts his answer was true? Who now thinks he has a Right?

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THE ATLANTICISTS' WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S:

Russians feel abortion's complications: Used as birth control in Soviet times, practice has led to widespread infertility (Sharon LaFraniere, February 22, 2003, Washington Post)

About 5 million -- or 13 percent -- of Russian married couples are infertile, and doctors report that diagnoses of infertility are on the rise. In nearly three out of four cases, infertility is attributed to the woman, typically because of complications from one or more abortions, according to Serov and other health experts.

The abortion rate has been declining rapidly for 15 years because of the availability of contraceptives. Still, it remains five times higher than that of the United States. The Health Ministry reports that for every live birth there are 1.7 abortions, compared with more than three births for every abortion in the United States.

A study of mid-1990s data by a group of health researchers showed Russia's abortion rate was the fourth-highest of 57 countries, after only Vietnam, Cuba and Romania.

"It's a habit, a tradition," said Serov. "It is a result of our low level of medical culture."

Russian health and demographics experts say the abortion legacy has created a problem greater than the private trauma of childless couples, because the resulting infertility contributes to a low birth rate. That trend and a soaring death rate are helping reduce Russia's population at a rapid rate.

U.N. population experts predict that in 50 years Russia will be the world's 17th-most populous country; it is now the sixth. Projections show Russia will lose more than a quarter of its population, dropping from 143 million people to 104 million by 2050.

Like other countries in Europe, Russia has been experiencing a falling fertility rate for most of the last half-century. It is now the sixth-lowest in the world, according to U.N. studies. On average, Russian women now bear just more than one child.

The two staggering numbers there are one child per couple and a near two to one rate of abortions to live births. This kind of society requires such a radical change in its culture in order to be saved that it's not sensible to believe it can happen. The problem, though most obvious in Russia, prevails across Europe and Japan and suggests that they are very nearly a lost cause. People who are insisting on the enduring importance of Europe are basically trying to prop up a corpse.

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SIMPLICITY & SILENCE:

Won't You Be My Neighbor?: At the center of Mister Rogers' cheery songs and smiles lies a God-ordained mission to children. (Wendy Murray Zoba, 3/18/00, Christianity Today)

Mister Rogers says that those in television "are chosen to be servants to help meet deeper needs." Life isn't cheap, he says. "It is the greatest mystery and we all only have one life to live on earth. Through television we can demean or cherish it.

"Life is deep and simple, and what our society gives us is shallow and complicated," he says. At its worst television can be "degrading, reducing important human feelings to the status of caricature or trivia," and even "encouraging pathology," he says.

"Television started out by attempting to bring cultural riches to its viewers, like NBC's Opera Theater. But that was before there were millions and millions of viewers. Then it became a tool for selling. I wish I knew how we could better point to all the riches of our society and how the media—television, radio, computers, magazines—could take an assignment to do our best to make goodness attractive. We're so caught up in glorifying the opposite. It is so unfair for parents to have to be so vigilant. They have so much that they have to do besides being police people."

But Mister Rogers still believes that human beings are God's vessels of mystery and beauty and he refuses to give up hope. "I have seen in my life too many indications of what is wonderful about human beings. I think the accuser would have us be so despairing that we wouldn't do anything. You know the effect of one little candlelight in great darkness. That sounds simple, but it's true.

"The older I get the more impressed I am with simplicity and silence," he says. "I do believe that that's where we can be inspired. Whenever I give a speech now I give a minute of silence for people to think about all those who have helped them to become who they are. Invariably, that's what people will remember—that silence.

"That leads me to a fishing-pole story.

"There was a conference on children and television at the White House, the East Room. The Clintons and the Gores were there. We all sat at this huge rectangular table. Different people were asked to present short thoughts. I guess mine was about seven or eight minutes. But for one of those minutes I gave a minute of silence. And when I was going out of the room I heard this voice say, 'Thank you, Mister Rogers.' I turned. It was one of the military guards, dressed in white and gold.

"I said, 'For what?'

"He said, 'For that silence.'

"I said, 'Who did you think about?'

"He said, 'I hadn't thought about him in a long time, but I thought about my grandfather's brother who, just before he died, took me to his basement and gave me his fishing pole. I've loved fishing all my life and that silence reminded me of that today.'

"The words thank you are probably the greatest words in any language."

Thank You, Mr. Rogers.

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IT'S A SAD DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD:

Fred Rogers, host of 'Mister Rogers' Neighborhood,' Dies at 74 (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, February 27, 2003)

Fred Rogers, who gently invited millions of children to be his neighbor as host of the public television show "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" for more than 30 years, died of cancer early Thursday. He was 74.

Rogers died at his Pittsburgh home, said family spokesman David Newell, who played Mr. McFeely on the show. Rogers had been diagnosed with stomach cancer sometime after the holidays, Newell said.

From 1968 to 2000, Rogers, an ordained Presbyterian minister, produced the show at Pittsburgh public television station WQED. The final new episode, which was taped in December 2000, aired in August 2001, though PBS affiliates continued to air back episodes.

Rogers composed his own songs for the show and began each episode in a set made to look like a comfortable living room, singing "It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood," as he donned sneakers and a zip-up cardigan.

His message remained a simple one throughout the years, telling his viewers to love themselves and others. On each show, he would take his audience on a magical trolley ride into the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, where his puppet creations would interact with each other and adults.

Rogers did much of the puppet work and voices himself.

The show gained a wide audience among children and parents who appreciated its simple lessons and Rogers' soothing manner.

Rogers taught children how to share, how to deal with anger and even how not to fear the bathtub by assuring them they'll never go down the drain.

Terry Gross did a nice interview with Mr. Rogers last year.

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FROG BASHING:

-AUDIO: France & The United States (Laura Knoy, 02/26/2003, The Exchange)

Their disagreement over Iraq has created huge tensions between the two countries. We’ll take a look at this sometimes-bumpy relationship with Ann Sa’adah, professor of Law and Political Science at Dartmouth College [http://www.dartmouth.edu], and Wallace Thies, professor of Politics at Catholic University of America [http://www.cua.edu] and author of the new book “Friendly Rivals”.

Suffice it to say, if you skip to around 45 minutes in, you'll hear that NPR hosts are unaccustomed to callers from Hanover being right-wing whackjobs.

Here's more on one of the points raised therein:
THE CAUSES OF THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE (III): The Constitutional and Legal Issues (Pastor Steve Wilkins' History Forum.)

Friedrich Gentz, a German historian, wrote an essay which appeared in the German Historical Journal in 1800 and was translated and republished in this
country by John Quincy Adams. The title of his essay was "The French and American Revolutions Compared." In this work Gentz shows the very different
principles upon which the War with Britain and the French Revolution operated:

"From the breaking out of this [the French] revolution the question as to the lawfulness of what the popular leaders did, was never (an extraordinary, yet an indubitable fact!) started...Thus much is certain, that the leaders of the revolution, under the shelter of this talisman [the radical doctrine of "the rights of man"] spared themselves and others the trouble of enquiring into the lawfulness of their proceedings; for in their system, all was right, which they resolved upon in the name of the people, or in the name of mankind . . ."

"The French revolution, therefore, began by a violation of rights, every step of its progress was a violation of rights, and its was never easy, until it had succeeded to establish absolute wrong, as the supreme and acknowledged maxim of a state completely dissolved, and yet existing only in bloody ruins." (The French and American Revolutions Compared, pp. 48,49,52)

By contrast Gentz notes:

"Never, in the whole course of the American revolution, were the rights of man, appealed to, for the destruction of the rights of a citizen; never was the sovereignty of the people used as a pretext to undermine the respect, due to the laws, or the foundations of social security; no example was ever seen of an individual, or a whole class of individuals, or even the representatives of this, or that single state, who recurred to the declaration of rights, to escape from positive obligation, or to renounce obedience to the common sovereign; finally, never did it enter the head of any legislator, or statesman in America to combat the lawfulness of foreign constitutions, and to set up the American revolution, as a new epocha in the general relations of civil society." (Ibid., pp. 71,72)

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THE SOUL STIRRER:

Al Vs. the Dems: Presidential Candidate Sharpton Goes After His Party (Thulani Davis, February 26 - March 4, 2003, Village Voice)

It was a sure sign that Reverend Al Sharpton's run for the presidency will bring out the worst in some folks when, last Thursday, Jay Leno, standing with the candidate and Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover girl Petra Nemcova, said he was hosting "Beauty and the Beast." Sharpton threw back his head and laughed gamely, but he is braced for a fight.

Sharpton views his campaign as a battle royal between the progressive "children of the rainbow" and the Democratic Leadership Council that brought Bill Clinton to power and turned the Democratic Party, as he says, "to the right, not the center." Presumably some rainbow children voted for Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, and facing the permanent problem that no one deals with our issues, will appreciate someone just "speaking truth to power." And a battle for the soul of the party seems even more needed now than in 1988.

It has not escaped people of color that the old arrangement of voting Democratic because the alternative is worse brings home little bacon. The past decade has only exacerbated entrenched problems of unemployment, racial profiling, police brutality, and poor access to education, medical care, and housing.

We have now been through years of the Dems' rightward drift. Though African Americans still like Bill Clinton, we suffered most heavily his compromises, like the 1994 crime bill and welfare reform in 1996. With the aftershocks so visible in our communities, it's hard to imagine black voters in particular taking hope from senators Joe Lieberman or John Kerry or Representative Dick Gephardt. [...]

AL SHARPTON: Many people who are running, in my judgment, are to the right of Republicans. And that won't even come out unless there's a real debate. I'm the only candidate who is unequivocally against the war. I'm the only one who is anti-death penalty. I'm the only one pro-gun control. I'm raising issues that none of them would have to deal with because there would be no debate. That's important, not just in terms of an Al Sharpton candidacy but in terms of, What is the Democratic Party? I think 2004 is about defining what the party is.

Despite whatever tensions we've had in the last couple of years, Jesse [Jackson] mentored me. I watched Jesse take this party to where it should go. This is a battle in 2004 of the children of the rainbow versus the DLC. I think this is what it's going to come down to, if I'm successful in what I want to do. And let's define what that is. When I was growing up in Brooklyn, I knew what a Democrat was. I don't know what a Democrat is now. Is a Democrat a pro-death-penalty, a pro-war, a pro-business deregulator?

I am asking these questions now because so often all the candidates looking for black votes show up at the last minute at our churches. One of the offensive things is what you just said, and I've been saying this to ministers all over the country. As you know, I've run for office here. I have to go in the white community and explain my positions, from the beginning. Whites run, they come by our church in the middle of the choir singing "Amazing Grace," wave at us, photo op, gone. Nobody challenges them on their positions. I don't blame the candidates; I blame that on us. We need to stop allowing our communities to be photo ops for Democrats who won't address our issues. For a party that gets 92 percent of our vote, I mean, this is ridiculous. They should be dealing with these issues across the board.

Fights for the soul of a party are often worthwhile--as in Truman vs. Thurmond & Wallace and the Goldwater showdown with Nelson Rockefeller and Reagan vs. Ford--but they seldom lead to victory (Truman and George W. Bush being the very rare exceptions).

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KNOWING YOUR ENEMY:

Liberal MP sorry for saying 'damn Americans' (Carolyn Parrish, 2/25/03, CTV.ca News)

A Liberal backbench MP has apologized for a remark she made about the United States. Carolyn Parrish was responding to reporters' questions when she was heard saying "damn Americans."

The Toronto-area Liberal MP, who is staunchly opposed to war in Iraq, had been commenting about her frustration with the American rejection of Canada's efforts to bring another UN resolution against Iraq.

As she finished a scrum with reporters outside the House of Commons, she quietly said "Damn Americans" to a nearby reporter. A nearby camera operator filmed Parrish making the remark, then smiling.

As she walked away a few seconds later after the cameras were turned off, she was heard saying "I hate those bastards." That part wasn't caught on video.

Has she ever been overheard saying that she hates Saddam Hussein?

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WHY ELECTIONS MATTER:

House Is Set to Make Cloning of Humans a Crime (SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, February 27, 2003, NY Times)

Dolly the sheep is dead, but the political controversy she engendered lives in the House of Representatives, where lawmakers are expected on Thursday to pass a bill making human cloning a crime.

The Republican-backed measure would outlaw cloning experiments — or, more precisely, the scientific procedure known as somatic cell nuclear transfer — either for baby making or medical research. Scientists who cloned human embryos would face up to 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine. The bill would also prohibit the importing of medical therapies derived from cloning research.

The bill is nearly identical to legislation that passed the House in the last Congress by more than 100 votes in July 2001, and it has the strong support of President Bush. The real question is what will happen in the Senate, where lawmakers are split over whether to ban human cloning entirely or to prohibit reproductive cloning while allowing cloning for research to proceed.

The Senate voted once, in 1998, to reject a broad cloning ban, and last year, the Democratic-controlled Senate would not take up the bill passed by the House. That will change now that Republicans are in charge.

"Our job has been made harder because of the elections," said Dan Perry, director of the Alliance for Aging Research, an advocacy group that supports cloning for medical research. Mr. Perry said he and others had been lobbying heavily to persuade lawmakers that "there is a difference between cloning a human and cloning cells in a dish that could lead to cures that save lives."

The debate over cloning is fraught with ethical issues. Should the ban pass, it would be a historic decision to criminalize a type of scientific research. "In my view, that's the equivalent of book burning," said Representative Anna G. Eshoo, a California Democrat who supports an alternative measure that would ban reproductive cloning only. The bill is sponsored by Representative James C. Greenwood, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania.

The controversy pits scientists, biotech companies and patients — who say the research holds the promise of treatments for diseases including diabetes and Alzheimer's — against conservatives and some religious leaders, who denounce experimenting on human embryos as immoral and tantamount to murder.

"We're having a debate about whether society can place any ethical limit whatever on the powers the new biology has given to us," said Richard Doerflinger, an official of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which strongly opposes cloning for any reason.

We can all probably come up with horrific childhood diseases that cloning procedures hold out cures for and tightly controlled circumstances under which we'd support limited research, but things never end there do they? The temptations to commodify human beings have already proven hard enough to resist, best nail shut this Pandora's Box.

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WHAT IS NOT PERMITTED BY WHOM?:

Morality: Who Needs God? (Rabbi Nechemia Coopersmith, Aish.com)

God's existence has direct bearing on how we view morality. As Dostoyevsky so famously put it, "Without God, everything is permitted."

At first glance, this statement may not make sense. Everything is permitted? Can't there be a morality without an infinite God?

Perhaps some of the confusion is due to a murky definition of morality we owe to moral relativism. Moral relativism maintains that there is no objective standard of right and wrong existing separate and independent from humanity. The creation of moral principles stems only from within a person, not as a distinct, detached reality. Each person is the source and definer of his or her subjective ethical code, and each has equal power and authority to define morality the way he or she sees fit.

The consequences of moral relativism are far-reaching. Since all moral issues are subjective, right and wrong are reduced to matters of opinion and personal taste. Without a binding, objective standard of morality that sticks whether one likes it or not, a person can do whatever he feels like by choosing to label any behavior he personally enjoys as "good." Adultery, embezzlement, and random acts of cruelty may not be your cup of tea -- but why should that stop someone from taking pleasure in them if that is what they enjoy. [...]

An absolute standard of morality can only stem from an infinite source. Why is that?

When we describe murder as being immoral, we do not mean it is wrong just for now, with the possibility of it becoming "right" some time in the future. Absolute means unchangeable, not unchanging.

What's the difference?

My dislike for olives is unchanging. I'll never start liking them. That doesn't mean it is impossible for my taste to change, even though it's highly unlikely. Since it could change, it is not absolute. It is changeable.

The term "absolute" means without the ability to change. It is utterly permanent, unchangeable. [...]

If everything in the finite universe is undergoing change -- since it exists within time -- where can we find the quality of absolute?

Its source cannot be in time, which is constantly undergoing change. It must be beyond time, in the infinite dimension. Only God, the infinite being that exists beyond time, is absolute and unchangeable.

'I am God, I do not change.' (Malachi 3:6)

Therefore an absolute standard of morality can exist only if it stems from an infinite dimension -- a realm that is eternal, beyond time, with no beginning and no end.

This is pretty much where we came in.

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IN DIGNITY:

Syria won't deal with US regime in Iraq: Khaddam (Agence France-Presse, February 26, 2003)

Syria will not deal with any US military governor expected to be installed in Baghdad following the overthrow of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam said on Wednesday.

"I believe that no Arab with dignity will deal with foreign occupation forces," he told Al-Riyadh newspaper when asked if Damascus would work with a US military governor in Baghdad.

The question isn't whether Mr. Khaddam will deal with the post-Saddam regime in Iraq, put how the post-Assad regime in Syria will deal with him.

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ALREADY PLANNING THE POST-SADDAM MIDDLE EAST:

Bush to say change in Iraq will have ripple effect (Steve Holland, 26 Feb 2003, Reuters)

President George W. Bush will say on Wednesday night that a change in government in Iraq will have a ripple effect in the Middle East and make it easier to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians, White House officials said.

His speech to the American Enterprise Institute comes as Arab states are angry about the prospect of war, fearing it could destabilize the already volatile Middle East and further complicate the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. His words also could send a chill down the spines of some of the non-democratic leaders in the region.

In what the White House called a big-picture speech, Bush is to lay out a vision of the region in the event war is necessary to disarm Iraq of suspected weapons of mass destruction and topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Bush will say what the future may hold not only for Iraq but also the security of the region, "because the president believes that a free Iraq will lead to a more stable Mideast."

"He'll talk about how a different Iraq will make it easier to achieve peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians," he said.

C-SPAN will broadcast the speech at 7:10pm.

MORE:
Russian Official: Country Will Back Second U.N. Resolution (Fox News)
Mexico Appears to Shift Stance on Iraq (DAFNA LINZER, Feb 26, 2003, Associated Press)

Mexico appeared to be the first among a handful of undecided U.N. Security Council members to shift toward the U.S. position on Iraq as Canada sought to find a middle ground among members split between disarming Saddam Hussein by force or giving weapons inspectors more time. [...]

The change in policy for Mexico -- one of the most outspoken supporters of continued weapons inspections instead of war, echoing French and German desires -- was first presented in a key address by Mexican President Vicente Fox on Tuesday and then outlined in a new and confidential foreign policy directive obtained by The Associated Press.

President Discusses the Future of Iraq in Speech at American Enterprise Institute (February 26, 2003, Washington Hilton Hotel, Washington, D.C.)

Rebuilding Iraq will require a sustained commitment from many nations, including our own: we will remain in Iraq as long as necessary, and not a day more. America has made and kept this kind of commitment before -- in the peace that followed a world war. After defeating enemies, we did not leave behind occupying armies, we left constitutions and parliaments. We established an atmosphere of safety, in which responsible, reform-minded local leaders could build lasting institutions of freedom. In societies that once bred fascism and militarism, liberty found a permanent home.

There was a time when many said that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values. Well, they were wrong. Some say the same of Iraq today. They are mistaken. (Applause.) The nation of Iraq -- with its proud heritage, abundant resources and skilled and educated people -- is fully capable of moving toward democracy and living in freedom. (Applause.)

The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life. And there are hopeful signs of a desire for freedom in the Middle East. Arab intellectuals have called on Arab governments to address the "freedom gap" so their peoples can fully share in the progress of our times. Leaders in the region speak of a new Arab charter that champions internal reform, greater politics participation, economic openness, and free trade. And from Morocco to Bahrain and beyond, nations are taking genuine steps toward politics reform. A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region. (Applause.)

It is presumptuous and insulting to suggest that a whole region of the world -- or the one-fifth of humanity that is Muslim -- is somehow untouched by the most basic aspirations of life. Human cultures can be vastly different. Yet the human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on Earth. In our desire to be safe from brutal and bullying oppression, human beings are the same. In our desire to care for our children and give them a better life, we are the same. For these fundamental reasons, freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred and the tactics of terror. (Applause.)

Success in Iraq could also begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace, and set in motion progress towards a truly democratic Palestinian state. (Applause.) The passing of Saddam Hussein's regime will deprive terrorist networks of a wealthy patron that pays for terrorist training, and offers rewards to families of suicide bombers. And other regimes will be given a clear warning that support for terror will not be tolerated. (Applause.)

Without this outside support for terrorism, Palestinians who are working for reform and long for democracy will be in a better position to choose new leaders. (Applause.) True leaders who strive for peace; true leaders who faithfully serve the people. A Palestinian state must be a reformed and peaceful state that abandons forever the use of terror. (Applause.)

For its part, the new government of Israel -- as the terror threat is removed and security improves -- will be expected to support the creation of a viable Palestinian state -- (applause) -- and to work as quickly as possible toward a final status agreement. As progress is made toward peace, settlement activity in the occupied territories must end. (Applause.) And the Arab states will be expected to meet their responsibilities to oppose terrorism, to support the emergence of a peaceful and democratic Palestine, and state clearly they will live in peace with Israel. (Applause.)

The United States and other nations are working on a road map for peace. We are setting out the necessary conditions for progress toward the goal of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security. It is the commitment of our government -- and my personal commitment -- to implement the road map and to reach that goal. Old patterns of conflict in the Middle East can be broken, if all concerned will let go of bitterness, hatred, and violence, and get on with the serious work of economic development, and political reform, and reconciliation. America will seize every opportunity in pursuit of peace. And the end of the present regime in Iraq would create such an opportunity. (Applause.)

In confronting Iraq, the United States is also showing our commitment to effective international institutions. We are a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. We helped to create the Security Council. We believe in the Security Council -- so much that we want its words to have meaning.

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CHARLIE MCCARTHY TO SADDAM'S EDGAR BERGEN:

CBS, White House in Dispute Over Saddam Interview (Randall Mikkelsen, February 26, 2003, Reuters)

The White House criticized CBS television on Wednesday over what a spokesman said was a spurned offer to rebut comments by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during an interview to be broadcast on Wednesday evening.

"This seems odd they wouldn't let the White House have a voice," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told Reuters.

He said the White House had offered a representative to counter what he said would be propaganda, lies and irresponsible statements by Saddam in the rare interview, but he said CBS replied it was interested only if President Bush made the response himself.

Reached for comment, Dan Rather said: "I have seen the future, and it works!"

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IS IT ALL A PLOT?:

New head of House panel says she’ll go to mat on Israel issues (Matthew E. Berger, JTA News)

When Rep. Benjamin Gilman announced he was retiring from Congress last summer, many on Capitol Hill speculated that the House of Representative’s Middle East panel would go with him.

After all, the subcommittee was created in 2001 to give Gilman a forum for his Middle East advocacy when tenure rules forced the New York Republican to turn over the gavel of the House International Relations Committee.

But the subcommittee has been saved, thanks in part to Republican efforts to court the American Jewish community. The panel’s new chair, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), says she is ready to come to the Jewish state’s defense.

“I feel great solidarity with the Israeli people,” Ros-Lehtinen told JTA last week, after leading a congressional delegation to Israel. “I treasure heading this subcommittee and will take it on with a great deal of seriousness.”

Officially entitled the House International Relations Committee’s subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia, in just two years the Mideast panel has become one of the largest forums for lawmakers to express their pro-Israel leanings.

Contrary to most House subcommittees, attendance at hearings by members of the Mideast subcommittee was impressive, with many touting their ties to Israel.

That’s the reason the subcommittee was maintained, one Democratic congressional staffer said.

“I don’t think there’s any question that the Republicans are working very hard on outreach to the Jewish community,” he said. “And this is a forum to highlight a principle objective of the Republican Party to the Jewish community.”

It seems hardly surprising that Ms Ros-Lehtinen, herself part of the Cuban Diaspora, should identify with the plight of Israel.

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LET OUR PEOPLE GO:

Americans are the chosen people (Clifford Longley, 23/02/2003, Daily Telegraph)

The first settlers to go to America from England were Protestants. They took with them the conviction that God had a unique role for England in world history. England was to be the site of the New Jerusalem, and the English stood in the steps of the ancient Israelites as God's instrument, his Chosen People. The Old Testament was not just their guide to morality. It was God's side of the bargain, telling them for instance that they could take whatever land they wanted (even if that meant turfing out the original occupants) just as the Israelites were told in the Bible they could have the Land of Canaan, and never mind the Canaanites.

By the time of the War of Independence, most Americans saw Britain as their oppressor, just as the Egyptian Pharaoh had oppressed the Israelites at the time of Moses. So the break with Britain was exactly like the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt, the working out of God's will for his new Chosen People. America was their Promised Land. "Americanism" is the belief - exactly as George W Bush displayed in his inaugural address - that God is still in charge of America's "manifest destiny". Whether we lesser mortals like it or not, the domination of the world by America, and American values, is what God wants.

The modern and more inclusive form of all this is often called "American exceptionalism". That makes it less off-putting to Jews, Italians, Irish and other non-Protestant immigrants. But it is still that original English Protestant nationalism in disguise. It has crossed the Atlantic and been given an American accent.

Now I freely admit that, even as a Catholic, many of the things America stands for, I approve of. When I was writing a book on the Chosen People phenomenon last year, I felt increasingly ambivalent - both repelled and attracted - for I belong to the generation that saw British and Americans working side by side to rescue Europe from Nazi tyranny. Without this conviction of being a nation with a unique calling from God, would America have made the enormous sacrifices? I doubt it. Without it, would America be bothering with Iraq? I doubt that too.

Whether you like what America is doing or not, it helps to know where they are coming from. America believes it has a divine mandate to lead the world. Just about oil? I don't think so.

Well, like The Man said:

Standing on the tiny deck of the Arabella in 1630 off the Massachusetts coast, John Winthrop said, “We will be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.” Well, we have not dealt falsely with our God, even if He is temporarily suspended from the classroom.

When I was born my life expectancy was 10 years less than I have already lived – that’s a cause of regret for some people in California, I know. Ninety percent of Americans at that time lived beneath what is considered the poverty line today, three-quarters lived in what is considered substandard housing. Today each of those figures is less than 10 percent. We have increased our life expectancy by wiping out, almost totally, diseases that still ravage mankind in other parts of the world. I doubt if the young people here tonight know the names of some of the diseases that were commonplace when we were growing up. We have more doctors per thousand people than any nation in the world. We have more hospitals that any nation in the world.

When I was your age, believe it or not, none of us knew that we even had a racial problem. When I graduated from college and became a radio sport announcer, broadcasting major league baseball, I didn’t have a Hank Aaron or a Willie Mays to talk about. The Spaulding Guide said baseball was a game for Caucasian gentlemen. Some of us then began editorializing and campaigning against this. Gradually we campaigned against all those other areas where the constitutional rights of a large segment of our citizenry were being denied. We have not finished the job. We still have a long way to go, but we have made more progress in a few years than we have made in more than a century.

One-third of all the students in the world who are pursuing higher education are doing so in the United States. The percentage of our young Negro community that is going to college is greater than the percentage of whites in any other country in the world.

One-half of all the economic activity in the entire history of man has taken place in this republic. We have distributed our wealth more widely among our people than any society known to man. Americans work less hours for a higher standard of living than any other people. Ninety-five percent of all our families have an adequate daily intake of nutrients -- and a part of the five percent that don't are trying to lose weight! Ninety-nine percent have gas or electric refrigeration, 92 percent have televisions, and an equal number have telephones. There are 120 million cars on our streets and highways -- and all of them are on the street at once when you are trying to get home at night. But isn't this just proof of our materialism -- the very thing that we are charged with? Well, we also have more churches, more libraries, we support voluntarily more symphony orchestras, and opera companies, non-profit theaters, and publish more books than all the other nations of the world put together.

Somehow America has bred a kindliness into our people unmatched anywhere, as has been pointed out in that best-selling record by a Canadian journalist. We are not a sick society. A sick society could not produce the men that set foot on the moon, or who are now circling the earth above us in the Skylab. A sick society bereft of morality and courage did not produce the men who went through those year of torture and captivity in Vietnam. Where did we find such men? They are typical of this land as the Founding Fathers were typical. We found them in our streets, in the offices, the shops and the working places of our country and on the farms.

We cannot escape our destiny, nor should we try to do so. The leadership of the free world was thrust upon us two centuries ago in that little hall of Philadelphia. In the days following World War II, when the economic strength and power of America was all that stood between the world and the return to the dark ages, Pope Pius XII said, “The American people have a great genius for splendid and unselfish actions. Into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind.”

We are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on earth.

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THREE FUN NOTES:

ARIZONA SENATE: Is This A Flake-y Idea? (Campaign Tip Sheet, 2/25/03, Hotline)

Rep. Jeff Flake (R-06) said 2/25 that his thinking of challenging Sen. John McCain (R) in the GOP primary. Flake: "At least in a Republican primary, ideas would be debated. More debate than you would get from a Democratic candidate. That's a party bereft of ideas." Flake said he will make a decision this summer. Flake's remarks came as AZ Dem chair Jim Pederson said that McCain "may have more of a challenge in his own primary." Pederson said there were "too many other priorities for" AZ Dems in '04 and "too little hope of much help from the national party to help fund an uphill race against McCain." But Pederson said a "well-funded conservative" GOPer like Flake or others "could cause some problems for McCain in a primary." [...]

CALIFORNIA SENATE: Could The GOP Look To A Latino To Challenge Boxer?

Island Valley Daily Bulletin's Drucker reports, "The name of" Sen. Barbara Boxer's (D) "opponent in her re-election bid this year could be as close as a ten-or twenty dollar bill." That's because U.S. Treas. Rosario Marin, "whose signature appears on the nation's currency, is being mentioned as a dark horse candidate by some party faithful." And Main's 2/21 address to the CA GOP Convo "did nothing to discourage them, containing all the elements of a stump speech except a declaration of her candidacy." Marin chastised Senate Dems "for threatening to kill with a filibuster Miguel Estrada's nomination" to the DC Court of Appeals. Marin, in an interview following her address to the convo, "sidestepped when pressed on her interest in challenging Boxer next year." Marin: "You never ever say 'never' to anything. I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow; I know what I need to do today. I'm so concentrated on doing my job today, what will happen tomorrow, God only knows." [...]

Forget '06 For Rice, What About This Year Post-Recall?

CNN's Novak: "Well, there's important people in California who would like Dr. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser to the president, to run for the Senate next year against Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer -- no stronger candidate against Boxer. But she doesn't -- Dr. Rice doesn't want to be a senator. What I'm told by good sources, however, what she might like to be is governor of California, running for an open seat for governor in 2006. It's a possibility" ("IP," 2/25).

Nothing would give conservatives greater satisfaction than taking down McCain. Nothing would give people with functioning brains greater pleasure than to remove the Senator who doesn't have one. Nothing would be better for the GOP's image than a black woman governor of California, who'd then be the leading contender for VP in 2008, assuming W doesn't tab her in '04.

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ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK:

Islam Says Otherwise (Muqtedar Khan, February 16, 2003, Washington Post)

Mr. bin Laden, in the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Benevolent, [...]

I am writing this to make clear that there are Muslims in America and in the world who despise and condemn extremists and have nothing to do with you, and those like you, for whom killing constitutes worship.

Islam was sent as mercy to humanity and not as an ideology of terror or hatred. It advocates plurality and moral equality of all faiths (Quran 2:62, 5:69). To use Islam to justify declaring Armageddon against all non-Muslims is inherently un-Islamic -- it is a despicable distortion of a faith of peace.

One of Allah's 99 names in the Quran is "Al Salam," which means "peace." Thus, in a way, Muslims are the only people who actually worship peace. Today this claim sounds so empty, thanks to people like you, Mr. bin Laden. You and those like you are dedicated to killing and bringing misery to people wherever they are. God blessed you with the capacity to lead and also endowed you with enormous resources. You could have used your influence in Afghanistan to develop it, to bring it out of poverty and show the world what Islam can do for those who believe in it. You chose to provoke and bring war to a people who had already been devastated by wars.

Yes, many innocent people lost their lives in America's war on Afghanistan and many more might lose their lives in Iraq. This is indeed regrettable. But we must never forget that the West is divided and agonizing over this decision to go to war in Iraq. While many Americans and Europeans oppose the war, Muslim nations have already agreed to cooperate in this war. No Muslim leader has tried to play the role of a statesman on this issue. It is a tragedy that there is not a single Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter or Nelson Mandela in the entire Muslim world who would stand up and speak for justice!

While opposition to al Qaeda from within Islam is obviously a good thing, this raises questions about the quality of that opposition. Producing a Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter or Nelson Mandela will hardly be an improvement.

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AFRICAN REALPOLITIK:

Forget the Peace Rhetoric, EA Must Back Bush (Martin Mbugua Kimani, February 25, 200, The East African)

Every Hollywood movie has this scene because it works so well: a child holding a teddy bear is shown in a moment of light-hearted play with no inkling that lurking nearby is a monster/ terrorist/ vampire. It is clear that the child stands for good and that around the corner is an evil that must be opposed.

It is this desire for a dramatic clarity between good and evil that both sides in the debate on Iraq seek to invoke. In the media, the question has been framed in a seemingly simple, logical fashion: Either you are with the Americans who are for war or with France and Germany who are for peace.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. What we are seeing is a referendum on the doctrine of pre-emptive action; how to confront anti-Western states pursuing weapons that threaten a pro-Western status quo and, most importantly for Europe, how to contain US hyperpower. If East Africa is to have a meaningful voice in the debate, we need to consider these questions with our self-interest in mind.

To begin with, it is in our interest to limit the spread of chemical and biological weapons. They are cheap force multipliers and are of greatest effect when used against civilian centres. As the largest economy in the region, it is to our strategic advantage if potential foes have to go to the greater expense of building up a conventional arsenal since we can outspend them. This deters ambitions of challenging us militarily and gives us time to build our nations in peace. (I am not suggesting that we are about to go to war with our neighbours, God forbid, but only by being strong can we ensure our peace.)

What do we want from the world and how does this inform the way we engage with it? To mention just a few: We want unfettered access to prosperous markets for our products, cheap oil since we are importers, regional peace since the alternative disables foreign investment and tourism, and a defeat of the major terrorist networks that have killed so many of us. [...]

Finally, on to the matter of the French who, by threatening to veto a second UN resolution on Iraq have donned superhero-for-peace costumes. Their empathy for the little girl with the doll has not always been in evidence - just think of the long parade of African Big Men they have propped up in the past. I mention this not to demonise a people who make really fine wines, but to illustrate the barrenness of morality plays in international relations.

Now that their influence has been on the wane for a century, the old European powers have learned the benefits of multilateralism; it allows them a chance to roll back American power and remain relevant. In school, we used to call it being taken shiko - when some guy studied all night and yet lied to you, saying that he had been at the Carnivore instead. European support for international law is a cynical play for power in a moral guise, let's recognise it as such.

It is probably a good thing to oppose unilateral American action since it can run amok and increase the global insecurity that is so disadvantageous for us. But in the particular case of Iraq, and the overall fight against terrorism, we need to understand that after September 11, the US will pursue its goal of seeking security with or without European help. By siding strongly with it and not with that large camp of doves, we raise our profile in America. To those willing to go America's way when the rest are headed in the opposite direction comes money - just ask Israel and Egypt.

Good to see a man who knows which side his toast is buttered on.

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LET'S ATONE FOR OUR SINS:

Iraq's U.S. arsenal: Complicity of firms in Saddam's crimes against humanity now well-documented (Paul Rockwell , Metro San Jose)

We now know who supplied Saddam Hussein with materials of mass destruction and where his military regime, notorious for atrocities against Iraqis, Iranians and Kurds, acquired helicopters, germs and lethal chemicals--an arsenal of terror. Iraq acquired its weapons of mass destruction from, among others, the United States and Britain--the very countries preparing all-out war to disarm Iraq.

In December, in the long-awaited 11,000-page report to the United Nations Security Council, an Iraq Weapons Inventory listed more than 150 foreign companies, including European and U.S. companies, that allegedly supplied Saddam Hussein with deadly and dual-use material.

Hoping to downplay its own culpability in Iraq's past war crimes, the U.S. reportedly suppressed the list of firms that contributed to Saddam's arsenal, but the dossier was leaked to a German newspaper, Die Tageszeitung, which published it. More information trickled onto the back pages of The New York Times and the Washington Post. The main facts are no longer in dispute.

The U.S. companies listed, some of which have facilities in Silicon Valley, include Spectra Physics, Honeywell, Dupont, Eastman Kodak, Bechtel, Tektronix, Unisys, Rockwell and Hewlett-Packard. They allegedly provided materials for Iraq's rocket program, planned nuclear weapons program and conventional weapons program, which includes military logistics as well as supplies and materials for building weapons plants.

The complete list included 24 companies with home bases in the United States, along with 50 subsidiaries of foreign companies that conducted their arms business with Iraq from within U.S. borders.

In addition to these companies, another group designated in the report as Iraq's arms suppliers includes the U.S. Ministries of Defense, Energy, Trade and Agriculture, as well as Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia National laboratories.

The article in Die Tageszeitung reported that German involvement with Iraq outstripped that of all other countries combined. The newspaper reported that Siemens had sold Baghdad at least eight sophisticated medical machines used to destroy kidney stones in patients, but which also contain switches that can be used as detonators for atomic bombs.

Great, so we're all agreed that Saddam has these weapons--now let's make up for past mistakes by going and taking them away, right?

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ALL OF THESE THINGS ARE JUST LIKE THE OTHERS:

AIDS vaccine mostly a failure: It helps some groups but doesn't work across the board (Tom Abate, February 24, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle)

A disappointed and puzzled Brisbane biotech firm announced Sunday that its experimental AIDS vaccine failed to protect white and Latino volunteers against HIV infections, while inexplicably shielding two-thirds of the black, Asian and other non-Latino minority participants.

Officials of VaxGen planned to hold a briefing this morning to elaborate on the unexpected results of the company's three-year study of an experimental vaccine tested primarily on gay men in the United States and Europe.

VaxGen vice president for research Phillip Berman, who began work on the vaccine in 1984, put the best spin on the divided findings.

"This is the first time we have specific numbers to suggest that a vaccine has prevented HIV infection in humans," Berman said, adding "we're not sure yet why certain groups have a better immune response."

As the world's largest and most advanced AIDS vaccine study, VaxGen's clinical trial has been closely watched by researchers worldwide looking for ways to blunt an epidemic that has claimed about 25 million lives since AIDS was first recognized in the early '80s.

Now scientists must figure out why, among the 4,511 white and Latino volunteers, the infection rates were virtually the same among those who received the vaccine and those who took the placebo.

However, among the 314 blacks in the study, those who received the vaccine were 78 percent less likely to contract HIV than those in the placebo group. When another 184 Asian and other non-Latino minority volunteers were added to the African American category, the effectiveness of the vaccine declined slightly to 67 percent -- a figure that still impressed UCSF AIDS researcher Tom Coates.

As the recent discussion here about racial intelligence differences suggested, even normally sensible people have an enormous emotional investment in the fanciful notion that race is merely a socialk construct, rather than a physical reality. But commentators of both the Left and the Right have noted how tortured and politically-correct the write ups on this study have been, merely one more example of how science/medicine has been corrupted by politics.

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WE NEED A TONKIN GULF:

N. Korea says U.S. invaded air space: U.S. denies intelligence flight violated air space (The Associated Press, 2/24/03)

North Korea said yesterday that an American reconnaissance plane intruded into its air space on a spying mission.

"This is a premeditated move to find an opportunity to mount a pre-emptive attack on the DPRK," said the North's official Korean Central News Agency. (DPRK stands for Democratic People's Republic of Korea.)

Hopefully someone at the Pentagon is working on manufacturing a pretext so that we can go in there and bomb the nuclear and missile facilities.

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IS IT ISLAM OR ARABISM?:

The arc of moderate Islam, (Tom Rose, Feb. 20, 2003, Jerusalem Post)

Just as many in the West seemed to be resigning themselves to the inexorable force of militant Islam, six Muslim nations convened in the Republic of Kazakhstan last week to break bread with Jewish leaders from the United States.

Israelis seemed transfixed last weekend by two televised images. In Europe, millions of demonstrators choked the streets of nearly every capital to protest US threats to disarm Saddam Hussein. And in Mecca, millions of Muslim pilgrims concluded the annual Haj with repeated chants of "Murder the Jews" and "Death to America."

These taken together, the average viewer would be forgiven for thinking that militant Islam is an unstoppable force - and that the West lacks the will to confront it.

But something else happened last weekend. Far away from international media centers, in the sleepy capital of the newly independent Muslim Republic of Kazakhstan, representatives of six Muslim nations, including three presidents and three foreign ministers, convened to condemn militant Islam, showcase their moderation and encourage greater interaction with the West.

To make their point, they invited a delegation from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to take part in the summit as full participants. Just as many in the West seemed resigned to the inexorable force of militant Islam, six Muslim states were breaking bread with Jewish leaders from the United States.

Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbaev hosted an event he called "The International Conference on Peace and Accord." Seated around Nazarbaev's long horseshoe table inside the grand and gilded "Golden Hall" state room were the presidents of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Afghanistan. With them sat Mortimer Zuckerman, chairman of the President's Conference and publisher of the New York Daily News, US News and World Report magazine, and former US senator Rudy Boschwitz. [...]

In Kazakhstan, nearly 45% of the country 16 million citizens are non-Muslim, including about 30,000 Jews. Avraham Berkowitz, the executive director of the Federation of Jewish Communities of the Commonwealth of Independent States points out that "Kazakhstan is the only Muslim country strongly encouraging Jewish life. Right now, there are 20 synagogues being built across the country, paid for by the state. The government is helping Jewish schools, providing security to Jewish institutions and working to improve relations with Israel."

True or not, Kazakh President Nazarbaev, regularly admonished by human-rights groups for cracking down on political opponents, sees the development of strong ties with Israel and American Jewry as the key to better relations with Washington and faster access to the Western capital he needs to develop his country's natural resources.

"The faster he can deliver that wealth," says [Richard] Perle, "the stronger a bulwark his country can become against militant Islam. If he thinks that the road to Washington goes through Jerusalem, all the better."

Indeed, in addition to extending his offer to negotiate the return of Israeli soldiers kidnapped and held by Hizbullah, Nazarbaev announced that he would allow coalition forces to use Kazakh airspace and facilities in a campaign to disarm Iraq. He made that announcement while on a highly publicized state visit to neighboring India, the purpose of which was to better coordinate the two nations' anti-terrorist campaigns.

"That these nations remain largely unknown," says Perle, "is both a failure and an opportunity. Not only are these states not pursuing sharia [Islamic law], they are leading the fight against it. The opportunity they present is that they will soon provide the living proof that moderate Islamic societies are able to realize real social and political development. The failure is that we have not done our job helping these countries to deliver that example already. If we wait much longer, it may be too late."

If non-Arab Muslim states begin to develop close ties with the West, even with Israel (as Turkey has), then the Arab Middle East ends up extraordinarily isolated as well as surrounded. Don't its leaders--especially the kings in Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Hosni Mubbarak in Egypt--have to deal with that at some point?

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GO RIGHT, YOUNG MAN:

Parents say no to 'gay' agenda in schools: Poll: 71% oppose 'normalizing' homosexual relationships (World Net Daily, 2/21/03)

A new survey shows parents don't want their children taught "it's O.K. to be 'gay'" at school.

Seventy-one percent of parents responding to a poll conducted nationally said they opposed sex education programs that teach students that homosexual love relationships are comparable to heterosexual relationships.

The poll of over 1,200 parents of K-12 students was conducted by Zogby International and released Feb. 13.

It's a curious thing but the harder edged the Republicans are ideologically, the better they do--Reagan, George H.W. Bush vs. Dukakis, The Contract in 1994, George W. Bush--and the more moderate the worse they do--Ford, George H.W. Bush in 1992, Dole, Congress in 1996 and 1998, yet still many of them shy away from social issues. Half the Party gets the vapors if anyone talks about abortion or homosexuality, but there's no evidence that adhering to conservative positions on such issues hurts at all and much that it helps.

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DEFEATISM:

Kerry Leading New Hampshire; Dean, Gephardt and Lieberman Distant Followers; 63% of Dems Say Bush Likely to be Re-elected, According to Zogby Poll (Zogby, February 25, 2003)

Weekend polling of likely New Hampshire voters in next January's first in the nation Democratic Presidential primary has Massachusetts Senator John Kerry with a strong lead (26%) over his next band of challengers, former Vermont governor Howard Dean (13%), Missouri Congressman Richard Gephardt (11%), and Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman (9%). No other contender polled more than 2%. Nearly three in ten (29%) remain undecided. [...]

Bush's job performance took a beating by Democrats in the Granite State, compared to recent national Zogby numbers: nearly three fourths of those
surveyed (74%) rated his job performance as fair or poor, while 26% said is was good or excellent. Four days earlier (February 20-21) on a national basis, 962 likely voters of all parties gave him a 57% good/excellent and 42% fair/poor.

Nonetheless, nearly two out of three (63%) Democratic and Independent likely primary voters in the New Hampshire poll said is was somewhat (44%) or very (19%) likely that Bush would be re-elected.

This may very well be the low point, politically, of the Bush presidency--with the economy floundering and anti-war forces at their peak, yet a large majority of Democrats expect him to be re-elected. When your own rank and file is that dispirited it's very hard to get them fired up to work on campaigns, contribute, etc., and, as the war and the economy turn around, it's only going to get worse.

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THE DEER HUNTERS:

Filibusted - Democratic Opposition to Estrada Will Backfire
(Marcelo Rodriguez, Feb 25, 2003, Pacific News Service)

Though Latinos have traditionally leaned toward the Democratic Party, PNS Associate Editor Marcelo Rodriguez says an attempt by Democrats to derail the nomination of a mildly conservative Latino appeals court appointee could begin to tip the scales the other way.

Success in politics is ultimately the aggregation of a lot of little things. And when it comes to Hispanics, President George W. Bush has two crafty little victories to his credit. Each makes it look as though he and the Republicans, more than the Democrats, have the interests of Hispanics at heart.

The first was in 2002, when Bush adopted provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that allowed commercial Mexican trucks to operate within the United States. Democrats, in their die-by-the-sword actions on behalf of job-protecting unions, resorted to ethnically charged accusations about the safety records of Mexican trucks and their drivers.

The second is happening now. By filibustering Bush's appointment of Miguel Estrada to the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., Senate Democrats -- along with several legal rights groups such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) that support the filibuster -- are playing right into Bush's hands.

The Democrats lost Bill Nelson today. Significantly, the Senator from Florida has decided he's alienating his large population of Latino voters. Bob Graham, his FL colleague, will announce which way he's going when he decides whether he's running for president or not. If he is, he'll join the filibuster. If not, he'll back Estrada. The politics of that seem fairly obvious, but apparently they aren't to Tom Daschle and company.

Meanwhile, Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch said today that starting Friday the Democrats will have to go 24/7 to keep the filibuster going. How'd you like to be the Democrat picked to hold the floor at 3am on Saturday morning, making sure there's no vote on a Hispanic judge? Think that's why folks joined the party?

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BUYING THEM THE ROPE:

France and faith -- arcane twist (Uwe Siemon-Netto, February 25, 2003, UPI)

Although church and state are more rigidly separated in France than even in the United States, a succession of French governments has arm-twisted seven Islamic federations into launching an umbrella organization called French Council of Muslim Faith.

Its members will be chosen in congregational elections April 6 and 13. There are approximately 1,500 mosques in France, where the number of Muslims is estimated at 4 million to 5 million.

In December, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy expressed the hope that the umbrella organization would lead to the emergence of "a French Islam with French-speaking imams" supporting "values commensurate with the values of the Republic."

This is indeed the new council's most important task, according to Bruno Guideroni, a prominent Muslim scholar and research director at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics. At present, each of France's seven Muslim organizations is linked to a different foreign country -- and financed by it.

One is loyal to Algeria, another pays allegiance to Morocco, and a third one receives funds from the Gulf States. One is tied to Turkey and one to African nations. Yet another one is close to Pakistan's hard-line "madrasas," or Koranic schools.

This is not healthy, Guiderdoni told United Press International Tuesday. Tariq Ramadan, a Geneva-based scholar who has spent the last years trying to persuade Muslims in French-speaking countries to become loyal and active citizens in their respective nations, is pleading for their independence from foreign influences. [...]

Given the otherwise sharp separation between the secular and the spiritual realms in France, it seems ironic that the government is literally urging the Muslims to hurry up in establishing their equivalent to the Catholic, Protestant or Jewish "institutes," which are religious universities in all but name.

Though the state does not recognize their diplomas, master's degrees or doctorates, it supports these "institutes" financially, justifying this with their cultural accomplishments. Comparatively, you don't have to be Protestant or even a believer to attend the Protestant Institute of Paris and Montpellier. You can do so out of pure intellectual curiosity; thus the state does not favor any particular religion with its generosity.

At any rate, it'll save the Muslims the bother of establishing Islam when they take over the government.

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THERE'S YOUR LIBERAL TALK RADIO HOST:

MSNBC axes Phil Donahue (AP, February 25, 2003)

MSNBC fired Phil Donahue on Tuesday, abruptly ending the veteran talk show host's return to television after six months of poor ratings. [...]

The move was not a surprise. MSNBC hoped "Donahue" would provide a liberal counterweight to Fox News Channel's competing "The O'Reilly Factor," but the ratings started poorly and didn't improve. [...]

The political talk show format has yet to prove -- and may never -- that it can support a liberal voice, said Andrew Tyndall, head of ADT Research, a television news consulting firm.

As the great Yogi Berra once said: "If the fans don't come out to the ball park, you can't stop them."

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TONY THE TORY WATCH:

Labour 'Rebels' to Embarrass UK's Blair Over Iraq (Andrew Cawthorne, February 25, 2003, Reuters)

British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Wednesday faces potentially the biggest rebellion yet from within his ruling Labour Party in a parliamentary debate over his pro-American hawkish stance on Iraq.

Up to 100 of Labour's total 410 legislators (MPs) in the British parliament's lower chamber are backing an amendment -- for what is bound to be a fiery debate -- stating that "the case for military action against Iraq is yet unproven."

It is one of three "anti-war" amendments put forward by Labour "rebels" and opposition Liberal Democrats determined to embarrass Blair, who is staunchly backing U.S. leader George W. Bush's hard line against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. [...]

Fortunately for Blair, while up to a quarter of his own party legislators are rebelling, the opposition Conservative Party -- which took Britain into conflict with Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War -- are backing him.

We continue toi believe that the next Tory Prime Minister of Britain will be Tony Blair.

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IT'S A DIRTY JOB, BUT...:

Rocket that could strike at the heart of Israel (James Bone, February 26, 2003, Times of London)

THE missile at the centre of the looming showdown between Iraq and the United Nations may be part of an ambitious secret project to develop a much longer-range missile that could hit Tehran or Tel Aviv, UN and independent missile experts believe.

The specifications of the al-Samoud 2 missile appear to have been designed so that it could be fitted with a second engine, making it a much more potent threat than previously realised, the experts have told The Times. [...]

Dr Blix's inspectors have said that the al-Samoud 2 flew over the maximum permitted range of 150km in only 13 of 40 test flights, reaching a maximum distance of 183km.

But experts say that the specifications of the al-Samoud 2 and its use of a Russian-designed Volga SA2 engine suggest that Iraq might be trying to develop a missile with a much longer range that could threaten the entire region.

One of the most compelling reasons to take out Saddam ourselves, even though he does not pose any serious threat to us, has always been because we are the world's great nation at the moment and it would be craven of us to leave the dirty work to the Israelis, who would have to act because he's obviously a threat to them.

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THE TWAIN SHALL MEET:

Iran Signs Defence Pact with India against Pakistan: Deafening Silence in Islamabad over Biggest Foreign Policy Setback (Shaheen Sehbai, 2/24/03, South Asia Tribune)

Pakistan is stunned. The intense shrill of silence is deafening. Not even the free media is talking about the issue which is by far the most staggering failure of not only General Pervez Musharraf but the entire military establishment. Apparently the elected political leadership has also been told not to touch the issue, not to raise national security concerns.

No official spokesman, from General Musharraf to PM Jamali to Information Minister Sheikh Rashid to Major General Rashid Qureshi to Foreign Office's Aziz Khan, have yet provided the nation any explanation of how and why the brotherly, Islamic nation and a trusted friend and ally of Pakistan, Iran, has turned into a strategic partner and military ally of India, and shockingly and publicly so, against Pakistan.

The latest word on this sensitive subject has come from world renowned Jane's Defence Weekly, the authentic voice on strategic and defence matters. And all JDW could say in its latest issue was that Pakistan "was expected to respond to the signing of India's recent accord with Iran, which would allow India the use of Iranian military bases in the event of any outbreak of tensions with Pakistan." Can any one believe that this agreement was signed more than one month ago and no one has yet been able to respond in Islamabad.

What has gone wrong with Pak-Iran relations? Iranian President just recently visited Pakistan but while he was in Islamabad, Indian and Iranian officials were finalizing the text of the defence pact under which India can now use Iranian land and air space and military bases against Pakistan. So what was General Musharraf talking about with the Iranian President? Did he indicate that his country was ready to sign a military pact against Pakistan? What did General Musharraf say to him? What has annoyed Teheran so much that the country which once allowed Pakistan to park most of its air force and PIA aircraft during a war with India, is now ready to provide the same facility to Pakistan's enemies?

According to the Jane's Defence Weekly the Indo-Iran "pact had shifted the strategic balance in South Asia and looked very much like an encirclement of Pakistan by India." Following the pact "pressure on Pakistan's defences would be almost overwhelming," the magazine said.

It's hard to believe that Pakistan--with its al Qaeda remnants, rising Islamicism, and inherent instability--won't have to be dealt with at some point. The network of alliances between Israel, Turkey, India, Iran, Russia, and America leaves Pakistan completely surrounded if that reckoning does come.

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CONSERVATIVE, AS IN EVIL (via Alastair):

-INTERVIEW: The greening of hate (Fred Pearce, New Scientist)

The poor are to blame for environmental decline because they have been putting their own ecosystems under intolerable population pressure. That's the hidden ideology of far too many environmentalists in the US who really should know better, says Betsy Hartmann, a radical feminist and academic. So much for the "green on the outside, red on the inside" label that's often hung round eco-campaigners; some conservationists, she told Fred Pearce recently, are the new conservatives

Q: What do you think is going on among environmentalists? Is the right wing taking over?

A: I first realised that the right wing was attempting to penetrate the mainstream environment movement when I sat on a panel at an environmental meeting in the University of Oregon in 1994. Beside me was a professor and environmentalist, Virginia Abernethy of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. She seemed to me to blame immigrants for overpopulating our country and destroying our environment. Some of the audience liked her ideas but I thought they were racist.

I started to investigate and found she wasn't alone among conservationists. She was a leader of the group called the Carrying Capacity Network, which sounds like a benign environmental organisation but its main campaign is to halt what it calls mass migration to the US. They blame migrants for destroying pristine America. For instance, they blame Mexican migrants for starting fires in national forests near the border. This group has prominent environmental scientists on its advisory board. People like biologist Tom Lovejoy, the green economist Herman Daly and the ecologist David Pimental. I call this the greening of hate.

Q: It sounds like a conspiracy theory

A: Well, it seems to me that the anti-immigration movement in the US has a strong green wing. For instance, they formed a group within the Sierra Club - a prominent nature protection organisation - trying to push it into a policy of immigration restriction and population reduction. Abernethy has spoken at conferences of the right wing Council of Conservative Citizens. And some of these people are getting funding from groups such as the Pioneer Fund, whose aims, as set out in its charter, are to fund research into genetics and study into "the problems of human race betterment". [...]

Q: Where did the environment come into your thinking on population?

A: I got concerned that conflicts over resources such as forests and land were being framed so that population pressure was seen as the main culprit. A variety of groups, including foundations that fund population work, were linking population and environment issues directly to national security. This seemed like a dangerous mix, especially when it got tied up with the growing anti-immigrant movement in the US, and maybe now in Europe, too.

Q: But isn't population pressure a real environmental issue?

A: It's more than an issue, it's an ideology. Ever since colonial times, Westerners have had what I call a degradation narrative. It says that poor peasants having too many children causes population pressures that degrade the environment and cause more poverty. It is the basic story that many Western environmentalists still tell. And it is now being extended to explain not just the loss of rainforests and species, but also migration and violent conflicts round the world.

Q: You say that this degradation narrative is being used to explain foreign policy disasters. How?

A: From Afghanistan to Gaza to El Salvador to Indonesia to Somalia, some prominent environmentalists have blamed disorder on resource depletion and environmental decay. And foreign policy people have gone along with it. When the slaughter happened in Rwanda in 1994 and the rest of the world stood by and did nothing, we heard a lot about how it was inevitable because of the high population density that was causing land shortages and poverty. Even Timothy Wirth, Clinton's undersecretary of state for global affairs and widely seen as an environmental good-guy, said it. But even some of the theorists behind these ideas, such as Thomas Homer-Dixon, a writer on environmental and security issues, have acknowledged it wasn't really like that. The massacres started where population pressure was least. It was about state-instigated racism, not environmental degradation. It's not that population is always irrelevant, it is just that it gets overemphasised. Blaming poor peasants for deforestation is like blaming conscripts for wars. [...]

Q: But even so, isn't it obvious that more people will cause more environmental damage?

A: Not necessarily. In Brazil, it's often the least populated areas that get trashed - by miners and loggers and cattle ranchers. And in certain contexts population pressure spurs innovation and better farming methods. The economist Julian Simon had a point when he said it provides more brains to think and hands to work as well as more mouths to feed.

Q: As a feminist, you don't sound like a natural supporter of Simon. Ronald Reagan used his ideas to justify his policies against abortion and birth control in the 1980s, didn't he?

A: Yes, I'm not a supporter of Simon. I disagree with his unbridled faith in the free market. But he was not against birth control. He was just a libertarian. People like Simon on the libertarian right have often had better positions on population control than the liberal population establishment, who were often afraid to speak out against coercion and sometimes actively supported it.

Q: Do average Americans buy these ideas?

A: I find even well-educated and well-meaning acquaintances have alarming responses on population issues. They believe the poor create their own problems by breeding, and it absolves the rest of us from responsibility. Even some committed feminists will scapegoat poor women's fertility for the planet's evils. It is a kind of ideological schizophrenia. Phrases like the population bomb and the population explosion breed racism. Few Americans know that, on average, woman round the world have less than three children each. They don't breed like rabbits. And by 2050 a majority of the world's population will be likely to live in countries with fertility levels below what demographers regard as replacement levels. It all avoids looking at the real issues on our own doorstep - of over-consumption, for instance. On climate change, we hype up fears of rising emissions in "overpopulated" India rather than looking at our own consumption patterns. Better a one-child policy there than a one-car policy here. We don't understand that communities all over the world can and do live in sustainable relationships with their environments.

Q: You've claimed that the military is also taking up environmentalism.

A: After the cold war, people were looking for a new political agenda, maybe a new enemy. Along came Robert Kaplan, who wrote a long and influential article called "The coming anarchy" in Atlantic Monthly. It painted a really frightening picture of overpopulation and environmental degradation causing violence and a breakdown of order in Africa. It was to me very racially charged, but it captured the imagination of the liberal establishment. Some of the influential people in the environment movement in the US just loved Kaplan's work. They saw it could raise environmental issues into the high politics of national security. And they were flattered when in 1996 the US National Security Strategy said that "large-scale environmental degradation, exacerbated by rapid population growth, threatens to undermine political stability in many countries". But they were engaging in all sorts of scaremongering images of the Third World. It makes the victims of the modern world into its villains, and encourages policies that attack them and their livelihoods.

Q: For example?

A: At the height of the Zapatista rebellion in the Chiapas region of Mexico in the late 1990s, some environment and security people argued that population pressure was causing deforestation and this environmental decay was in turn the cause of the conflict there. Of course it was much more complex. You might equally argue that Mexican land policies forced the poor to farm in the forests because there was no effective land reform or other economic alternatives. Recently, it has been alleged that that a US-based conservation group working in the region colluded with the Mexican military, helping them identify communities in the forest so they could be removed.

Q: How did that happen?

A: Many environment groups in the US have very little knowledge of international development issues. They buy into things like Chiapas because they don't know any differently. And the imagery is very seductive. Several friends and I have been looking at the imagery used, often subconsciously, to create fear about particular threats, especially in the environment movement. For instance, look at how the Ebola virus encapsulates a lot of fears about Africa and migration. And how the ideas of ecologists about invasive species - alien species as they are often called - sound so similar to anti-immigration rhetoric. Green themes like scarcity and purity and invasion and protection all have right-wing echoes. Hitler's ideas about environmentalism came out of purity, after all.

This is one of the most vile and dishonest things you'll ever read. Ms Hartmann offers chapter and verse on how liberals and evironmental activists are hostile to immigration and population growth, but says that these themes are conservative? It seems hardly necessary to point out that the Left has a rich tradition of Eugenics--advocates of which included Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, the mission of which was to get immigrants to limit their reproduction--and of a more basic hostility towards humans generally, as is the case with Paul Ehrlich, whose book, The Population Bomb, practically the Bible of the population control movement, proposed that the planet's human population be reduced to one billion. If racists and anti-immigrationists are cropping up in the environmental movement, it's not because the Right is trying to take it over, it's because that's their natural home. Environmentalism has throughout its history been a movement of upper-class white people who wish that the poor wouldn't make such a mess of their cities and spoil the natural beauty of the countryside that they want to be able to vacation in. It couldn't be more elitist and separatist.

Meanwhile, Julian Simon a libertarian but nonetheless a man of the Right, was the great scourge of the population controlling, anti-immigrant, depletionist Left that Ehrlich epitomized. Here's a description from a remembrance, Malthus, Watch Out (Ben Wattenberg, February 11, 1998, Wall St. Journal):

His keystone work was "The Ultimate Resource," published in 1981 and updated in 1996 as "The Ultimate Resource 2" (Princeton University Press). Its central point is clear: Supplies of natural resources are not finite in any serious way; they are created by the intellect of man, an always renewable resource. Coal, oil and uranium were not resources at all until mixed well with human intellect.

The notion drove some enviromentalists crazy. If it were true, poof!--there went so many of the crises that justified their existence. From their air-conditioned offices in high-rise buildings, they brayed: Simon believes in a technological fix! The attacks often got personal: Simon's doctorate was in business economics, they sniffed; he had merely been a professor of advertising and marketing, and--get this--he had actually started a mail-order business and written a book about how to do it. Never mind that he also studied population economics for a quarter century.

In fact, it was Simon's knowledge of real-world commerce that gave him an edge in the intellectual wars. He knew firsthand about some things that many environmentalists had only touched gingerly, like prices. If the real resource was the human intellect, Simon reasoned, and the amount of human intellect was increasing, both quantitatively through population growth and qualitatively through education, then the supply of resources would grow, outrunning demand, pushing prices down and giving people more access to what they wanted, with more than enough left over to deal with pollution and congestion. In short, mankind faced the very opposite of a crisis.

Simon rarely presented a sentence not supported by facts--facts arranged in serried ranks to confront the opposition; facts about forests and food, pollution and poverty, nuclear power and nonrenewable resources; facts used as foot soldiers to strike blows for accuracy.

In a famous bet, gloom-meister Paul Ehrlich took up Simon's challenge and wagered that between 1980 and 1990 scarcity would drive resource prices up. Simon bet that progress would push prices down. Simon won the bet, easily. Mr. Ehrlich won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. But the wheel turns, and we'll see who's a genius. Fortune magazine listed Simon among "the world's most stimulating thinkers." Mr. Ehrlich didn't make the cut.

Simon sensed the primacy of something else that many environmentalists and crisis-mongers didn't catch on to for a quite a time: Human intellect could best be transformed into beneficial goods and services in an atmosphere of political and economic liberty. At the United Nations' Mexico City population conference in 1984 Simon winced, and counterattacked, when population alarmists caricatured the Reagan-appointed American delegation as promoting the idea that "capitalism is the best contraceptive." It was not a good idea to ridicule capitalism, or free markets, or human liberty, in Simon's presence.

Of course, rising living standards do tend to depress fertility. Living standards do rise faster under democratic market systems. Smart folks now know that the fruits of economic growth can be used to diminish pollution. You don't hear much anymore about how we're running out of everything. (Next task: Simonize the Global Warmists.)

Finally, unlike many of his opponents, Julian was a traditionalist. He did not work on the Sabbath, and the Friday Sabbath dinner at the Simon house was always a gentle and joyous celebration.

Mr. Simon was waging this fight a quarter century ago and Ronald Reagan took America out of the business of aborting foreign babies around the same time--a practice we returned to only when Bill Clinton was President--but we're asked to believe that environmentalism's animus towards the poor, especially those of other skin hues, is something new and that it's being driven by infiltration of the movement by the Right? This is just heinous.

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MEANWHILE, ON THE WESTERN FRONT:

Perle: U.S. also seeks regime change in Iran, Libya, Syria (WORLD TRIBUNE.COM, February 25, 2003)

The United States will not be satisfied with toppling Saddam Hussein, but also seeks to change other regimes throughout the Arab world.

Richard Perle, chairman of the U.S. Defense Advisory Board, said the regimes include those in Iran, Libya and Syria. Perle told Arab journalists during a trip to London last week that the U.S. tactic would differ for each country. [...]

Change is needed in all those three countries [Iran, Libya and Syria], and a few others besides," Perle told the London-based author and analyst Amir Taheri.

But Perle said the regimes in Iran and Syria could be changed without direct U.S. intervention. He said the United States would help democratic reform movements in those countries.

"I think Iran can be changed by the action of the Iranian people," Perle told Taheri, an Iranian exile. "I believe that Syria, too, can organize change from within."

In a separate interview with the London-based A-Sharq Al Awsat, Perle listed what Washington would demand from Damascus. The key demand is the expulsion of groups deemed by the State Department as terrorist groups.

"A lot will be required from Syrian President Bashar Assad not only in terms of reform, but also the closure of the offices of terrorist organizations and the return of Lebanon to the Lebanese. [...]

"As for Libya, it is a weird case," Perle said. "For the time being it is out of world reality. But the colonel knows that we have our eyes on him." [...]

"Not a single Arab state is making the slightest move against our policy on this issue," Perle said. "And at least a dozen are actively cooperating with us in whatever field we require. What interests me is that almost all Arab states are showing a sense of realism and an understanding of their own interests on this issue."

If Diogenes had met Richard Perle, he could have rested.

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WHO'S NAIVE?

U.S. Officials Say U.N. Future At Stake in Vote: Bush Message Is That a War Is Inevitable, Diplomats Say (Karen DeYoung, February 25, 2003, Washington Post)

As it launches an all-out lobbying campaign to gain United Nations approval, the Bush administration has begun to characterize the decision facing the Security Council not as whether there will be war against Iraq, but whether council members are willing to irrevocably destroy the world body's legitimacy by failing to follow the U.S. lead, senior U.S. and diplomatic sources said.

In meetings yesterday with senior officials in Moscow, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton told the Russian government that "we're going ahead," whether the council agrees or not, a senior administration official said. "The council's unity is at stake here."

A senior diplomat from another council member said his government had heard a similar message and was told not to anguish over whether to vote for war.

"You are not going to decide whether there is war in Iraq or not," the diplomat said U.S. officials told him. "That decision is ours, and we have already made it. It is already final. The only question now is whether the council will go along with it or not."

There's an amusing phrase that's starting to pop up in reporters' pieces on George W. Bush and, on the radio anyway, it's accompanied by a tone of near shock: "This president actually means what he says". If they'd been paying attention from the beginning they'd have had no doubt about how this diplomatic dance ends.

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DEAD MAN WALKING:

Californians angry at Davis, wary of Bush (John Wildermuth, February 25, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle)

Californians' growing dismay over the state's shaky fiscal future and the possibility of war with Iraq have them angry at Gov. Gray Davis and increasingly wary of President Bush, a new poll showed today.

Only 33 percent of the state's residents are happy with the job Davis is doing as governor, down from 52 percent just three months ago, the survey by the Public Policy Institute of California showed. [...]

"If you thought the voters were cranky (before), now they're really in a sour mood," said Mark Baldassare, the poll's director. "These are numbers I haven't seen since 1994," when California was mired in a deep recession. [...]

"Last year, we were talking about how low Davis' approval ratings were when he was elected," Baldassare said. "Now, he's entered an entirely new territory.

"You begin to wonder how the governor can regain the public's trust when his numbers are as low as they are today, and people are directing their anger and frustration at him."

The poll is based on a telephone survey of 2,004 California adults interviewed between Feb. 6 and Feb. 17. The sampling error for a survey that size is
plus or minus two percentage points.

Poll numbers like that get you this. But, unfortunately, once Saddam falls the markets are going to soar and even deadwood like Gray Davis will rise somewhat with the tide. This couple years has though killed his chances of moving up to national politics...thankfully.

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WHAT'S THE SPANISH FOR COOK?:

Deborah Cook Is the Typical Bush Judicial Nominee; So Watch Out (ADAM COHEN, 2/25/03, NY Times)

Ms. Cook is no Miguel Estrada, the so-called conservative "stealth nominee," who is facing a Senate filibuster. Blacks are not rallying against her, the way they are against Charles Pickering, the Trent Lott protégé who lobbied the Justice Department to go easy on a convicted cross-burner. Disabled people are not lined up against her, as they are against Jeffrey Sutton, who argued a major case that weakened the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Deborah Cook, a 51-year-old onetime corporate lawyer from Akron, Ohio, may actually be the most utterly typical of the Bush administration's judicial nominees. Which is why, based on her judicial record, we should all be very worried about the future of the federal courts.

In eight years on the Ohio Supreme Court, Justice Cook has been a steady voice against injured workers, discrimination victims and consumers. The court's most prolific dissenter, she frequently breaks with her Republican colleagues to side with big business and insurance companies. Often she reaches for a harsh legal technicality to send a hapless victim home empty-handed.

To bad she isn't Hispanic, then the Democrats would filibuster.

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THE CRUSADERS:

The Pope's disapproval worries Blair more than marchers (Matthew d'Ancona, 23/02/2003, Daily Telegraph)

It used to be the solemn practice of medieval crusaders to seek the indulgence of the Pope before they rode off on their steeds to the Holy Land. Some wrote impassioned letters to the Pontiff for the good of their souls, but many made the pilgrimage to Rome in person. Yesterday, on the eve of another mighty conflict in the sands of the Middle East, the Prime Minister was granted a private audience by John Paul II. But there was to be no indulgence - no papal imprimatur - for this Christian soldier. Mr Blair may believe that he is embarking on a "just war": the Holy Father does not.

When President Bush called the war on terrorism a "crusade" he was pilloried as a Bible-bashing redneck. It is too easily forgotten that Tony Blair deployed that word first, in a Newsweek article on the Balkan war in 1999, long before the atrocities of September 11. The Prime Minister's robust Christian convictions and his readiness to take military action have always been intimately linked in his own mind. He does not see himself as a crusader in any aggressive sense; but there is no doubt that he seeks authorisation for war, as well as personal spiritual solace, in the Gospels. [...]

The extent of the Prime Minister's attraction to Roman Catholicism remains a matter of controversy. Downing Street was furious in 1998 when the Press Association revealed that he had been attending Mass at Westminster Cathedral on his own. Cardinal Hume wasn't too thrilled either by what appeared to be doctrinal dilettantism. On the Anglican side, it was claimed that the Prime Minister, as an alleged crypto-Catholic, could not make sound appointments to the episcopal bench. I recall an unswervingly Protestant minister seething to me at the time that his boss's decision to take Catholic Communion was "unconscionable": as so often over the centuries, London murmured of a "Popish plot".

Number 10 tried desperately to close the story down: one of the most menacing phone calls I have ever taken from Downing Street was from a spin doctor convinced The Sunday Telegraph was going to disclose an alleged discussion between Mr Blair and a Catholic priest. In short, I would be amazed if the Prime Minister converts to Rome while he is in office. But there is no doubt that he is powerfully drawn to the certainties and liturgy of Catholicism (and to its canon law: visitors to his study have been startled on occasion to see a well-thumbed copy of Paul VI's bull on human reproduction, Humanae Vitae). So yesterday's audience will have been freighted with personal significance for Mr Blair as a station on his own private pilgrimage.

Downing Street insists that the Prime Minister has a "clear conscience" on Iraq, and that may well be so. But that clarity has been hard won. According to one Cabinet Minister, the Prime Minister spent a great deal of time towards the end of last year wrestling with the prospect of war and convincing himself that it was just. "It was very private," the minister told me, "and very intense." The joke among his officials before Christmas was that it was easier to engage the Prime Minister's interest on the nuances of St Thomas Aquinas than on the detail of public service reform.

There has always been a strongly Christian strain in the British Labour movement, of course, but one which has emphasised the duty of the believer to avert war at almost any cost. Labour pacifism and CND have their roots in Christian socialism. The theologian to whom Mr Blair says he owes most, John MacMurray (1891-1976), offers little comfort to the politician about to commit troops to battle. "We went into war in a blaze of idealism," wrote MacMurray of his experience in the Somme and at Arras. "We learned that war was simply stupidity, destruction, waste and futility."

The Prime Minister's faith has led him to a quite different, more muscular position on the morality of conflict. "Christianity is a very tough religion," he wrote in 1993. "It is judgmental. There is right and wrong. There is good and bad." In an interview with this newspaper in 2001, he avowed his belief in "the necessity to make judgments about the human condition" and drew an explicit connection between that conviction and his conduct during the Kosovo crisis. There is, in fact, a consistent recoil from appeasement in what he has said about Christianity over the years.

It seems fair to wonder whether America and Britain would any longer be willing to go to war with evil regimes if they were to be led by non-believers.

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SEE NO EVIL:

Seeing God as `a kind of mascot': Biblical imagery nothing new for U.S. presidents But Bush critics say he's gone to far with `good vs. evil' (BRUCE NOLAN, 2/24/03, Toronto Star)

Does President George W. Bush believe an American war against Iraq is divinely ordained?

It's a provocative question, raised in part by a series of presidential speeches in which Bush, more than any other recent president, has been using explicit religious imagery to define America and to frame his administration's goals.

The images include Bush's vision of the United States as a "blessed" nation, his belief that it is a participant in a providential plan and his confrontation with what he has called "the forces of darkness" in Al Qaeda and Iraq.

"The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain," he told Congress three weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them."

Adopting an image many Christians recognized as a paraphrase of the opening of the Gospel of St. John, he said this in an Ellis Island address on the anniversary of Sept. 11: "This ideal of America is the hope of all mankind .... That hope still lights our way. And the light shines in the darkness. And the darkness will not overcome it."

In his Jan. 28 State of the Union address, he said: "As our nation moves troops and builds alliances to make our world safer, we must also remember our calling as a blessed country is to make this world better.

"Should an attack on Iraq become necessary, he told the National Religious Broadcasters this month, "American troops will act ... in the highest moral traditions of our country."

To some religious leaders, including Bush's fellow evangelicals, such language and the world view it represents are well within the tradition of presidential rhetoric and completely recognizable to millions of Americans.

"There's a history to the use of this kind of language, and I think the American people expect this of their president and respect it," says the Rev. Richard Cizik, vice-president of the National Association of Evangelicals. "I think people ought not get too excited about it."

But other religious leaders are disturbed, including the Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, a liberal faith group formed to counter the conservative Christian Coalition.

Gaddy suggests that the president has come to "a growing sense of awareness that he is, in fact, a divinely chosen leader for this particular moment in history," a conviction that may cloud his judgment and yield disastrous consequences.

If Bush does see America's confrontations with Al Qaeda and Iraq in theological terms of light vs. darkness, the danger is that it both oversimplifies the political conversation and drives the stakes through the roof, says Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University.

"It suggests we're in a drama like Lord Of The Rings or a children's story in which the forces of good are battling the forces of evil. And the only end of that story can be the victory of one side and the annihilation of the other."

Is Mr. Gaddy suggesting that God is neutral between America and Saddam Hussein? Is Ms Pagels suggesting that both al Qaeda and America can win?

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CHARACTER AS A GUIDE TO POLICY:

Bush Seeks to Help Blair at Home by Going Back to U.N. on Iraq (PATRICK E. TYLER, February 25, 2003, NY Times)

President Bush's decision to go all out to win a second Security Council endorsement to wage war on Iraq was made primarily to help a friend and ally, Prime Minister Tony Blair, say experts who follow British affairs. But the determined opposition of France, Germany and Russia expose Mr. Bush to the risk of diplomatic embarrassment.

"He has to do it primarily because it is now a necessary action to ease Tony Blair's problems," with the torrent of popular domestic opposition to war, said James R. Schlesinger, a former secretary of defense and a member of the Defense Policy Board that advises the Pentagon. "It is also an indication of our deep and abiding hope in the efficacy of the U.N.," Mr. Schlesinger added.

As recently as last month, the White House acted as if it would not return to the Security Council for a second resolution. But Mr. Blair, stung by criticism at home, urged the administration to reconsider. It is not clear, however, that Mr. Bush will get the nine votes needed to prevail in the Council. If he does, there is no guarantee that France or Russia or China will not veto the resolution.

Late last week, it was not clear whether Mr. Bush would gamble on the prospect of a highly visible loss in the Security Council after the ebullient highs of last November when the Council voted 15 to 0 to affirm the administration's muscular stand that President Saddam Hussein must disarm immediately.

But suddenly on Saturday morning, Mr. Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, reported a conference call involving the president, the Spanish prime minister, José María Aznar, Mr. Blair and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy to map out the steps at the United Nations that would pave the way to war.

That conference call set off a cascade of diplomatic lobbying on four continents that is continuing. Mr. Bush and the ad hoc coalition he is orchestrating for the coming military campaign are pressing and cajoling governments to adopt the Bush view that the time has come to disarm Mr. Hussein by force.

Mr. Fleischer said today that the President wants, but does not need, United Nations authority to act.

We underestimate sometimes just how much the personal character of even a president may influence their public policies. George W. Bush is famously loyal to friends, staff and allies, so it should come as no surprise that he might delay a war he's more than ready to launch in order to help Tony Blair, who's been a steadfast partner in the war on terror. On the other hand, the war has already begun and since 9-11, short of an Iraqi rising that toppled Saddam for us, there's been nothing that could stop it--that too is a function of the President's character. All the fretting about him letting Saddam off the hook is just silly, precisely because while to do so might win points in the international community, it would be untrue to who he is.

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YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHIN' YET:

Scandal hits Dutch food giant Ahold (Anthony Deutsch, February 25, 2003, AP)

With WorldCom and Enron still fresh in investors' minds, Europe was confronted with its own corporate accounting scandal Monday when the world's third biggest food retailer Ahold admitted vastly overstating earnings over the past two years.

Ahold's top two executives resigned, and several senior U.S. managers were suspended while investigations focused on whether income was booked prematurely at the company's U.S. Foodservice arm. Ahold also owns Stop & Shop; Skokie-based Peapod Inc., the online grocery, and other U.S. supermarket chains. Ahold's problems won't have a material affect on Peapod, a spokesman said.

Ahold shares plunged 63 percent in Amsterdam trading after the company said it had inflated earnings in the last two years by at least $500 million, and will restate earnings for 2001. Merrill Lynch estimated the restatement could wipe 10 to 30 percent off 2002 per-share earnings.

A great deal of nonsense has been written recently about the loss of confidence in American markets and the rising strength of the euro--but while we've worked through our scandals, the Europeans, with looser rules to begin with and greater cronyism, have yet to face the fact that all our problems are multiplied in their system. This is just the tip of the European iceberg and it's going to be very ugly watching the money that 's been flowing there--on the basis of emotion rather than reason--get yanked out and returned to America.

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CLIMBING THE GREASY POLE:

Draft Mitch Daniels

He's one of the unsung heroes of the Administration, so it'll be a shame to lose him, and we'd sort of rather he try to knock off Evan Bayh (who may well be the VP pick anyway), but he's definitely headed higher.

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SADDAM, SLIP SLIDING AWAY:

This may not work with all browsers and is a tad slow, but we received a neat Power Point presentation on Iraq over the transom.

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DEBRIS:

Who Is Regis Debray? (JAMES TARANTO, February 24, 2003, Opinion Journal: Best of the Web)

He complains that "the new world of President Bush, postmodern in its technology, seems premodern in its values." What he means is that whereas Bush and those simple-minded Americans use outmoded terms like "evil" when referring to a genocidal dictator, "Europe"--meaning France--"now knows that the planet is too complex, too definitively plural to suffer insertion into a monotheistic binary logic: white or black, good or evil, friend or enemy." Debray characterizes any discussion of good and evil as "fundamentalist," in contrast with Europe's "secular vision of the world." [...]

"Europe has learned modesty," Debray says--an odd assertion coming from a country currently strutting around the world stage pretending it is still a great power. In truth, what "Europe" has learned is not modesty but a facile relativism. Yes, America is moralistic, and that's hard to stomach for a country with France's history of colonialism and collaboration. (So you think it was evil for the French to deport Jews to Nazi Germany? Hey, quit being such a fundamentalist!) Yet to deny the existence of evil in the face of Saddam Hussein's atrocious human-rights record is not so much sophisticated as jaded.[...]

Who is this Régis Debray, anyway? The Times describes him as "a former adviser to President Francois Mitterrand of France, . . . editor of Cahiers de Mediologie and the author of the forthcoming 'The God That Prevailed.' " But a 1995 Wired magazine article tells a more, shall we say, interesting story:

"Twenty-seven years ago, French radical theoretician Regis Debray was sentenced by a Bolivian military tribunal to 30 years in jail. He had been captured with the guerrilla band led by Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Fidel Castro's legendary lieutenant. Released after three years, largely because of the intervention of compatriots such as President Charles de Gaulle, Andre Malraux, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Debray returned to writing. (His 1967 Revolution in the Revolution is considered a primer for guerrilla insurrection.) He spent five years in the early '80s as a special advisor on Latin American relations to French President Francois Mitterrand."

So this defender of reason, this proud opponent of "fundamentalism," spent the 1960s as an acolyte of Che Guevara and an author of a manual for revolution. Mightn't the Times' readers have wanted to know a bit of this background?

We linked to Mr. DeBray's column this weekend, but actually only made it through the first three sentences. Meanwhile, folks elsewhere have done a great job exposing what a whackjob this guy is. I do have one problem with Mr. Taranto's essay: he seems perplexed by the notion that a belief in good and evil is antithetical to secularism and that, in the eyes of the secularist, adherence to morality makes one a de facto fundamentalist. It's hard to place Mr. Taranto on the conservative spectrum, but he seems more libertarian than cultural conservative--at any rate, it's surprising he's unfamiliar with what's a rather well understood phenomenon: the secular Left no longer has any intellectual access to the concept of evil. Moral relativism is not a coincidence but an inevitable outgrowth of secularity.

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YOU GO, GIRL:

Clinton starts her bid to be president (MARK COLEMAN, 2/24/03, The Scotsman)

HILLARY Clinton is spending millions of dollars building up an office that would form the centre of her bid for the presidency, it was claimed last night.

Mrs Clinton raised $3.3 million (E2.09 million) last year for her HILLPAC charity, which was set up to distribute funds to Democratic candidates.

But a study has claimed that most of the money raised has been spent funding her own political campaign.

According to Washington's independent weekly political newspaper, the Hill, only 31 per cent of the money raised has gone where it was intended. The rest has been spent on staff, an office, travel, direct mail and political consultants.

The revelations prompted speculation that Mrs Clinton, 57, a supremely popular figure among rank and file Democrats, could finally be gearing up for an eventual assault on the US presidency.

No person of normal human ambition could look at the Democratic field and not feel the urge to run. Her ambition seems higher than normal.

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EGYPTIAN PRESTIGE?:

Egypt threatens to cut off ties with Palestinian terror groups (Khaled Abu Toameh, Feb. 24, 2003, Jerusalem Post)

Egypt has informed radical Palestinian factions that their refusal to accept a temporary cessation of terrorist attacks against Israel could prompt Cairo to sever its ties with them.

A Palestinian official told The Jerusalem Post Monday that Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other extremist groups have earned Egypt's opprobrium after they rejected its latest initiative for a one-year cease-fire with Israel.

"The Egyptians are really angry," the official added. "They see the Palestinian groups' stance as a severe blow to Egypt's credibility and prestige."

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NYET!:

Russia plays its economic card over Iraq (Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Kara-Murza, February 23 2003, Financial Times)

Despite Russia's reminder to the US last week that it could still use its UN Security Council veto against military action in Iraq, Moscow's stance has generally been more conciliatory than that adopted by Paris. This may appear surprising given Russia's record of supporting Baghdad, and its opposition to UN and Nato military intervention against Serbia in 1999.

Yet there is a simple explanation. While Russia's relations with Serbia are characterised by long-standing feelings of ethnic, religious and cultural proximity, as well as the pursuit of geopolitical interests in the Balkans, Russia's attitude towards Iraq is pragmatic. To be more precise: its interests are economic. By recognising those interests as legitimate, and by making clear they could be furthered by the removal of the Ba'athist dictatorship, the Anglo-American coalition could win over Russian support.

The first and perhaps easiest issue to resolve is Iraq's $8bn debt to Russia. Needless to say, Moscow wants its money back, yet repayment is outof the question while the UN sanctions regime remains in place. There is, however, another way: the US-UK coalition could recognise Iraq's foreigndebts and guarantee their repayment by the post-Saddam regime.

It's time to stop paying off the creditors of totalitarian regimes. Let a few of these multi-billion dollar debts go begging and let's see who'll be willing to lend tyrants money.

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WHY DO THEY HATE US?:

Computer Made from DNA and Enzymes (Stefan Lovgren, February 24, 2003, National Geographic News)

Israeli scientists have devised a computer that can perform 330 trillion operations per second, more than 100,000 times the speed of the fastest PC. The secret: It runs on DNA.

A year ago, researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, unveiled a programmable molecular computing machine composed of enzymes and DNA molecules instead of silicon microchips. Now the team has gone one step further. In the new device, the single DNA molecule that provides the computer with the input data also provides all the necessary fuel.

The design is considered a giant step in DNA computing. The Guinness World Records last week recognized the computer as "the smallest biological computing device" ever constructed. DNA computing is in its infancy, and its implications are only beginning to be explored. But it could transform the future of computers, especially in pharmaceutical and biomedical applications.

Think the Palestinians are doing similar research?

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FROM NATO TO NAFTA:

In with the new...Europe (Larry Kudlow, February 24, 2003, Townhall)

Do not let the fog of war obscure the international trade figures just published by the U.S. Commerce Department. The statistics may be drier than sand, but they reveal a fascinating tale of wartime politics and economics. [...]

Let's look at trade balances by region. First, Western Europe -- or more accurately, Old Europe, to use Donald Rumsfeld's all-too-accurate phrase. U.S. exports to this fading old hag are down 15.6 percent. Pacifist Germany? Minus 11.9 percent. Egocentric and anti-U.S. France? Minus 13.6 percent. Are these guys playing with a thin deck or what? Their economics are just as wussy as their foreign politics.

How about our real friends in the Mediterranean sector of Old Europe? Well, U.S. exports to Jose Aznar's Spain are up 27.6 percent. Silvio Berlusconi's Italy? Up 16.1 percent. Their economies are as strong as their dislike for terrorism.

How about New Europe? U.S. exports to these freedom-loving and Saddam-hating nations in the central and eastern precincts are up 25.5 percent over the past 12 months. A tremendous performance. [...]

Trade figures may not tell the whole economic story, but something good is surely going on in the former Soviet colonies. Just as they value their newfound democracies and political freedoms, they also seem to appreciate their newly established free-market economies and their liberation from communist state controls.

This raises a logical question. Why not a transatlantic free-trade agreement with the willing members of old and new Europe?

The Cold War is over, time to move on.

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PRE-EMPT NOW!:

N. Korea Launches Test Missile (CBS News, Feb. 24, 2003)

North Korea launched a missile that landed in the sea between the Korean Peninsula and Japan, a South Korean Defense Ministry official said Tuesday.

The Seoul government was investigating whether Monday's launch was a test of a new missile, said the official, who asked to be identified only as Maj. Chun.

The reported land-to-sea missile launch came on the eve of the inauguration of South Korea's new president, Roh Moo-hyun.

It's fifty years past time to rid the planet of the DPRK.

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DUELLING REVIEWS:

We've mentioned before that the same account rep sends us and Steven Martinovich of Enter Stage Right books to review. Typically Mr. Martinovich--who has the advantage in at least this regard of being childless--gets the books read well before me, but this week we happen to have stereo-posted reviews of two different very good books:

A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy (2003) (James MacDonald)

REVIEW: by ESR

REVIEW: by Brothers Judd

and

Feminist Fantasies (2003) (Phyllis Schlafly)

REVIEW: by ESR

REVIEW: by Brothers Judd

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TOSSING CURVES:

Apologia pro vita sua (Charles Murtaugh, February 23, 2003)

Responding to my recent post about genetics and IQ, Calpundit Kevin Drum wrote a very long and very thoughtful essay about intelligence, The Bell Curve, and the importance of not ignoring inconvenient facts -- by which he, and I, mean the evidence that intelligence is a real variable with a real (if not all-explaining) genetic component.

He links to a number of the responses that other bloggers made, particularly Atrios (start at the top and scroll down -- he has a lot of posts), almost all of which take him to task for even arguing about The Bell Curve. In Atrios's comments boards, I also get repeatedly called a racist and an idiot, which is why I'm embarking on this lengthy post to set the record straight.

I'll readily acknowledge that I couldn't follow all the data and arguments of The Bell Curve, however, I also don't understand how anyone can both believe in evolution and question the basic premise of the book, which is that there are differences in intelligence between the different races. I've never met anyone who is willing to argue that, for instance, every breed of dog is equally intelligent. Yet those who deny racial differences in intelligence would have us believe that different breeds of humans have ended up with absolutely identical intelligence. Just think about this for a moment: you needn't be a racist to say that you'd be able to pick out the Swede, the Masai, and the Inuit in a police lineup; but we're supposed to pretend that there's no possibility that just as there are significant physical differences among the three there might be even just subtle intelligence differences? By that I don't mean that we have to say, or have any impartial basis for saying, that one is "superior" and one "inferior", but, c'mon, you can't honestly rule out some variation. What kind of natural selection would be able to render two men with completely different skin colors, facial features, hair types, musculatures, etc., but leave their minds totally unaffected?

In his essay, Mr. Murtaugh links to one of the many attacks on Stephen Jay Gould, THE ACCIDENTAL CREATIONIST: Why Stephen Jay Gould is bad for evolution. (ROBERT WRIGHT, Dec. 13, 1999, The New Yorker), by fellow Darwinists for refusing to follow the theory to its inevitable conclusions, and thereby offering succor to the skeptics. But the entire attack on the Bell Curve seems of a piece with Mr. Gould's apostasy. People, especially on the Left, are so wedded to egalitarianism that their political predispositions force them to deny certain aspects of a science that they otherwise consider nearly sacred, just because certain of its implications challenge their philosophy. Mr. Murtaugh, who is a scientist, says that some of the studies that the book's authors relied on are dubious. Fine. But can anyone explain in any kind of logical manner how it might be possible for human intelligence not to vary one iota from Tierra del Fuego to Kamchatka?

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"SHORT & SWEET":

U.S., Britain, Spain Challenge U.N. on Iraq (Fox News, February 24, 2003)

The United States, Great Britain and Spain threw down the gauntlet Monday, drawing up a new resolution for submittal to the U.N. Security Council that declares Iraq in "further material breach" of U.N. resolutions and orders Baghdad to get rid of its weapons of mass destruction.

The document, a copy of which was obtained by Fox News, challenges the Security Council to stick to its guns and not back down from Resolution 1441, which was passed in November and calls for the complete and immediate disarmament of Iraq -- or else.

The resolution, to be presented by Great Britain around 3:30 p.m. EST, refers to "serious consequences," but not to using "all necessary means." It does not include any deadline for compliance.

Most of the resolution refers to previous actions, but it adds two lines of new language: The Security Council "decides that Iraq has failed to take the final opportunity afforded to it in Resolution 1441," and the Security Council "decides to remain seized of the matter."

One notes that the last three world tyrannies--Napoleonic France, Nazism, and Communism--were defeated by some configuration or another of these three resolution sponsors, with at least two and sometimes all three leading the way.

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NOW HE THINKS HE'S AL GORE:

Saddam Challenges Bush To Debate (CBS News, Feb. 24, 2003)

In an exclusive interview with CBS News Anchor Dan Rather, Saddam Hussein has challenged President George W. Bush to a live, international television and radio debate about the looming war.

Saddam envisions it as being along the lines of U.S. presidential campaign debates. The Iraqi president also flatly denies that his al-Samoud missiles are in violation of United Nations' mandates and indicates he does not intend to destroy them or pledge to destroy them as demanded by chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix. Blix had set a deadline for at least a promise by this weekend.

I know Saddam Hussein; he's a friend of mine; and he's not even Anne Richards.

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LAST GRAMMY NOTE (MAYBE EVER):

Also, last night The Blind Boys of Alabama, in their 64th year of making music together, won for Best Traditional Soul Gospel Album with the excellent Higher Ground, featuring both Ben Harper and Robert Randolph. We particularly suggest you give a listen to The Cross, which was written by Prince.

MORE:
-Interview: Gospel's Fountain of Youth: Clarence Fountain and the Blind Boys of Alabama (Jeffrey Stringer, Borders)
-REVIEW: of Higher Ground (Russ Breimeier, Christianity Today)
-REVIEW: of Higher Ground (Paul Salfen, Dallas Music Guide)
-REVIEW: of Higher Ground (David Lynch, Austin Chronicle)

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WHY IS SLATE STILL IN BUSINESS?:

For Liberals, It's Morning in America: Shock jocks are the progressive answer to Rush Limbaugh (Marc Fisher, February 21, 2003, Slate)

Talk isn't conservative or liberal. Scratch almost any successful radio talker, and you'll find a former Top 40 DJ who has repurposed his quick-lipped skill at dispensing shreds of meaning, moving from music to talk while remaining in the loyal service of his twin masters—the clock and the spots. Content is secondary. These guys are on the radio because they are storytellers and showmen. Their heroes are not Churchill, JFK, or Reagan but Jean Shepherd, Larry Lujack, and Dan Ingram—the legendary radio yakkers and jocks they listened to as shy boys alone in their rooms.

AM talk—Rush, Dr. Laura, Hannity—targets middle-aged white guys. Surprise: They tend to be conservative. But FM talk—Stern, Joyner, Mancow, Don and Mike in Washington, Tom Leykis in Los Angeles—scores with young men, guys who like their radio on the risqué side, with a bulging menu of sex jokes and a powerful message that this is America and you can do whatever you want. Hint to Democrats: You may not like to admit this, but these are your voters.

Yes, they like it raunchy. Most people listen to radio alone in their cars, where no one needs to be PC, where it's still OK to insult women and minorities and foreigners, and no one has to fear being slapped with a harassment charge. And it's OK to chuckle at that coarse humor and still vote Democratic. The PC brigades may find this hard to believe, but shock jocks do quite well with black listeners and with traditional Democratic demographics, such as college graduates and city dwellers. No, Stern and Don Geronimo and Tom Leykis have no interest whatsoever in having Dick Gephardt on the show, at least not unless he's going to remove his pants. And no, they would say, there's no politics on their shows. (Sabo tells DJs who want to be talk-show hosts: "If the topic is national politics, abortion, gun control, death penalty, religion, race, we have no interest. If the topics are movies, TV, personal relationships, your strong personal feelings, stuff about the workplace—things people under 90 talk about, we'd love to hear your tape.") But even if Stern wannabes don't address abortion directly, their daily diet of searingly intimate conversation with callers hits many of those hot-button issues, and they do it almost unfailingly from a left-libertarian perspective—they are classic social liberals.

Shock jocks are this country's progressive talkers, ranting for hours on end on behalf of civil liberties, sexual freedom, the rights of the little guy against the nation's big corporations and institutions (and—sorry, Dems—against affirmative action). They may not share Limbaugh's fascination with electoral politics, but on the issues that divide this country into red and blue, they are every bit as popular and powerful as the supposedly unchallenged conservatives. Shock jocks talk about sex, television, and what's hot. They talk about what people are talking about, which, if you listen carefully, usually are exactly the same issues that determine how people vote: personal freedom, mores, economic well-being, family, what it's like to be a guy or a woman or an American right now.

Well, yes, if racist, misogynist, homophobic, anti-intellectual, small government, war-mongering is progressive, these are indeed the voices of liberal America.

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THE REAGAN BUILD-UP--THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING:

BACK TO THE FUTURE (Ed Driscoll, February 24, 2003)

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UNILTATERAL DISARMAMENT:

GOP Committees Rake it In (Dotty Lynch, Douglas Kiker and Steve Chaggaris, 2/24/03, CBS News)

"The three Republican campaign committees far outdistanced their Democratic counterparts fundraising in January," reports Roll Call based on reports just filed with the FEC.

The RNC raised $11 million compared to $2.2 million by the DNC. On the House side, the NRCC raised four times as much as the DCCC, $6.9 million compared to $1.7 million.

On the Senate side, the Republican advantage was 2-to-1, with the NRSC raising $1.2 million and the DSCC having receipts of $698,000. But the Democrats have a $6 million debt from the 2002 cycle compared to the $608,000 debt carried by the NRSC.

Democrats have three "victories" to show for the Bush years: Jim Jeffords; the education bill; and Campaign Finance Reform. The Jeffords majority they used to obstruct a popular president and got buried in November. The education bill is being used to create a de facto voucher system. CFR is going to leave them massively outgunned in 2004. Now they're aiming at a fourth, stopping the Estrada nomination. They're quick learners, eh?

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SCHOOL CHOICE NOW!:

Here's an assignment that was given to Hanover school students:

JOSEF STALIN'S LEGACY: As you read about Russia in the Stalin years, look for both positive and negative ways that Stalin affected the country. It is easier to find ways that he hurt his people, but try and think of things that could have been seen as positive especially from the perspective of Russia's history, values and traditions. Write as many as you can in the spaces below.

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OPEN SEASON:

HUNT-AND-KILL SQUADS SET TO TAKE OUT SADDAM & SONS (Niles Latham, 2/24/03, NY Post)

Special "hunter-killer teams and aircraft would target Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein - and his two evil sons - within 48 hours of the launch of any military campaign, The Post has learned.

The moves would include a series of massive, surgical airstrikes and commando raids in the opening hours of the action. Specially trained operatives would target Saddam, sons Uday and Qusay and other key aides.

Qusay, who heads Saddam's personal Republican Guard unit, has orders to unleash weapons of mass destruction should something happen to his father, according to British intelligence.

Saddam's eldest son, Uday, is said to command Iraq's vicious paramilitary groups in charge of sabotaging infrastructure, such as bridges, and committing atrocities against their country's own civilians to blame on the United States.

In the past, Uday has been accused of personally brutally beating Iraqi Olympic athletes, as well has having ties to terrorists. He also is considered the money man who helps fund Saddam's regime.

Taking the fiendish father and sons out would be part of what U.S. military officials and outside defense analysts say is a bold and radical battle plan for Gulf War II. The plan aims to use exotic new weapons and the full range of U.S. military power in a series of nearly simultaneous air and ground attacks on the citadels of Sadda's power in the opening hours.

A massive intelligence-gathering effort - involving electronic eavesdropping and clandestine contacts with potential Iraqi military moles - has been under way for months to try to track the world's best-protected tyrant. [...]

Defense analysts said the planned massive early thrust into Iraq is designed to end the war quickly without directly taking on its army - and with special care given to avoiding civilian casualties and winning over the local people.

You'd have to think there's a pretty good chance that Saddam will already be dead when we announce the war has begun.

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GEORGE "MAJOR CHANGE" BUSH:

Bush Proposes Major Changes in Health Plans: The president's proposals offer a fundamentally different
vision of social welfare policy, many experts say. (ROBIN TONER and ROBERT PEAR, 2/24/03, NY Times)

President Bush has begun one of the most ambitious efforts to reinvent Medicare and Medicaid since the programs were created 38 years ago. Combined with his earlier plan for Social Security, the proposals offer a fundamentally different vision of social welfare policy, many experts say.

Mr. Bush's proposals for Medicare and Medicaid, taking shape in recent weeks, would transform these pillars of the Great Society and their guarantee of health benefits to the elderly, disabled and poor.

States would have far more power to determine who receives what benefits in the Medicaid program, which covers 45 million low-income Americans. The elderly would rely more on private health plans, and less on the government, for their health benefits under Medicare, which covers 40 million elderly and disabled people.

The administration's vision for Medicare and Social Security moves away from the notion that everyone should be in the same government-managed system with the same benefits. It promises individuals more choices, including the option of picking a private health plan or investing some of their Social Security taxes in the stock market.

But critics say these proposals would also mean less security, fewer guaranteed benefits and more financial risk for beneficiaries.

The magnitude of the Bush proposals is only gradually dawning on members of Congress. Unlike President Bill Clinton and former Speaker Newt Gingrich, Mr. Bush has not boasted about the boldness of his vision for these programs, perhaps because he is mindful of the voters' anxiety about major changes in health care.

Indeed, a senior administration official dismissed the idea that Mr. Bush was attempting fundamental change in Medicare and Medicaid.

Having proposed and/or effected radical transformations of military doctrine and structure, homeland security, social security, health care, public education, taxation, welfare services, etc., etc., etc., it may be almost time to recognize that George W. Bush isn't the do-nothing moderate his father was, eh?

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SPLITTING HAIRS:

Norah has a firm grip on the Grammy (NEKESA MUMBI MOODY, 2/24/03, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Some other veteran artists added to bulging trophy cases: bluesman B.B. King won two, for 13 in his career, while Johnny Cash won his 11th and Tony Bennett his 10th-- while soul legend Solomon Burke won his first.

The essential silliness of these awards is amply demonstrated by this being Solomon Burke's first. He's been the greatest soul singer on Earth for forty years and this isn't even a particularly good album. On the other hand, if you've not heard Johnny Cash's latest, at least check out the first two tunes--his own The Man Comes Around and Hurt, a cover of a Nine Inch Nails number--which are so harrowing they're difficult to listen to even as they compel you to recue them. And don't take my word for it, check with our Northern neighbor.

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ME, ME, ME, MINE, MINE, MINE:

U.S. Approach on N. Korea Strains Alliances in Asia:The showdown over North Korea's nuclear weapons program is testing Washington's alliances with South Korea and Japan. (HOWARD W. FRENCH, 2/24/03, NY Times)

With little of the clamor generated by preparations for war with Iraq, the showdown between the United States and North Korea over that country's nuclear weapons program is severely testing Washington's oldest Asian alliances.

In recent weeks, senior officials in officially pacifist Japan have spoken of mounting a "pre-emptive strike" against North Korea, if it appeared that the heavily armed Communist state intended to use its ballistic missiles against Japan.

"Our nation will use military force as a self-defense measure if they start to resort to arms against Japan," said Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba.

For many Japanese commentators, Mr. Ishiba's statement was meant to draw attention to the fact that Japan in reality has no strike ability. More than as a credible threat against North Korea, it was intended to influence a debate that has gathered momentum during the administration of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi over giving the country's armed forces, which face sharp constitutional limits on their action, a larger role in the country's defense, and in making Japan a player in international security again.

When Secretary of State Colin L. Powell arrives here on Monday for the inauguration of Roh Moo Hyun as president of South Korea, he will try to narrow differences with a man whose response to tensions with North Korea has been virtually the opposite of Japan's and, if anything, even more radical.

Mr. Roh has given strong indications that he intends to accelerate South Korea's embrace of North Korea, even as the United States looks for ways to ratchet up pressure on North Korea.

To the dismay of Washington, Mr. Roh has spoken in recent weeks of establishing an economic community with North Korea, stepping up trade, aid and investment there, ruling out economic sanctions and military strikes against the country and even of personally "guaranteeing" North Korea's security.

The president-elect said he would replace the current armistice agreement with a treaty between the Koreas in order to ensure peace on the Korean Peninsula.

Nations almost always act in their own perceived interests--what's so strange about that? The more important question is why are people arguing that only the United States should not follow suit and act unilaterally?

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AMIDST THE SOUND AND THE FURY:

Firing Leaflets and Electrons, U.S. Wages Information War: The U.S. military is using an arsenal of electronic and psychological weapons to break the Iraqi military's will to fight and sway Iraqi public opinion. (THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT, 2/24/03, NY Times)

As of last week, more than eight million leaflets had been dropped over Iraq — including towns 65 miles south of Baghdad — warning Iraqi antiaircraft missile operators that their bunkers will be destroyed if they track or fire at allied warplanes. In the same way, a blunt offer has gone to Iraqi ground troops: surrender, and live.

But the leaflets are old-fashioned instruments compared with some of the others that are being applied already or are likely to be used soon.

Radio transmitters hauled aloft by Air Force Special Operations EC-130E planes are broadcasting directly to the Iraqi public in Arabic with programs that mimic the program styles of local radio stations and are more sophisticated than the clumsy preachings of previous wartime propaganda efforts.

"Do not let Saddam tarnish the reputation of soldiers any longer," one recent broadcast said. "Saddam uses the military to persecute those who don't agree with his unjust agenda. Make the decision."

Military planners at the United States Central Command expect to rely on many kinds of information warfare — including electronic attacks on power grids, communications systems and computer networks, as well as deception and psychological operations — to break the Iraqi military's will to fight and sway Iraqi public opinion.

It's great fun listening to doves who think they can still stop the war and hawks who think it's up to them to stiffen W's backbone, even as the operation proceeds as planned.

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HURRICANE WARNING:

Looking Back at an Ugly Time: An unchallenged war against the very idea of diversity will
turn us back in the direction of segregation. (Bob Herbert, 2/23/03, NY Times)

There's a reason why so many mainstream individuals and groups, and some of the nation's largest corporations, have filed briefs with the Supreme Court in support of Michigan's effort to save its affirmative-action programs. The United States is a better place after a half-century of racial progress and improved educational opportunities for racial and ethnic minorities, and women.

We have all benefited, and voluntary efforts to continue that progress, including the policies at Michigan, are in the interest of us all.

Justice Lewis Powell, who wrote the controlling opinion in the Bakke case in 1978, eloquently addressed the matter of campus diversity when he said that "a robust exchange of ideas" is of "transcendent value to us all."

An unchallenged right-wing war against the very idea of diversity will turn us back in the direction of the noxious beliefs spewed out by National Review in 1957.

The question is not whether diversity may be valuable for some people or desirable to them, but whether it is in fact a "transcendent value" and should be made compulsory even for those who do not desire it. To start with, no one actually believes that diversity broadly is a transcendent value--no one proposes that white supremacists, paedophiles, cannibals, misogynists, etc. have reserved spots in our universities so that we can all be exposed to a genuine diversity of opinion. In fact, schools have largely headed in the opposite direction, requiring a uniformity of opinion on many issues, lest anyone be offended by thoughts that are "different". Few would find fault with banning Nazism from the classroom, but if the increasing diversity of the student body requires that a shrinking range of opinions be presented--so, for instance, that racial differences on IQ tests, or social effects of immigration, or demographic effects of abortion, or health effects of homosexuality, or similar topics, are considered out of bounds--then it seems fair to ask whether diversity has added something to the educational experience or subtracted something.

The next question is why it is thought helpful to admit people who are objectively unqualified. By this we don't mean that they are inferior per se, but that they have not met the entrance standards that their classmates have met. Here there are two possibilities--one can argue that the standards don't matter and that the diversity itself is more important or one can argue that it is only circumstances that lead to one student meeting the standards and the other not. Both of these are essentially arguments for extreme egalitarianism and they raise the question why not just select student bodies via a random lottery? If you truly believe all people to be equal at their core, then why isn't the heterosexual WASP male who doesn't qualify just as much a victim of his upbringing as the black girl from the ghetto? If you take a less drastic view of nature vs. nurture and argue that but for the disadvantages of their prior education some minority students would be qualified, it seems fair to point out that while this may be true it also implicates character. No one, I don't think, would argue that a person who is innately qualified could not have met admission standards had they prepared themselves better. We can recognize the external reasons why they failed to do so without then turning around and absolving them of any responsibility for this failure. Surely there are many majority students who are in the same boat, but we don't--for good reason--cut them any slack. The effect of this influx of the unqualified has, for obvious reason, been the complete degradation of the grading system in college, inflating average grades to the point where they mean nothing. Here again, we're left to ask whether diversity has in practice improved education or decimated it.

The next argument folks like Mr. Herbert have to fall back on is that it is good simply to have different types of people in every setting, that the sole basis for diversity is skin color or gender or whatever. [This is, of course, an argument that they do not apply to fields where blacks, women and such predominate. Thus they don't propose "improving" the NBA by forcing teams to take white, Latino, or Asian players. They don't propound diversity in women's sports, allowing men to compete for spots on the teams. They don't object--or most don't--to historically black or women's colleges.] In effect they are asking us to judge people solely by the color of their skin (or some other immutable characteristic). But then they also demand that only the judgment they've settled upon be allowed. They ask that we freight race with enormous meaning but that only they be allowed to tell us what the meaning is. Why, for instance, if the very quality of being black is so important is it only reasoinable to mix the races in some government derived proportion? Why might someone not think as different proportion was valid? Why might someone not say that homogeneity was more important, at least in certain areas? From whence do folks like Mr. Herbert receive their wisdom that race is a sufficient reason to admit exactly 10% blacks to the University of Michigan or 4% of Asians to UCLA or 51% women to colleges generally, or whatever arbitrary measures they wish us to accept are transcendent? Regardless, we're left with a system where because we now think it wrong that Student A would not have been admitted to College B in 1930 because of his race, he now must be admitted because of his race. We can bicker about the relative motivations of the two regimes, but all we've done is replace one variant of racism with another.

At the end of the day, it is impossible to accept any of the proffered reasons for diversity and we're left to look at the results in order to discern motives. It seems apparent from that perspective that the point really is to impose a utopian egalitarian vision. It is an attack on ability (which is, unfortunately, unevenly distributed amongst us); on opinions that do not conform to the idea of absolute equality; on elite institutions in and of themselves (so that we today graduate kids from college knowing no more than their grandparents learned in high school); and, in toto, on the very bases of Western Civilization--on the free exchange of ideas, on individual achievement, on character, on responsibility, and on natural hierarchy. It is the levelling wind and it's already bent us too far..

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CHANGING THE SUBJECT:

Unspeakable Conversations (HARRIET McBRYDE JOHNSON, February 16, 2003, NY Times Magazine)

He insists he doesn't want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.

Whenever I try to wrap my head around his tight string of syllogisms, my brain gets so fried it's . . . almost fun. Mercy! It's like ''Alice in Wonderland.''

It is a chilly Monday in late March, just less than a year ago. I am at Princeton University. My host is Prof. Peter Singer, often called -- and not just by his book publicist -- the most influential philosopher of our time. He is the man who wants me dead. No, that's not at all fair. He wants to legalize the killing of certain babies who might come to be like me if allowed to live. He also says he believes that it should be lawful under some circumstances to kill, at any age, individuals with cognitive impairments so severe that he doesn't consider them ''persons.'' What does it take to be a person? Awareness of your own existence in time. The capacity to harbor preferences as to the future, including the preference for continuing to live.

At this stage of my life, he says, I am a person. However, as an infant, I wasn't. I, like all humans, was born without self-awareness. And eventually, assuming my brain finally gets so fried that I fall into that wonderland where self and other and present and past and future blur into one boundless, formless all or nothing, then I'll lose my personhood and therefore my right to life. Then, he says, my family and doctors might put me out of my misery, or out of my bliss or oblivion, and no one count it murder. [...]

In the lecture hall that afternoon, Singer lays it all out. The ''illogic'' of allowing abortion but not infanticide, of allowing withdrawal of life support but not active killing. Applying the basic assumptions of preference utilitarianism, he spins out his bone-chilling argument for letting parents kill disabled babies and replace them with nondisabled babies who have a greater chance at happiness. It is all about allowing as many individuals as possible to fulfill as many of their preferences as possible.

As soon as he's done, I get the microphone and say I'd like to discuss selective infanticide. As a lawyer, I disagree with his jurisprudential assumptions. Logical inconsistency is not a sufficient reason to change the law. As an atheist, I object to his using religious terms (''the doctrine of the sanctity of human life'') to characterize his critics. Singer takes a note pad out of his pocket and jots down my points, apparently eager to take them on, and I proceed to the heart of my argument: that the presence or absence of a disability doesn't predict quality of life. I question his replacement-baby theory, with its assumption of ''other things equal,'' arguing that people are not fungible. I draw out a comparison of myself and my nondisabled brother Mac (the next-born after me), each of us with a combination of gifts and flaws so peculiar that we can't be measured on the same scale.

He responds to each point with clear and lucid counterarguments. He proceeds with the assumption that I am one of the people who might rightly have been killed at birth. He sticks to his guns, conceding just enough to show himself open-minded and flexible. We go back and forth for 10 long minutes. Even as I am horrified by what he says, and by the fact that I have been sucked into a civil discussion of whether I ought to exist, I can't help being dazzled by his verbal facility. He is so respectful, so free of condescension, so focused on the argument, that by the time the show is over, I'm not exactly angry with him. Yes, I am shaking, furious, enraged -- but it's for the big room, 200 of my fellow Charlestonians who have listened with polite interest, when in decency they should have run him out of town on a rail. [...]

When I put the phone down, my argumentative nature feels frustrated. In my mind, I replay the conversation, but this time defend my position.

''He's not exactly a monster. He just has some strange ways of looking at things.''

''He's advocating genocide.''

''That's the thing. In his mind, he isn't. He's only giving parents a choice. He thinks the humans he is talking about aren't people, aren't 'persons.'''

''But that's the way it always works, isn't it? They're always animals or vermin or chattel goods. Objects, not persons. He's repackaging some old ideas. Making them acceptable.''

''I think his ideas are new, in a way. It's not old-fashioned hate. It's a twisted, misinformed, warped kind of beneficence. His motive is to do good.''

''What do you care about motives?'' she asks. ''Doesn't this beneficent killing make disabled brothers and sisters just as dead?''

''But he isn't killing anyone. It's just talk.''

''Just talk? It's talk with an agenda, talk aimed at forming policy. Talk that's getting a receptive audience. You of all people know the power of that kind of talk.''

''Well, sure, but--''

''If talk didn't matter, would you make it your life's work?''

''But,'' I say, ''his talk won't matter in the end. He won't succeed in reinventing morality. He stirs the pot, brings things out into the open. But ultimately we'll make a world that's fit to live in, a society that has room for all its flawed creatures. History will remember Singer as a curious example of the bizarre things that can happen when paradigms collide.''

''What if you're wrong? What if he convinces people that there's no morally significant difference between a fetus and a newborn, and just as disabled fetuses are routinely aborted now, so disabled babies are routinely killed? Might some future generation take it further than Singer wants to go? Might some say there's no morally significant line between a newborn and a 3-year-old?''

''Sure. Singer concedes that a bright line cannot be drawn. But he doesn't propose killing anyone who prefers to live.''

''That overarching respect for the individual's preference for life -might some say it's a fiction, a fetish, a quasi-religious belief?''

''Yes,'' I say. ''That's pretty close to what I think. As an atheist, I think all preferences are moot once you kill someone. The injury is entirely to the surviving community.''

''So what if that view wins out, but you can't break disability prejudice? What if you wind up in a world where the disabled person's 'irrational' preference to live must yield to society's 'rational' interest in reducing the incidence of disability? Doesn't horror kick in somewhere? Maybe as you watch the door close behind whoever has wheeled you into the gas chamber?''

''That's not going to happen.''

In all the discussion of this piece from last week's NY Times Magazine, the most important and ineffably sad point seems to have been mentioned little: Ms Johnson effectively supports Mr. Singer's case. As an atheist she has no belief in the intrinsic value of life and no conception of good and evil, she's forced to fall back on ad hoc definitions. The definition of human that she has chosen, so far as one can tell, is anyone who has been born. So she talks about her fear that disabled infants could come to be treated like fetuses, which is to say not human and therefore disposable. But she assures herself: "He won't succeed in reinventing morality." This ignores the fact that the wholesale killing of fetuses required just such a reinvention of morality, a new definition of who is not human and who is disposable. Nor is even that definition consistently applied--as for instance when someone is charged with murder if they shoot a pregnant woman kill the baby--nor accepted by even a simple majority of society.

If the value of life is to be determined solely by the definitions we choose, as to who's human and who's not, we don't even have any ground to criticize slaveholders, who after all had merely defined blacks as not fully human or the Nazis who believed Jews to be sub-human. And, if we should one day, perhaps under the pressure of rising medical costs, decide that the disabled, the terminal, the extremely elderly, the Alzheimer's ridden, etc., are not what we choose at that moment to define as human, then how can someone who believes in nothing more than definitionalism quarrel with that result? Ms Johnson's subjectivism leaves her with no defense against the subjectivism of the majority.

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WOW!:

Chairman's Speech (Judge Evan Wallach of the United States Court of International Trade, 9/21/01, Hughes Hall, Cambridge)

When President Richards invited me to speak here some months past, I had in mind a few words about my personal history at Hughes, and some specific thoughts about how much Cambridge has meant to the cause of freedom. I meant to speak about how England stood alone and undaunted in those dark days of May and June, 1940, as the only bulwark between the free world and the dark night of unending barbarism. Long before we Americans were forced into the affair, even before her empire could effectively rally to the colors, this island held the line; and this small town, with its great university, was at the center of that resistance, providing many of its pilots, much of its intelligence apparatus, and a great deal of its military leadership.

My original thought was to come here to thank you yet again, and to speak about the links forged in that crucible of war which bind us still. As much as those links were forged in war, they were also woven in peace. The warp and woof of that great tapestry are shaded with majestic blues, and running through it as long continuing threads are the blue and white of Hughes Hall.

Those mystic threads join us through space and time with all who have gone before and all the generations yet unborn. This special, gentle quiet place has given us each, as some magical point in our lives, a period to reflect, explore, change and grow. The experience is quite unlike any other.

In my heart, and I dare say in many others', the memories of Hughes Hall and Cambridge are co-joined with a certain almost Platonic ideal of happiness. The opportunity to share those pleasures, recall those days, and to continue and advance them is one not to be lightly foresworn. That opportunity is why, despite the events of September 11, I completed this pilgrimage from New York.

That was before Tuesday, September 11.

On that morning I was talking to my secretary Linda Sue as she prepared coffee. When we heard the first explosion I thought it was a bomb. We were relieved when the television said it was an airplane. It had to be an accident. We watched the second aircraft fly into the WTC. In one second it changed everything. We knew we were at war.

New Yorkers reacted very well. They reminded me so much of Londoners in the Blitz. Our court is exactly a half mile from the WTC. There was no panic. People helped someone when they stumbled, urged one another on, and were kind to strangers. It was as Dickens says, the best of times and the worst of times.

We are much a family, we Americans, a very large, very extended and often very dysfunctional family. When our brothers and sisters come into harm's way we react as does any family; we cry, we grieve, we pray, we hold each other close, and then we go on living.

Make no mistake about it, we will go on. The continental Europeans have a conception of America which has a strong kernel of truth. We are still, somewhat, the vaguely isolationist, happy-go-lucky plough boy who can be insulted by foreign waiters, eucered by a sidewalk grifter, blow his month's pay on a pretty bar girl, and still go home convinced he had a real nice time in the big city.

But when you slap us across the face, we know we've been wronged and it is not in our nature to slap you in return. Rather, our national instinct is to destroy your armies, drive your population into exile, pillage your cities and plow salt into the ground where they stood; in short, to act like Europeans. Then, however, being Americans we pass out chewing gum and foreign aid to help rebuild what we just destroyed.

That baser instinct, however, is fortunately also mitigated by one equally strong which we suckled at the breast of our mother country with the milk of Magna Carta. I refer, of course, to the sanctity of the rule of law. As Edmund Burke said in 1775:

In this character of the Americans a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole...This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies, probably, than in any other people of the earth [because] the people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen.

We learned our lessons well at your knee. We learned from Entick v. Carrington that though a citizen lives in the rudest hut with no door or window, though the wind may blow through and the rain may pour in, the King of England with all his armies may not pass over his thresh hold without an invitation to enter.

We have taken the rights and liberties of Englishmen and extended them even further. We have enshrined them in a written Constitution, and from time to time, as we have done wrong to individuals and learned our lesson from that wrong doing, we have added additional protections.

We have been attacked by people from one particular part of the world. I am not an Arabist or a scholar of that region's history to any great degree but I think I can say those who planned this attack are mistaken about the United States in many ways. I believe they thought to wound us deeply by attacking our national symbols, and that they viewed the WTC as one such symbol. They thought, I imagine, that as a capitalist state, worshiping the almighty dollar, we would reel back, shaken and demoralized, by the loss of this great temple of Mammon. Truly they mistake us.

We reel back, not at the loss of a building, because bricks and mortar can always be restacked; we usually tear down our great edifices every few decades or so anyway, to construct something larger and more modern. What wounded us, what cut us to our souls, what enraged us beyond the comprehension of these bombers, was the loss of five thousand souls; sons and daughters, moms and dads, firemen, policemen, janitors, bankers, doctors and lawyers. Not just Americans, but Britons, Frenchmen, Germans, Indians, Pakistanis; by they hundreds they died with us in that pyre, five thousand souls swept away on an evil whim. For this we shall not forgive the perpetrators; this we shall never forget. They are sadly mistaken.

If I could say one thing to those attackers and to their followers it would be this:

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits...Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire. Wherefore, by their fruits shall ye know them.

I trust we will not again make the mistake of the Second World War and presume that because an individual or his forefathers came from that region or worships our common God in its way, that he is anything other than someone entitled to mutual rights and mutual respect. There will be no mass roundups based on race, there will be no mass internment camps based on religion. We are not the same people as we were in 1941, and thank God, we are not the same people as those with whom we are at war.

I take some pride, that as a member of the federal judiciary I have taken an oath to do equal justice to all who come before me, and I have great confidence that not only shall we honor that oath, but that the executive branch will equally honor its obligation to protect the rights of those who reside within our nation whatever their race or religion. If restrictions there are, and there will be, if some limitations arise on the freedom from government interference with our ability to travel, and there will be, they will be applied equally. If individual officials make mistakes simply because of someone's color or creed, we will correct those mistakes as quickly as possible and apologize for the error. We will all face the burden together, we shall spread it as fairly as possible, and we shall bear it with quiet determination and good humor, for we are at war.

Make no mistake about it, we are at war. It is a different war than those of the recent past, and we Americans tend to be so forward looking that we confine our vision only to the front, but there is historical precedent for what we are about to do. When our nation was still in its infancy we fought an undeclared war with your neighbors across the Channel, we sent our young navy to the Mediterranean to battle the corsairs of Barbary, and over the years we have chased bandits and pirates beyond our borders whenever our national interest required it. Often, and for many decades, we shared that job with the Royal Navy.

I cannot, in this English language, say anything about the endeavor upon which we now embark in any way better than my hero who led your fight for civilization in the last world war. Let me quote from two speeches by Mr. Churchill:

There shall be no halting or half measures, there shall be no compromise or parley. These gangs of bandits have sought to darken the light of the world; have sought to stand between the common people and their inheritance. They shall themselves be cast into the pit of death and shame, and only when the earth has been cleansed and purged of their crimes and villainy shall we turn from the task they have forced upon us, a task which we were reluctant to undertake, but which we shall now most faithfully and punctiliously discharge.

We do not war primarily with races as such. Tyranny is our foe, whatever trappings or disguise it wears, whatever language it speaks, be it external or internal, we must forever be on our guard, ever mobilized, ever vigilant, always ready to spring at its throat. In this, we march together.

In this indeed, I know, we shall march together. In this indeed I know we shall triumph.

It is to that triumph, to the triumph of the human spirit, to the triumph of freedom of thought and expression and belief, to the triumph of justice seasoned with mercy and force restrained by law, to all the freedoms and ideals so keenly represented by this great university, and most particularly by this dear and beloved college, to the international friendship and ties for which Hughes Hall so clearly stands, to all our professors, tutors, staff and graduates, and to the continuation and growth of our traditions of excellence and kindness that I ask you now to raise your glasses.

Ladies and Gentlemen: The Hughes Hall Society.

I know we're not supposed to question each others patriotism and stuff, but it's difficult to read that and not think that anyone who doesn't believe its words simply is not an American.

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THE GALL WAY:

Laura Bush doth protest too much (Jeff Guinn, Feb. 15, 2003, Dallas-Fort Worth Star-Telegram)

And just what, exactly, did Laura Bush expect?

When the first lady announced a Feb. 12 White House symposium honoring poets Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, that trio of honorees included two avowed social radicals and one closet disdainer of government. Among the modern-day poets invited to be part of the program were Sam Hamill, an outspoken pacifist, and Galway Kinnell, whose resume includes both a Pulitzer Prize and prominent 1960s and '70s opposition to U.S. war policies in Vietnam.

President George W. Bush is about to lead the nation into war with Iraq, though opinion polls indicate there's growing public opposition to such an act. In both modern and ancient history, there's a tradition of poets, playwrights and authors leading protests against war. [...]

Had the event been held as scheduled, though, Kinnell believes the three or four poets who agreed to host the program would have stuck to the White House agenda of reading some works by Whitman, Dickinson and Hughes and discussing their lives.

"Somewhere along the line, a question about the war might have come up, but it would not have been the travesty that the Laura Bush reaction made it appear it would be," Kinnell said. "It's very unlikely the day would have turned into a rant of anti-war poems."

Kinnell says he turned down the invitation to participate because, "from one point of view, what Laura Bush is doing with literary symposiums is a good thing. But I also think these literary events are an attempt to put a human face on the Bush administration and its questionable policies, and I can't separate that." [...]

A side benefit, Morrow said he hopes, will be "reminding people of the force poetry can have, causing them to read it a little bit more."

Here are a couple of things Mrs. Bush might have expected: (1) that poets, having been summoned to an event to celebrate their betters, might not choose to turn the event into a solipsistic wallow; (2) that they might have decent manners, and not try to embarrass their hosts. That she should have known better is amply demonstrated by the comment of Mr. Kinnell, who apparently thinks the Bush administration is not "human", but that poets are and by Mr. Morrow's belief that this will get people to read more poetry.

President Bush's new head of the National Endowment for the Arts happens to be a poet, Dana Gioia, who has famously (infamously if you're a left-wing poet) asked: Can Poetry Matter?. In his essay he suggested that the world of poetry has become an insular subculture that no longer interacts with the larger society. This little contretemps with the White House perfectly illustrates the point. Given an opportunity, with White House imprimatur, to celebrate poetry, these poets sought instead to turn the event into a denunciation of the American government and people, who contrary to the author's assertion, support the coming war in record numbers. Little wonder then that so few of us think modern poetry is intended for our ears, but is instead the mental onanism of an effete, ivory-towered, intellectual elite.

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WHY WAR:

Why Saddam will never disarm: the Iraqi leader is prepared to go to any lengths to hold on to his deadly weapons (William Shawcross, February 23, 2003, The Observer)

Saddam's obsession with his WMD has deep roots at home as well as abroad. First, he sees the threat of such weapons as a means of internal control over the 60 per cent of Iraqis who are Shia. The use of chemical weapons against the Kurds in 1998 taught the Shia the dangers of revolt. In 1999 a Shia revolt in the town of Najaf was crushed by Saddam's security forces accompanied by troops in white uniforms wearing gas masks. People were terrified that Saddam was about to gas them - with the weapons that Saddam denies having and for which the UN is still vainly searching. The Shia have been mostly cowed since.

WMD also helps to keep the regular armed forces in line, according to Amatzia Baram, of the Saban Centre at the Brookings Institution in Washington. They are controlled by the Special Security Organisation, which is loyal to Saddam. This serves as a counterweight to the regular army, whose officers Saddam does not trust. The army knows his ultimate power lies elsewhere.

Abroad, the benefits seem even more obvious. Saddam believes that Iraq's victory over Iran in 19[8]8 was largely to do with Iraq's massive use of chemical weapons. He also believes that that was one of the principal reasons the Allies did not march on Baghdad in 1991. Watching the stand-off with North Korea he may have concluded that only nuclear weapons provide an unassailable deterrent.

His third incentive is his desire to become the unquestioned leader of the Arab world. His failure to seize Kuwait's oil resources in 1991 convinced him that nuclear weapons were essential. With nuclear weapons he would feel able to confront Israel in a spectacular way.

Saddam apologists here in the West tend to make a big production out of the idea that he's a secularist, a Ba'Athist, rather than an Islamicist, and so can not ever work with the likes of al Qaeda and should not be considered part and parcel of the war on terror. In his excellent profile of Saddam, Mark Bowden demonstrated why this logic is faulty, and dangerous, Tales of the Tyrant:

What does Saddam want? By all accounts, he is not interested in money. This is not the case with other members of his family. His wife, Sajida, is known to have gone on million-dollar shopping sprees in New York and London, back in the days of Saddam's good relations with the West. Uday drives expensive cars and wears custom-tailored suits of his own design. Saddam himself isn't a hedonist; he lives a well-regulated, somewhat abstemious existence. He seems far more interested in fame than in money, desiring above all to be admired, remembered, and revered. A nineteen-volume official biography is mandatory reading for Iraqi government officials, and Saddam has also commissioned a six-hour film about his life, called The Long Days, which was edited by Terence Young, best known for directing three James Bond films. Saddam told his official biographer that he isn't interested in what people think of him today, only in what they will think of him in five hundred years. The root of Saddam's bloody, single-minded pursuit of power appears to be simple vanity. [...]

Each time Saddam has escaped death-when he survived, with a minor wound to his leg, a failed attempt in 1959 to assassinate Iraqi President Abd al-Karim Qasim; when he avoided the ultimate punishment in 1964 for his part in a failed Baath Party uprising; when he survived being trapped behind Iranian lines in the Iran-Iraq war; when he survived attempted coups d'etat; when he survived America's smart-bombing campaign against Baghdad, in 1991; when he survived the nationwide revolt after the Gulf War-it has strengthened his conviction that his path is divinely inspired and that greatness is his destiny. Because his world view is essentially tribal and patriarchal, destiny means blood. So he has ordered genealogists to construct a plausible family tree linking him to Fatima, the daughter of the prophet Muhammad. Saddam sees the prophet less as the bearer of divine revelation than as a political precursor-a great leader who unified the Arab peoples and inspired a flowering of Arab power and culture. The concocted link of bloodlines to Muhammad is symbolized by a 600-page hand-lettered copy of the Koran that was written with Saddam's own blood, which he donated a pint at a time over three years. It is now on display in a Baghdad museum.

If Saddam has a religion, it is a belief in the superiority of Arab history and culture, a tradition that he is convinced will rise up again and rattle the world. His imperial view of the grandeur that was Arabia is romantic, replete with fanciful visions of great palaces and wise and powerful sultans and caliphs. His notion of history has nothing to do with progress, with the advance of knowledge, with the evolution of individual rights and liberties, with any of the things that matter most to Western civilization. It has to do simply with power. To Saddam, the present global domination by the West, particularly the United States, is just a phase. America is infidel and inferior. It lacks the rich ancient heritage of Iraq and other Arab states. Its place at the summit of the world powers is just a historical quirk, an aberration, a consequence of its having acquired technological advantages. It cannot endure.

In a speech this past January 17, the eleventh anniversary of the start of the Gulf War, Saddam explained, "The Americans have not yet established a civilization, in the deep and comprehensive sense we give to civilization. What they have established is a metropolis of force ... Some people, perhaps including Arabs and plenty of Muslims and more than these in the wide world ... considered the ascent of the U.S. to the summit as the last scene in the world picture, after which there will be no more summits and no one will try to ascend and sit comfortably there. They considered it the end of the world as they hoped for, or as their scared souls suggested it to them."

Arabia, which Saddam sees as the wellspring of civilization, will one day own that summit again. When that day comes, whether in his lifetime or a century or even five centuries hence, his name will rank with those of the great men in history. Saddam sees himself as an established member of the pantheon of great men-conquerors, prophets, kings and presidents, scholars, poets, scientists. It doesn't matter if he understands their contributions and ideas. It matters only that they are the ones history has remembered and honored for their accomplishments.

This derangement makes it obvious that Saddam need not be a believing Muslim in order to be one of the most dangerous men in the Islamic world and a de facto ally of Islamicism.

MORE:
Saddam Hussein breathes fear, lives in fear, deals in fear (RICK MONTGOMERY, 2/23/03, Knight Ridder Newspapers)

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Q & A WITH THE FLAT EARTH SOCIETY:

Libertarians challenge Bush to answer 10 questions before going to war with Iraq (Libertarian Party Online, February 20, 2003)

The Libertarian Party is challenging President Bush to answer 10 simple, but important, questions about his policy of waging war against Iraq.

From what we hear, the President is too busy these days to answer every quarrelsome interrogatory from every marginal group in America, so we'll give it a shot (the LP's questions are indented):

(1) Isn't it possible that invading Iraq will cause more terrorism than it prevents?

Of course, it's possible. But here's what we know for sure: al Qaeda considers Saddam's retention of power after the 19991 war too have been a victory for Islam over the West and one in a series of such triumphs that they use as a recruiting tool because it shows their jihad is "winning".

(2) If Saddam is really a threat to the Middle East, why do his neighbors seem to fear him less than the U.S. government does?

We don't fear him, his own people do. Soon they won't have to.

(3) Why do you maintain that Iraq poses a more immediate threat than North Korea?

It's not--we'll deal with N. Korea next, but we happen to have already moved our forces to the Gulf. Presumably, having acknowledged the North Korean threat, you'll be on board for the pre-emptive strikes there?

(4) Why do you believe a U.S.-led "regime change" will do any more good in Iraq than it did in Panama, Haiti, or Bosnia?

Do any of those nations sponsor terrorism?

(5) You say Saddam has refused to comply with U.N. weapons inspectors. Does that mean that you intend to subject Americans to U.N. mandates in the future?

No, only our enemies.

(6) You point out that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction that "could" be turned over to terrorists. But couldn't the same be said of Pakistan, North Korea, and dozens of other nations? And do you intend to launch pre-emptive strikes against them as well?

Yes, if necessary to protect American security.

(7) Won't attacking Iraq make Saddam more likely to launch a biological or chemical attack?

Yes, if he can and I'm glad you acknowledge that inspections have done nothing to deprive him of WMD. However, the universal mantra of those who oppose the war, that Saddam will launch WMD if he has nothing left to lose, suggests that he might do so if he were diagnosed with cancer--are you willing to risk our safety on the health status of an aging crackpot?

(8) Considering that many of the September 11 hijackers were Saudi nationals - not Iraqis - why haven't you publicly accused the Saudi government of sponsoring terrorism?

Because they weren't sponsored by the Saudi government?

(9) Why have you stopped mentioning the name of the one individual who has been most closely linked to the 9/11 attacks: Osama bin Laden?

He's dead.

(10) Finally, Mr. President, if your Iraq policy is so successful, why are Americans more afraid than ever?

Because we're going to be vulnerable to anti-Western terrorism until those regimes and terrorist organizations that perpetrate it are annihilated.

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MAYBE THE ASTROS CAN MOVE THERE?

On Mars, Curveballs become Screwballs (Robert Roy Britt, 21 February 2003, Space.com)

If a baseball team traveled to Mars for an interplanetary away game, shortstops and second basemen would become instant sluggers, benefiting from the reduced gravity and thinner air.

And according to a new study, pitchers might find their curveballs behaving like screwballs. The reverse behavior would owe to Mars' practically nonexistent atmosphere and the complex "fluid dynamics" that make a spinning ball curve. [...]

Here's how a curveball works, again looking at it all from above:

A spinning object creates a whirlpool of air around it. On the left side of a curveball, this whirlpool is moving in the same direction as wind that's zipping past the ball, generating increased air speed. On the right side, the whirlpool opposes the oncoming wind, slowing it down.

As any airplane wing designer knows, faster-moving air means less pressure (wings are designed to make air move more quickly over the top, thus providing lift). With our curveball, the left side experiences less pressure than the right side, pulling the pitch to the left.

The phenomenon is called Magnus force.

In thin air, however, the whole whirlpool process breaks down if the distance a molecule must travel to hit another molecule is greater than the diameter of the spinning object. In this case, another process governs the ball's movement.

Now, sans a whirlpool, our intended curve ball interacts directly with incoming air.

"The side of the ball facing the incoming gas molecules will deflect these in the direction given by the rotation," researcher Hanno Essen, of Stockholm University, explained in an e-mail interview. "The ball will therefore (according to the law of action and reaction) tend in the opposite direction." Meaning the molecules go left, the ball goes right.

Those of us of a certain age can still recall teachers telling us that the break of a baseball was nothing more than an optical illusion, that it was physically impossible for it to actually curve in flight. So, when he was, all too briefly, Commissioner of Baseball, Bart Giammatti got a fellow Yale Professor, Robert Kemp Adair, to write a terrific little book about the The Physics of Baseball. It created kind of a cottage industry among physicists/baseball fans and made more than one of us want to hunt down an old teacher and say: Told you so!

MORE:
-The Crack-of-the-Bat: The Acoustics of the Bat Hitting the Ball (Robert Kemp Adair, Yale University, Presented Friday afternoon, June 8, 2001, 141st ASA Meeting, Chicago, IL)
-AUDIO: Bats, Balls and the Wind (The Weather Notebook)
-Fastball Feats: The Split-Second Act of Putting Bat on Ball (Paul Recer, The Associated Press)
-The Physics of Baseball (Alan Nathan)
-Baseball HR Simulator
-The Physics of Ball on Bat (Ned Rozell, Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks)
-The Physics of Baseballs: Foul Ball?: Unraveling the mystery of why it's so easy to hit a home run (Curtis Rist, May 2001, Discover)
-Science of Baseball (Exploratorium)
-Physicist Maps Bat's Sweet Spot (Kenneth Chang, 9/08/98, ABCNEWS.com)
-Playball (Beyond 2000)
-SCIENCE HAS A SWEET SPOT FOR BASEBALL: BASEBALL A PHYSICS PASTIME: SCIENTISTS DON'T CARE IF THEY EVER GET BACK. (Jeremy Manier, April 3, 2000, Chicago Tribune)
-Batspeed.com: offers over 50 detailed pages covering the latest research in baseball and softball hitting mechanics
-Beyond the Physics of Baseball (Don Malcolm, Baseball Primer)
-How To Neuter Coors: Taking the pop out of baseball's highest-scoring park. (John Pastier, July 5, 2002, Slate)
-REVIEW: of The Physics of Baseball (Michael J. Mehl)

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VIEWER WARNING--LEFTIST TWADDLE:

BOOKNOTES: Freedom: A History of US by Joy Hakim (C-SPAN, February 23, 2003)

-ESSAY: 'Freedom' tells America's storied past (Dusty Saunders, January 4, 2003, Rocky Mountain News)

Producer Philip Kunhardt, responsible for numerous PBS historical documentaries (Lincoln, The American Presidents and Echoes From the White House) has been thinking of the "freedom theme'' since his 1992 production of Lincoln. [...]

One hour, dealing with the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is "a very important example of how civil liberties came under duress during times of national problems," according to Kunhardt. "This has been one of our recurrent problems."

An hour?

MORE:
-Freedom: A History of US (PBS)
-BOOK SITE: Freedom: A History of US: The companion volume to a major 8-part PBS series hosted by Katie Couric (OUP)
-Meet the Writers: Joy Hakim: Biography (Barnes & Noble)
-LECTURE: Remarks by Joy Hakim (Upon Receipt Of The 1997 Michener Prize In Writing)
-ESSAY: Joy Hakim Should Not Write About the History of Europe (Alice Whealey, Textbook League)
-ESSAY: Textbook-Writers Promote Religious Tales as "History" (Earl Hautala, Textbook League)
-ESSAY: A History of US subjects students to religious indoctrination (Textbook League)

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LAND O' GOSHA:

Strange world awaits Bantus in metro area (MARK BIXLER, 02/23/03, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

Sometime this spring, in cities around the United States, the first of nearly 12,000 African refugees will step off airplanes and into a modern world as alien and strange as the bottom of the ocean. They will come with hopes of work, education and safety, at last, from a legacy of persecution.

They are Somali Bantus, a people devastated by massacre and rape after Somalia crumbled into civil war in 1991. Thousands left rural homes for refugee camps in Kenya. They have languished there for the last dozen years. Now the United States is opening its doors to the Bantus in one of the most ambitious and complex refugee resettlement initiatives in recent years. [...]

They will come in need of more help than most refugees. Few speak English. Many cannot read or write even in their native language. Only in the last few months have most seen telephones, flush toilets and clocks, in classes on American culture at the Kakuma Refugee Camp, on the sweltering plain of northwest Kenya. Some saw a bathtub for the first time and asked whether it was some sort of boat, said Sasha Chanoff, who coordinates the classes for the International Organization for Migration.

"They really don't have any exposure to modern development," he said.

The Bantus are descended from natives of Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania who were enslaved and taken to Somalia in the 1800s. They eventually won freedom but remained frequent victims of discrimination. They performed menial jobs and lacked political power and access to education. The Bantus also lacked clan affiliation, which made them easy prey for all sides in Somalia's civil war.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees sought to resettle the Bantus in one of their ancestral homes, Mozambique, but that plan fell through in 1997. Two years later, the State Department recognized the Bantus as a group eligible for resettlement on humanitarian grounds. [...]

There are various groups of Bantus, but the ones coming to the United States are those who volunteered to go to Mozambique in 1997. Nearly all belong to a Bantu branch called the Mushunguli. They were subsistence farmers who shunned society. Other Somalis sometimes refer to them with derogatory terms such as jareer, which refers to the characteristic kinky hair of Bantus, gosha, a Somali term for "forest dweller" and adoon, which means "slave."

That puts resettlement agencies in a tricky spot. They need Somali-speaking caseworkers but must find staffers able to give even-handed treatment.

Our racist past offers fertile soil for those who wish to revile America, but it says pretty much all you need to know about us that where African nations won't take in these folk, we are. And, in February 2021, you'll be reading about how a child from this group is valedictorian of her high school and is headed to Harvard.

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P[ET]AINFUL MEMORIES:

The French Lesson (ReGIS DeBRAY, February 23, 2003, NY Times)

In the year 212, Emperor Caracalla granted citizenship to all free men in the Roman Empire. Emboldened by that precedent, a friend of mine, a former high French official, once asked a president of the United States to treat Europeans as compatriots. It was an agreeable fantasy; only vassals were wanted.

For the current trans-Atlantic crisis to be defused, the White House would do well to steer between those extremes and to treat its European allies as what they are - citizens of independent states, each with an idiosyncratic history and geography. That approach would spare us many a useless bout of hysteria as the Security Council this week considers Iraq. To each its own geopolitics.

Eight out of 10 Europeans on the street agree with the French-German position, and the governments of Britain, Spain, Italy, et al., have cut themselves off from public opinion. In confronting that awkwardness, the United States has chosen France as its scapegoat. Not having any training as a satellite state, unlike the countries of Eastern Europe, France has assumed the right to judge for itself (despite a number of elites firmly in the American camp).

Holy incoherence, Batman! First he asks to be subsumed into the American Empire and granted American citizenship. Then he starts prattling about how Europeans want to be independent. Then he apparently writes Vichy France out of existence, that unfortunate episode when the proud French made themselves a satellite of Nazi Germany. Does anyone edit the Times?

---

WE REPORT. YOU DECIDE.:

Iraq unbound:You don't picture amusement parks, free elections and a (mostly) free press in the nation of Saddam Hussein. But that's reality in the 12-year-old Kurdish autonomous zone, reports (STEPHANIE NOLEN, Feb. 22, 2003, Globe & Mail)

In a smoky coffee shop in the Kurdish town of Salahuddin, two dozen men sat around a big-screen TV last weekend, watching the footage from peace demonstrations all over the world. And scowling.

"No war with Iraq?" one elderly man hissed. "What do those people know about war? They should spend five minutes as a Kurd. That would change their minds."

The men around him -- dressed in the traditional baggy trousers, cummerbund and turban of Kurdish warriors, or peshmerga -- all nodded in agreement. "So they say 'no war,' " another man said. "They made this regime, but now they do not want to fix the mess they made."

These days, people here in the Kurdish self-rule area of northern Iraq keep their TVs tuned to Fox News. The hawkish American news channel is right in sync with Kurdish sentiment.

You mean they don't watch Donahue, Chris Matthews and Pat Buchanan on the America First channel?

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THE AXIS OF THAT'S NOT CRICKET:

BBC viewers vent their anger at 'anti-US' bias of Iraq coverage (David Bamber and Chris Hastings, 23/02/2003, Daily Telegraph)

The BBC has received an unprecedented number of complaints at the alleged anti-war and anti-American tone of its coverage of the Iraqi crisis.

More than 400 viewers have rung the corporation in the past few weeks to complain that it has shown overwhelming bias. It is one of the largest reactions from viewers ever recorded.

One programme to attract opprobrium was the screening of a debate on Newsnight two weeks ago in which Tony Blair was savaged by an overwhelmingly anti-war audience. A Panorama programme on the crisis three weeks ago, which featured very few speakers in favour of military action, also provoked a hostile reaction.

Viewers have complained that BBC interviews with "ordinary Iraqis" in Baghdad routinely fail to point out that they risk death if they criticise Saddam Hussein. Many others have been incensed by BBC journalists seeming to add personal comment to their reports that is openly opposed to American policy and a possible war.

Some viewers were angered about a piece by Angus Roxburgh, the BBC's Brussels correspondent, on the BBC website on February 12, which was headlined: "Europe's new gang resists US 'bullying' ". He wrote: "President Bush's attitude has reminded Russians of the bad old days when American presidents branded Russia the axis of evil."

Yes, well, if the BBC still can't accept that communism was evil they're hardly going to believe that Saddam is, are they?

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LET ME HELP YOU WITH THAT ROCK:

Apologia for Evil (Rod Dreher, January 27, 2003, Breakpoint)

I try to do right by my wife. I make a decent living, which provides a roof over our heads, clothes on our backs, and food on our table. I do my best to be caring, thoughtful, and dependable. Though he¹s only three years old, our son shows her love as best he can. "I love you," he tells her all the time. We're not the Cleaver family, but all in all, things seem to be going pretty well at our house.

Now that I've seen The Hours, though, I know that if she were to decide one day, out of nowhere, to walk out on the boy and me . . . well, life is like that. The heart wants what it wants, and nobody has any business judging her. She¹s just doing what she has to to be happy.

The Hours is a feminist movie that has been praised to the skies by critics, took home some major Golden Globe awards, and is expected to do well in upcoming Academy Award nominations. I think the movie is pure poison, and am going to tell you why (warning: Major spoilers ahead). Then again, Gloria Steinem figured I'd react that way.

In a Los Angeles Times essay lauding the film, Steinem wrote, "Some male moviegoers emerged bewildered about why Laura wasn't happy with just her nice
house, nice marriage, and nice son

Well, call me a caveman, but yes, I did wonder why Laura (Julianne Moore), a 1950s suburban housewife with a loving husband and a small boy who adores
her, was made so miserable by her existence that she came close to killing herself, even though she was pregnant, and ultimately abandoned her husband and two young children to run off to Canada. It's telling that Steinem, who probably still thinks the National Organization for Women speaks for the entire female population, assumes that all women naturally understand Laura's decision (guess what, they don't).

To sharpen the point, it's not that Laura's unhappiness is hard to grasp, though she never talks to her nice-guy husband, or anybody else, about what she¹s
feeling. The objectionable thing is the film's view that Laura owed nothing to her husband and children, not even an explanation, and that her pursuit of happiness should trump everything else

That's the philosophical heart of this film: Individual happiness is the highest good in anyone's life, and brave are those who have the courage to put personal
fulfillment above any other entanglement. The Hours is a fairytale for contemporary narcissists. No wonder Hollywood loves it so.

Mr. Dreher, even with all that, is more charitable than we were to the book.

MORE:
Pathos or Bathos? (Claudia Winkler, January 24, 2003, Weekly Standard)

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DON'T TELL HARRY:

Notes of faith: Gospel choirs gain popularity in public schools (Colette M. Jenkins, Feb. 15, 2003, Akron Beacon Journal)

Gospel music is a source of inspiration and hope for Sarah Miller.

"I feel something way beyond the music,'' the Buchtel High School senior says. "It encourages me and strengthens my faith in God through its messages.''

Miller is among the students making up a growing number of gospel choirs in public schools, colleges and universities. In addition to bringing inspiration to audiences, the choirs have brought cultural renewal and fellowship to many of those who participate.

While the choirs primarily attract African-Americans and Christians, members of other faith groups and ethnic backgrounds also participate. (One local choir director remembers an atheist who joined the choir and later became a Christian.)

We had a gospel chorus at our elementary school (which I was the only white person in) and we used to go on field trips to sing at churches in Newark. Hard to believe folks can still do so without the ACLU getting its panties in a twist.

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THEIR WORST NIGHTMARE--A LATINO WITH A GAVEL:

Hispanic nominee terrifies Democrats (Ruben Navarrette Jr., 2/13/2003, Boston Globe)

[W]ho's afraid of Miguel Estrada?

Why Senate Democrats, of course. Why else would they have come out with guns blazing, turning the routine process of confirming an appellate court judge into a shootout at the O.K. Corral? With the exceptions of Justice Clarence Thomas and a few others, most Supreme Court nominations didn't even send this much lead flying.

In threatening to filibuster the nomination, Democrats accuse Estrada of being an inexperienced ''stealth nominee'' whose views on hot-button issues are still unknown despite their best attempts to drag them out. And yet, at the same time, they seem confident that his views -- if they were known -- would be too extreme for most Americans.

Huh? You can't fault Democrats for the doubletalk. If they told you the truth, you'd lose what little respect you have left for them.

The truth is that Democrats want to make an example of Miguel Estrada, whose appointment to the bench could make Hispanic voters look more favorably on the Bush administration. They also want to send a message to the White House that when it comes to confirming federal judges, there are some things they simply will not tolerate. Apparently at the top of the list: Independent-minded Hispanic hotshots who don't go around thanking liberals for everything that the nominees have accomplished on their own. [...]

Of course, Democrats insist their opposition to Estrada has nothing to do with the fact that he is Hispanic. But that claim has nothing to do with reality. While it may not be fair to suggest Democrats are opposing Estrada just because he is Hispanic, it would be naive to think that they would oppose him as aggressively as they have if he were not Hispanic. [...]

If Estrada makes it onto the appellate court -- despite the best efforts of Senate Democrats to prevent it -- Hispanics might ask what the party of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy has done for them lately.

That question--"What have you done for us lately?"--must give Terry McAuliffe night terrors, especially since even Donna Brazile has started to ask it aloud.

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STAND BESIDE US AND GUIDE US:

A Nation Bound by Faith: Of all its national traits, America's religiosity is probably the most baffling-and infuriating-for the rest of the world. Where does it come from? Why do Americans think they're on the side of right? And why it will not go away (Dirk Johnson, 2/24/03, NEWSWEEK)

When it comes to matters of might and right, Americans look to the heavens in a way that bewilders much of the rest of the world-especially Europe. A majority of Americans say religion shapes their lives, and it clearly shapes politics. Regular churchgoers are far more likely to vote Republican than Democratic, according to polls, and it's well known that the religious right is the Bush administration's political base. The president himself sometimes sounds like the nation's commander in the pulpit. His State of the Union address last month repeatedly invoked divine power, declaring confidence in "the loving God behind all of life and all of history." "May He guide us now," George W. Bush beseeched. [...]

According to polls, 80 percent of Americans say a belief in God shapes their views. Conservative, evangelical churches have seen strong growth across the country in recent years, while more liberal denominations struggle to fill their pews. A popular wristband reads wwjd, or "What would Jesus do?" Many Americans today want prayer in schools and sex-education campaigns to consist solely of teaching abstinence. The Boy Scouts of America excludes gays and atheists. Pro-football players point to the heavens in gratitude for scoring a touchdown, then praise Jesus in post game television interviews. [...]

Americans tend to see their country as being on the side of mercy and righteousness. What is good for America, the thinking goes, is good for the rest of the world, whether it realizes it or not.

This notion of American exceptionalism was the underpinning of Manifest Destiny, the mid-19th-century idea that America had a right and duty to extend its reach of power. The self-image of benevolence, with regard to international affairs, was burnished by America's role in the two world wars of the 20th century. Given that -Americans sent millions of men to fight tyranny in Europe, and then helped rebuild war-ravaged nations, the voices of pacifism coming from the Continent ring painfully hollow.

Many Americans agree with the White House that the looming war with Iraq is a battle against tyranny, a righteous act of liberating an oppressed people. "When Americans see a picture of a woman who is suffering, they say simply, `I want to help'," says Zainab Salbi, a 33-year-old Iraqi immigrant who founded Women for Women in Washington. "This is not something I see in the rest of the world." The flip side of that generosity, she adds, is the sometimes naive view that America "can fix everything-and always knows what's best." Benevolent or arrogant, perhaps some of both, Americans are praying for peace in the eleventh hour. But their faith may also bring them war.

Perhaps this is a case where arrogance and benevolence are intertwined. Confucius said: To see the right and not to do it is cowardice. Maybe it's just American self-confidence, even overweening self-confidence, that gives us a foolhardy courage to at least try and do the right thing?

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PSEUDO ECHO:

HYMIETOWN REDUX (NY Post, February 22, 2003)

When Manhattan Democrat Robert Jackson was asked on a radio talk show Thursday why an anti-war resolution is foundering in the City Council - only 12 of its 51 members are on board - he had an immediate answer.

He blamed the Jews.

"New York City is the home away from home for most Jews," said the freshman legislator, "and this is seen by many members of the Jewish community as a resolution that will go against [President] Bush and, in the long run, will not be in the best interests of the state of Israel."

According to Jackson, several of his council colleagues have been intimidated into silence by the pro-Israel crowd: "They've expressed concern," he said, "and I think that that is an issue."

Indeed, he warned ominously, "people are not talking about this" - "this" being the fact that "this whole issue" of support for Israel, along with post-9/11 sentiment, "is what's tying up this resolution."

So there you have it: Not only do the Jews run New York City, but they've cowed their opponents into silence.

The prevalence of such attitudes in black America makes it suicidal for the Democrats to nominate Joe Lieberman.

---

AT HOME:

Chirac is 'uniting world', says Mugabe (Alex Duval Smith, 22 February 2003, Independent)

Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe, and his wife, Grace, left their five-star Paris hotel last night at the end of the France-Africa summit, praising French hospitality and President Jacques Chirac's role in "uniting the world. "We've had tremendous hospitality, we felt at home," said Mr Mugabe, who woke up yesterday, his 79th birthday, in the palatial Plaza Athenee hotel.

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THE DEMOCRATS' VALETUDINARIAN:

The George W. Diet: Lose unsightly pounds by eating like a pig. (Michael Kinsley, February 20, 2003, Slate)

[T]his is essentially the logic adopted by the Bush administration and the Republican congressional leadership to rationalize turning the federal budget surplus back into huge deficits...[t]hey say that deficits are actually a good thing--despite what you may have heard from Ronald Reagan and almost every Republican before and since--because deficits create pressure for smaller government. "Conservatives Now See Deficits as a Tool to Fight Spending" was the headline on a recent New York Times article quoting a slew of them--including the chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, Glenn Hubbard.

This line of patter started a couple of years ago, when Bush inherited a budget in surplus. There is some sense in the idea that a surplus stimulates appetites and that prudence suggests giving the money back before it gets spent. But "giving back" money you don't have turns prudence on its head.

Back in the 1980s, liberals used to suspect that Reagan was up to something similar--purposely producing a deficit to discredit the government--and would leap with a great "aha" on any Reaganite remark half-implying as much. Today, what used to be the ulterior motive has become the public excuse. The Bushies apparently would rather be thought of as insanely Machiavellian than as shamefully irresponsible.

In case the chief White House economist, the House majority leader (Tom DeLay), and others actually believe in this magical fairy dust, we'd better explain patiently why it is unlikely to succeed. You see, boys and girls, the trouble with spending is that it costs money. If the government could spend money it doesn't have without running up debts that have to be paid back (with interest), there would be little reason to object. So running up those debts in order to reduce spending is a bit self-defeating.

This reminded us of a quote from Macaulay's History of England:

At every stage of the growth of the debt the nation has set up the same cry of anguish and despair....[After the Napoleonic Wars] the funded debt of
England...was in truth a fabulous debt; and we can hardly wonder that the cry of despair should have been louder than ever. Yet like Addison's valetudinarian, who continued to whimper that he was dying of consumption till he became so fat that he was shamed into silence, [England] went on complaining that she was sunk in poverty till her wealth showed itself by tokens which made her complaints ridiculous....The beggared, the bankrupt society not only proved able to meet all its obligations, but while meeting these obligations, grew richer and richer so fast that the growth could almost be discerned by the eye.

Sure it would be nice to have a government so small we could pay for it again, but that's not going to happen anytime soon. But the complaint, heard from Republicans until Ronald Reagan's deficits and corresponding economic boom proved it to be ridiculous, that running a deficit has any appreciable effect on the health of a society, is by now so outmoded as to seem like hypochondriacal raving, as it does here from Mr. Kinsley. It should suffice to point out that here, in the midst of what may come to be called the Fourth World War, the total government debt is $6.4 trillion, with a GDP of over $10 trillion--let's call it about 65% of GDP. By comparison, the debt rose above GDP during the Second World War (and the debt Mr. Macauly was reffering to was three times GDP), yet Republicans were denied control of Congress for sixty years when they called for balancing the budget. Democrats are more than welcome to this perennial loser of an issue.

---

AUST???:

Country Girl: Barricades & Brickwalls--and motherhood--won't keep Kasey Chambers from you (Zac Crain, Feb 06, 2003, Dallas Observer)

Here's the most significant way having a baby has changed Kasey Chambers' life: "I used to, as soon as I walked off stage, I would go straight to the back room and have a cigarette. And soon as I got pregnant, I gave up smoking. And now, I walk straight off stage and breast-feed my baby." She laughs, which she does often. "It's a little bit different."

You can occasionally hear the cause of that difference, her 8-month-old son, Talon, in the background as she speaks. Chambers' mom is looking after him while she does a few interviews from her home in Australia, about two hours north of Sydney. It's a week before Chambers is set to come to the United States for a five-week tour supporting her latest album, last year's Barricades & Brickwalls, and she's more than a little excited: "I'm like a little kid waiting for Christmas," she says and, of course, laughs. Touring is something she hasn't been able to do much since the record was released, because Talon was released not long after. She's ready to give her "itchy feet" a good scratch.

She won't be alone. Not like Chambers ever really has been. Well, OK, she was when she was growing up, when she was listening to her sacred country albums while her friends got their teen-age kicks with rock and roll. "I'm not much like my generation," Chambers sang on her debut, 2000's The Captain. "Their music only hurts my ears."

Australia? I thought she was from Austin...

MORE:
-REVIEW: of Barricades & Brickwalls (MICHAEL D. CLARK, Houston Chronicle)

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A REPUBLIC, NOT A PARLIAMENT:

European Governments On One Side, Voters On The Other (Clive Crook, Feb. 21, 2003, National Journal)

The White House apparently believes that divisions in Europe over the need to confront Saddam Hussein are of small concern. In many ways, it is right.
America does not need Europe's help to deal with threats to its security. Militarily, it may be better off alone -- or with just a few allies that are strategically placed or competent for niche tasks. The objections to war being expressed by the governments of France, Germany, Russia and others are unpersuasive. America has made its case repeatedly and at length, and the dissenters have failed to offer any plausible alternative to war. Given their earlier agreement to "serious consequences" for Saddam if he failed to disarm, their good faith is now in question. [...]

On top of all this is the desire -- unworthy, but understandable -- to let America carry the burden alone, so that Britain does not become a terrorist target. Britain is not immune to the logic of weakness, the desire to free ride on another's strength. Perhaps it is less inclined than some to dress this up as moral superiority, but it is not immune to that either. The opinion polls do suggest that a majority would support a war against Iraq so long as a second resolution at the United Nations explicitly authorized it. If you recall, that was the position in the United States as well, up until Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's recent presentation to the Security Council. That was when a good number of Americans decided that if Powell's evidence had failed to persuade the U.N., it was the U.N. that was at fault. There has been no corresponding shift of opinion in Britain. In recent days, views have moved the other way. And for now, a U.N. resolution explicitly authorizing war looks out of reach. [...]

If Britain had a constitution like America's, Blair would be unable to deliver the military support he has promised. The country is not evenly divided: A substantial majority of the public opposes war on the terms that now present themselves.

That last bit seems exactly backwards. Mr. Blair could at any moment lose the support of his own party and be thrown out of office, at which point British military support for the United States would evaporate. If Britain had a constitution like ours, he'd be immune to such overly direct democracy--barring impeachment--and his party would risk defeat at the next poll if it emasculated its own leader. This creates pressure, as we saw with Bill Clinton in the Balkans, for even an anti-war party to support practically any intervention that their leader drags them into.

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TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL:

Warning over sex disease 'crisis' (BBC, 2/22/03)

A national safe sex campaign is needed to counter a dramatic rise in the number of cases of sexually transmitted diseases, a group of MPs has warned.

They described the problem as a full blown crisis and said it particularly affects young people who have become complacent about the risks.

One of the groups causing the most concern was young women, who were increasingly likely to be infected. [...]

The latest official figures show a big rise in the number of HIV cases, but there is a similar increase in the incidence of more traditional diseases like gonorrhoea and syphilis.

Gee, who'da thunk that the government telling youngsters to engage in anal sex would lead to a rise in disease?

---

WHY NOT KEEP THE HOUSE DIVIDED?:

Battles are won, an audience is lost: The grand war scenes are a high achievement, but the grandiloquent talk brings 'Gods' down. (Kevin Thomas, February 21 2003, LA Times)

Just as the Civil War revealed a nation divided, Ronald F. Maxwell's "Gods and Generals," a prequel to his 1993 "Gettysburg," is a film divided. With an awesome sense of authenticity and scope, he has staged three major battles leading up to the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg, but he has populated his film with paragons rather than people.

Worse, they talk and talk and talk; this film is in danger of talking itself to death before the Union and the Confederacy are able to decimate each other. The battle scenes, however, attain a level of accomplishment that is likely to intrigue and please legions of Civil War buffs, especially battle re-enactors who participated extensively in the making of this film.

But all that yapping! -- great swaths of quotations from the Bible and the classics, countless ringing speeches, endless stretches of flowery dialogue. It's as if the scores of actors are portraying people who believe their every phrase and gesture was being recorded for posterity by an omniscient documentarian. Such overwhelming self-consciousness threatens to stifle the humanity of everyone within camera range. [...]

None of this may bother anyone able to view a battlefield as a place of glory rather than of folly, the site of the ultimate breakdown of civilization -- of mankind's failure to mediate its differences. To his credit, Maxwell does not flinch from showing the carnage of battle but never wallows in it. Unfortunately, his legions of soldiers too often seem more heroic than human.

The idea that a war that freed the slaves represented the "ultimate breakdown of civilization", as opposed to a mediated solution, which presumably would have kept at least some blacks enslaved, is so bizarre as to be unanswerable. Here, as in the question of whether it's morally justified to dethrone Saddam, such people seem to be members of a different "civilization" than the rest of us.

---

IN OUR YOUTH, OUR HEARTS WERE TOUCHED WITH FIRE:

U.S. Defeats Soviet Squad In Olympic Hockey by 4-3 (Gerald Eskenazi, 2/22/03, The New York Times

In one of the most startling and dramatic upsets in Olympic history, the underdog United States hockey team, composed in great part of collegians, defeated the defending champion Soviet squad by 4-3 tonight. [...]

The American goal that broke a 3-3 tie tonight was scored midway through the final period by a player who typifies the makeup of the United States team.

His name is Mike Eruzione, he is from Winthrop, Mass., he is the American team's captain and he was plucked from the obscurity of the Toledo Blades of the International League. His opponents tonight included world-renounced stars, some of them performing in the Olympics for the third time.

The Soviet team has captured the previous four Olympic hockey tournaments, going back to 1964, and five of the last six. The only club to defeat them since 1956 was the United States team of 1960, which won the gold medal at Squaw Valley, Calif.

Few victories in American Olympic play have provoked reaction comparable to tonight's decision at the red-seated, smallish Olympic Field House. At the final buzzer, after the fans had chanted seconds away, fathers and mothers and friends of the United Sates players dashed onto the ice, hugging anyone they could find in red, white and blue uniforms.

Meanwhile, in the stands, most of the 10,000 fans - including about 1,500 standees, who paid $24.40 apiece for a ticket - shouted "U.S.A.," over and over, and hundreds outside waved American flags.[...]

No hockey game is played nonstop for 60 minutes, but this one came close. The Russians have been famed for their conditioning techniques. They also were considered the finest hockey team in the world.

Unless you lived through the godforsaken '70s, as described below, you'll not be able to comprehend how huge this moment was. If our parents remember where they were when Kennedy was shot, we remember where we were when the US beat the Russkies.

It's not too much to say that it was here the worm began to turn and America began to believe in itself again and in the possibility of eventual triumph over the Soviet Union. As the 1972 theft of the Olympic gold in Men's Basketball became a metaphor for American ineffectiveness in the face of Soviet ruthlessness, so did the 1980 hockey win seem a metaphor for an America rising from the ashes of Vietnam, Watergate, energy crisis, and Iran hostage-taking. It may be merely a coincidence, but if so a providential one, that five days later Ronald Reagan, with his mantra of waging and winning the Cold War, scored a crushing upset victory over George H. W. Bush in the NH primary. And the American people never looked back...

---

NEXT TO FALL?:

A Lifelong Dissident Defies Iran's Rulers on Torture (ELAINE SCIOLINO, February 22, 2003, NY Times)

Ezatollah Sahabi is a war horse of the revolution. He began his dissident activity half a century ago after the Central Intelligence Agency staged a coup that overthrew the government and reinstated the monarchy. He spent 12 years in the shah's prisons, and in the heady early days of revolution he was rewarded with a seat on the ruling Revolutionary Council.

Then, repulsed by repression in the name of Islam, Mr. Sahabi turned against the system he helped create, writing and speaking out for the cause of freedom. In 2000, he was silenced - with prison.

Now, in his mid-70's, Mr. Sahabi is free again, in a manner of speaking. And he has dared the Islamic Republic to execute him. Death, he said, is preferable to the torment he suffers at the hands of a justice system that has broken him and continues to pursue him.

"If you believe I'm such a dangerous person, rid yourself and the country of me with my execution, for the sake of the country, the nation, the revolution and Islam," Mr. Sahabi wrote in a letter to the three branches of government that was written last summer and recently made public. "After all," he added, "there is another world, where we will all be accountable before God."

Mr. Sahabi's letter is the latest and perhaps most dramatic manifestation of a battle between political dissidents and a justice system run by clerics that uses various forms of repression, including torture. "This is one of the most important documents in the past decade," said Mohsen Kadivar, a mid-level cleric who was imprisoned for 18 months on charges of spreading lies, defaming Islam and disturbing public opinion with his writings. "There is a struggle today between democracy and dictatorship." [...]

Torture of political prisoners had been a linchpin of the reign of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and many of Iran's revolutionaries had suffered in his prisons. So the Islamic utopia on earth envisioned by its makers was supposed to abolish a repressive system that inflicted pain on those who opposed it.

Symbolically, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini made that point from the moment he stepped on Iranian soil in 1979 to make his revolution. The first place he visited was the graves of the political prisoners who had died at the hands of Savak, the shah's secret police force.

Legally, the Islamic Republic's Constitution explicitly bans torture, saying, "All forms of torture for the purpose of extracting confessions or acquiring information are forbidden," adding, "Any testimony, confession or oath obtained under duress is devoid of value."

The Islamic Republic did not end the repression, but simply introduced a new form of it. In addition to physical abuse, there is an open-ended effort to degrade prisoners by bringing morals charges against them and their families, including detailed accusations about sexual habits and activities.

The great tragedy of the Shah's Iran is that things like Savak and the exorbitant splendor with which he celebrated the 2500 years of Persian kingdom created such a distance between ruler and ruled that it undermined his legitimacy, even though much of the Westernization he'd brought and things like land reform had made him reasonably popular. Given the totalitarian definition of the state that Ayatollah Khomeini propounded Revolutionary Iran was never going to be successful:

The fundamental difference between Islamic government, on the one hand, and constitutional monarchies and republics, on the other, is this: whereas the representatives of the people or the monarch in such regimes engage in legislation, in Islam the legislative power and competence to establish laws belongs exclusively to God Almighty. The Sacred Legislator of Islam is the sole legislative power. No one has the right to legislate and no law may be executed except the law of the Divine Legislator. It is for this reason that in an Islamic government, a simple planning body takes the place of the legislative assembly that is one of the three branches of government. This body draws up programs for the different ministries in the light of the ordinances of Islam and thereby determines how public services are to be provided across the country.

...but, by resorting to the same tactics as the Shah employed, the mullahs have delegitimized their own relatively popular movement too.

---

THE A TEAM:

That Devil Ashcroft (David Tell, for the Editors, 03/03/2003, Weekly Standard)

A FEW WEEKS BACK, a Washington-based "investigative research" outfit called the Center for Public Integrity announced that it had recently "obtained" a large and significant set of confidential legal papers from someone inside the Justice Department--a someone whose name the Center for Public Integrity did not make public, his integrity being of a sort that bar association ethics panels and the department's own Office of Professional Responsibility tend not to recognize.

Never mind that, though. For CPI executive director Charles Lewis, the leak was a stroke of purest good fortune. He runs a scrupulously nonpartisan shop, you understand, and his donor list represents the full spectrum of American viewpoints, from the Gaia Fund to the Streisand Foundation and everything in between, and he cares only for the public interest, let the chips fall where they may. Okay, sure: If by chance, when fall they do, those chips should happen to embarrass a Republican, like that awful John Ashcroft fellow, well, then the good folks at CPI probably aren't going to start weeping in their beer, exactly. But never mind that, either. What matters is that an anonymous, self-styled whistle-blower gave Charles Lewis a copy of the latest "secret" Big Brother plan being hatched by awful John Ashcroft's awful staff henchmen, and that Lewis then made out like Paul Revere, rushing to warn each Middlesex village and farm--and all the Justice Department beat reporters, too--of an imminent and positively "breathtaking" threat to the Republic and its freedoms.

Also, Lewis made a photographic facsimile of the document in question--apparently an advanced but less-than-final draft of omnibus anti-terrorism legislation provisionally entitled the "Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003"--and posted it on CPI's Internet home page. Where it remains to this day, and where anybody interested might long ago have tracked it down and read the thing.

Which otherwise humble and obvious piece of information turns out to be the entire episode's explanatory linchpin, and much the most depressing aspect of all the overheated commentary it's occasioned. Because, as anybody who does take the trouble to track down and read the "Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003" very quickly begins to suspect, the overheated commentary it's occasioned is ill-informed--so freakishly ill-informed, in fact, as to constitute something close to an outright hoax, the punditry equivalent of one of those "I am treasurer of the Nigerian exile government" e-mail money scams. You wouldn't think it possible, but in this case, unfortunately, it cannot be dismissed out of hand: The pundits involved, Charles "Public Integrity" Lewis included, may barely have glanced at, much less earnestly studied, the very same Justice Department proposal they claim to find scandalous. [...]

No one need feel sorry for John Ashcroft personally; he doesn't seem to mind his critics all that much. Neither should anyone suppose that the mere existence of their criticism poses a consequential public policy problem in and of itself. Quite the contrary: Even in times of relative calm, how the attorney general of the United States balances considerations of public safety and individual rights in his administration of federal law is a subject of enormous importance. And any related proposal he advances should therefore warrant scrupulous public attention. The "Domestic Security Enhancement Act," should it ever formally debut, will be such a proposal. It ought to get some serious criticism.

But that's not what's happening. The criticism isn't serious; it is uniformly self-indulgent, heedless of detail, and hysterical. And especially in an age of terrorism, an insistence on the right kind of public debate should count as more than merely an aspirational nicety of goo-goo political science. Yes, civil liberties are at stake. But people's lives are, too. Executive-branch initiatives intended to help save those lives do not become "instruments of repression used by totalitarian states" (as the San Francisco Chronicle has lately suggested)--and ought not be set aside on that basis--purely by dint of the fact that they originate at staff levels of a Justice Department led by a Republican named Ashcroft. Nobody's civil liberties are advanced by lying about the government this way.

It was Richard Nixon who said that every Cabinet should have one potential future president in it. His was John Connally, who later spent $13 million to secure one delegate to the Republican convention, suggesting that here, as in so many other areas, Mr. Nixon's judgment was a tad sketchy. However, the basic point, that a president should be grooming a future party leader and must have the confidence to create alternate power centers even within his own government, remains valid.

The Clinton administration was conspicuous for the absence of such figures, at least until Bill Richardson came on board. (Bruce Babbitt was the closest thing in the initial cabinet, but was soon mired in scandal.) George W. Bush, on the other hand, in an early indication of the serene self-confidence that his critics still can't grasp, chose a cabinet that has a minimum of four people who'd be credible presidents--Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, John Ashcroft--and, significantly, they were put in charge of America's foreign and domestic security apparati. To the nation's great good fortune, this meant that when 9-11 struck there were competent and forceful figures running the agencies that mattered. Don Rumsfeld soon emerged as the star, but no one has had a better couple years than Mr. Ashcroft.

With every step he's taken, civil libertarians and fellow travelers (most of whom really just oppose the war and would gladly round up Muslims if only we'd return to isolationism) have accused him of wanting to shred the Constitution and impose some kind of dictatorship. But in courtroom after courtroom and judicial opinion after opinion he's been vindicated. We may well look back in ten or twenty years and tut-tut about this measure or that measure, but the Justice Department has proceeded in a reasonable manner throughout and, unlike his predecessors during WWI, WWII, and Vietnam, it appears Mr. Ashcroft will have nothing to be ashamed of and much to be proud of.

MORE:
Officials Say Case Against Florida Professor Had Been Hindered: Law enforcement officials long suspected Sami Al-Arian of posing a national security risk, but were slow to act because of legal, political and operational roadblocks. (ERIC LICHTBLAU and JUDITH MILLER, 2/21/03, NY Times)

---

THE WISDOM OF THE MARKET:

Boom Before the Bombs: American ordnance may soon rain over Iraq. But prices for homes and land are going nowhere but up these days (Melinda Liu, 2/24/03, NEWSWEEK)

Iraqi real estate may sound like a terrible investment right now. Yet the market is booming in all but a few places like Safwan, on the Kuwaiti border, where people worry that the soil is dangerously contaminated with depleted-uranium ammunition from Desert Storm. "Prices have doubled in the past three months," says Adnan Abd Al-Ridh, a real-estate agent in Basra. He quit his job as a car salesman six months ago to cash in on the boom. "The prices of both land and houses are rising," says a Western diplomat in Baghdad. "People think they'll be even higher in two months." Even the fear of U.S. firepower doesn't seem to deter buyers, who may be placing their faith in America's smart bombs. "Houses are riskier than land, because of the possibility of heavy bombing," a Baghdad real-estate agent says. "But people are used to bombardment in the no-fly zones. They know that ordinary houses are not normally a target."

Few people dare to say what the market will do after the war. The prospect of regime change is a risky topic. But watch what Iraqis are doing; their optimism is unmistakable. The Baghdad stock exchange is soaring, and private construction plans are pushing ahead. Sarmad Majeed, 36, whose family runs a coffee shop overhanging the Tigris in Baghdad, says he's investing 180 million dinars in a 14,000-square-foot shopping arcade. Two months ago he paid 60 million to buy land-use rights for the project. "Six months from now it will be worth 70 million," he predicts. An older employee, Naama Isa, recalls when the shop was so quiet that water buffalo liked to hang out in the shade beneath it. Asked why the market is surging now, both men pause a bit too long and then speak a bit too quickly. "The area is a desirable one," says Isa. In the same breath, Majeed answers: "We love our country."

Senior Iraqis 'are preparing to desert Saddam' - but not just yet (Anton La Guardia, 21/02/2003, Daily Telegraph)

Senior members of the Iraqi regime are "preparing their bolt-holes" in the conviction that Saddam Hussein is doomed, but are unlikely to risk staging a coup until a war begins, Whitehall sources said yesterday.

America and Britain have long hoped that the build-up to war might break the regime without the need for military action. But at present fear of Saddam within the Iraqi government is still greater than the fear of war.

None the less British officials say they have picked up signs that "people are preparing for the day after".

One said: "They are preparing bolt-holes overseas. They are sending messages out. Most people in the regime, even those at a very high level but not including Saddam Hussein, realise that time is short.

"They are not prepared to go down with Saddam. They will try to melt away into the greater Arab world. They are preparing as far as they can for the inevitable. But they have to be very careful. If they are spotted, they will be seen by the regime as potential traitors."

Iraq deserter says military personnel eager to quit (Jonathan S. Landay, February 22, 2003, Knight Ridder Newspapers)

An Iraqi army deserter yesterday described Saddam Hussein's military as being rife with corruption, outfitted with inoperable equipment and populated by troops ready to surrender the instant that U.S. forces attack.

"The regular army won't fight and my friends are looking forward to the day the Americans begin the war so that they can surrender," said Ali Qadir Jadir, a veteran tank mechanic of the 34th Brigade of the 1st Mechanized Division who fled to the Kurdish held north of Iraq.

Ali said none of the 128 soldiers in his unit, the Qurtuba Battalion, are willing to die for Saddam. But few will risk desertion before a U.S. invasion, preferring to surrender en masse when it begins, he said.

Time to light this candle.

---

DEATH WISH

'Gutsy' Dean rouses Democrats with call to arms (Donald Lambro, February 22, 2003, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

The Democrats' bitter split over Iraq broke wide open yesterday at their winter meeting when presidential candidate Howard Dean won standing ovations as he sharply rebuked party leaders and his political rivals for backing President Bush's war policies.

The long-simmering division in the party over whether to go to war to disarm Saddam Hussein erupted at the second day of the Democratic National Committee's gathering to preview its presidential contenders, who denounced many of Mr. Bush's policies and vowed to defeat him in 2004.

"What I want to know is, why is the Democratic Party leadership supporting the president's unilateral war on Iraq?" the former Vermont governor asked DNC members who were packed into a ballroom at the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Capitol Hill, with an overflow audience in two adjacent rooms. Why, he asked, jabbing a finger into the air for emphasis, did three of his Democratic rivals back the administration's war resolution in Congress? [...]

Compared with Mr. Dean's reception, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut received a tepid response when they explained their reasons for supporting Mr. Bush's war plans in Iraq. The response to former Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois was somewhat muted despite her opposition to military action.

When Mr. Gephardt said, "I'm proud that I wrote the resolution that helped lead the president to make his case to the United Nations," someone in the audience shouted, "Shame." [...]

Democratic strategist Donna Brazile said that "Dean won the day hands down," adding that his feisty delivery and anti-war rhetoric "could carry the day in many state primaries." But she did not see his anti-war agenda "winning the White House, because people want to be sure that we protect our national security and our homeland."

Noam Schreiber has just written, in the New Republic, that the Democrats have become captives of opinion polling--even of a few particular pollsters--and that it's made them cautious on issues like Iraq. But in a presidential nomination fight this effect is mitigated both because there are so many candidates there are necessarily a wide variety of pollsters and because they poll Democrats, not the whole country. Unfortunately for the Democrats, this is far more likely to be disastrous for them than the phenomenon that Mr. Schreiber is concerned with. That's because the Second Iraq War is the most popular in our nation's history before we've even won it, but it's terribly unpopular among the Democrat faithful. And it's impossible to imagine that subsequent actions--in North Korea, Syria, South Lebanon, or wherever--are going to be any more acceptable to primary voters. This is going to push the field Left and exacerbate their weakness on National Security at a time when the nation genuinely cares about such things.

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KOSCIUSZKO WE ARE HERE!:

Arrogance of France boosts eastern Europe's admiration for US (Robin Gedye, 2/22/03, Daily Telegraph)

President Jacques Chirac's tirade against eastern Europe's fledgling democracies was the best news residents of the Polish village of Bidla Podlaska have had since the last Soviet tank rolled out of the nearby base nearly 10 years ago.

Hard against Poland's eastern border with Russia, about 100 miles out of Warsaw on Route 80, Bidla Podlaska is tipped to become the new American military headquarters in Europe if American forces relocate from the increasingly hostile German environment.

Equipped with a barracks for several thousand men and a hospital to treat front-line casualties, its airfield would provide the perfect headquarters for America's new army in a new Europe.

Poland believes that M Chirac's intervention has raised the likelihood of a move by several notches.

That would not create problems for the Poles. Their love affair with America, which endured covertly under communist rule, now flourishes. [...]

"What Chirac said was horrible, truly awful. It has above all served to encourage the Eurosceptics while reinforcing the Rumsfeld doctrine by speaking of a 'family' that was old Europe and 'candidates' that are new Europe."

When Poles were asked in a recent Wprost opinion poll to name countries they considered "friends", 50 per cent put America first, 34 per cent Germany and 25 per cent France. At the same time, 50 per cent considered Poland's greatest enemy to be Russia, 40 per cent said it was Germany and seven per cent Iraq.

And that was even before M Chirac's outburst. "We understand that the fact that when Poland dared to express its opinion, it caused some confusion," said Poland's foreign minister, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz.

"But the fact is that France and Germany did not consult Poland when they put out their statement.

"The letter [from eight European leaders, including Tony Blair, backing America's Iraq policy] that we signed was to underline the significance of the transatlantic relationship. It was not about America and it was not about Europe. It was about America and Europe, the most important relationship of the 20th century."

Ya' gotta love that 40% of Poles still consider Germany to be the enemy.

MORE:
Poles Cherish U.S. as Friend, Fondly Recalling Its Support (CRAIG S. SMITH, February 22, 2003, NY Times)
Anti-Europeanism in America (Timothy Garton Ash, February 13, 2003, The New York Review of Books)

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DEIST OR DARWINIST?:

Pastor guilty of aiding genocide (Reuters, 2/19/03)

A Rwandan pastor and his son were found guilty of aiding and abetting genocide by a U.N. tribunal on Wednesday, and sentenced to 10 and 25 years respectively for helping to massacre ethnic Tutsis.

Elizaphan Ntakirutimana and his son Gerard were accused of herding large groups of Tutsi men, women and children into a church and hospital compound in the Kibuye region of western Rwanda in 1994 and then calling Hutus to come and kill them.

The 78-year-old Seventh Day Adventist pastor was found guilty of aiding and abetting genocide, a U.N. spokesman at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) said. His 45-year-old son Gerard, a doctor, was found guilty of the same charge and of genocide. The verdicts were unanimous. [...]

Rights groups say several church leaders from various denominations played a leading role in the killings, using their authority to encourage the massacres of Tutsis who tried to take refuge in the country's churches.

There's a genuinely bizarre trope making the rounds amongst the usual suspects about how this episode indicates something important about Christianity or religion in general. Bunk.

Obviously religion has a bloody history of persecuting unbelievers and it would be silly to deny it. What's that have to do with this? There's no suggestion that the violence here was sectarian in nature.

In fact, if anything, this seems to have been an episode of simple Darwinism at work. One tribe (one group of selfish genes) sought a competitive advantage over another. At least Christianity instructs us that what the pastor did was evil and unacceptable. For an evolutionist what he did was entirely natural and, if unfortunate, understandable. It was just that kind of inevitable logic of evolution that led Stephen Jay Gould--who could not accept the Holocaust as merely a function of competing gene pools--to become an apostate. Even if he could never come to full terms with what his revulsion should have told his head, at least he had the decency to feel it in his gut.

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KILL LENIN AND THE REVOLUTION FALLS:

A World of Enemies: Is It All Reagan's Fault? (Nicholas Stix, 2/19/03, Toogood Reports)

People usually seek to explain the fall of the Soviet Union and the East Bloc, via either of two competing theories. A theory popular in the U.S.,
especially among Republicans, holds that Ronald Reagan's 1980s arms buildup forced the Soviets to compete with us, a competition that eventually
exhausted their economy, and caused their system to collapse. By contrast, the theory of choice among many American leftists and foreigners is that the
Soviet Union and East Bloc were brought down by a bloodless, popular revolution - what fans (among them, journalist Paul Berman) of Czechoslovakian dissident playwright and contemporary President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel and his group, Charter 77, called the former Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Revolution."

During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan engineered the biggest peacetime arms buildup ever. On June 12, 1987 in West Berlin, he told the Soviet premier--thanks to speechwriter Peter Robinson - "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" And beginning in June, 1989, less than six months after Reagan handed over the reins of power to George Herbert Walker Bush, the world saw the biggest liberation, in terms of sheer numbers, in history. What's not to like?

If the conventional wisdom in the U.S. is correct, and Ronald Reagan's arms buildup caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, then Reagan must get both
the credit and the blame for today's world order, or lack thereof. With all due respect, however, I don't think he deserves either. Reagan cared deeply
about the millions oppressed by Soviet totalitarianism, but he did not cause The Wall to come down.

Alternatively, we are to believe that, inspired by a group of poets and artists who signed petitions and wrote editorials, in 1989, the Czechoslovakian people "shouted down" their communist rulers, and young East Germans simply decided to tear down the Berlin Wall. So, for 44 years, the Czechoslovakians and East Germans (not to mention all the other nationalities who suffered under the boot of Soviet terror) had needed only to mass in the street, and start shouting! Think of all of the missed opportunities! Such silliness will not convince any sober person above the age of consent, much less anyone familiar with the history of Soviet communism.

It was Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev that caused The Wall to fall, but not because Ronald Reagan had succeeded in converting him to the cause of
freedom, and not because Gorbachev sought to end the Soviet Union and the East Bloc. Rather, Gorbachev was a vain, confused man. Dreaming of being a beloved dictator, he sought to be both the dictator and the liberator of his people. As Stalin, Hitler, and Mao had already shown, however, the way to become a beloved dictator, is through murdering millions of one's own people, and terrorizing the rest. Most of the citizens whom a tyrant has not yet murdered, will learn to fear him, others will learn to love him, and some will feel both emotions for him. Witness the nostalgia for the "certainty" and "security" Stalin supposedly provided that is still widespread in "free" Russia, and the former Soviet Republics and East Bloc nations.

Gorbachev was a tyrant who stopped tyrannizing. In a tyranny, such a man is soon out of a job, if not dead. Gorbachev expected the Soviets to embrace
him as their leader. Instead, they no longer recognized him as leader, but as the cause of a vacuum in leadership. Soon enough, Gorby was an ex-leader.
In 1991, his resignation as Premier of the Soviet Union was redundant, since as many observers have commented, he was the ruler of a nation that no longer existed. Gorbachev is lucky to still be alive.

Mr. Stix is always an interesting writer, but this seems a bit sketchy. He's offered up three things that are not at all incompatible--the Reagan buildup, internal pressure from dissidents, and Gorbachev's incompetence--as competing causes of the fall of the Wall. In fact the three interlocked quite nicely.

What the Reaganite confrontation with the USSR did--following a decade of detente and three decades+ of containment--was demonstrate to the Soviet leaders that they were going to have to compete with capitalist democracy in development, construction, and deployment of new and sophisticated technologies and militarily defend the most unstable parts of the Soviet Bloc (Grenada, Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan). It was obvious as early as the 1940s that they could do no such thing, that just maintaining rough parity required acquiescence by American leaders. So when it came to things like stealth technology and space-based weapons it was apparent that major reform of the Soviet system would be required.

Mikhail Gorbachev, and those around him, had deluded themselves into believing that they could control such reform and steer it in the directions they wanted. The most important error in this regard was their belief that the Communist Revolution itself was still popular and that it might have worked, but that betrayal of its ideals by Stalin had corrupted it both in terms of popular support and its functionality. So Gorbachev unleashed Perestroika, the campaign to allow more open criticism of what had gone wrong in the Soviet Union, with the expectation that it would be Stalin who bore the brunt of the attacks. Instead, as David Remnick details in his indispensable Lenin's Tomb, the dissidents went after Lenin himself and undermined the very foundations of the Revolution. They showed that, far from being a good thing gone bad, communism had been an anti-human catastrophe from the start. And what is the point of reforming something evil? Why not scrap it and start over?

Meanwhile, having delegitimized the Soviet Union itself, how was Gorbachev supposed to keep its satellites in orbit? And once Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan (1989) and in Nicaragua the Sandinistas lost to Violetta Chamorro (1990), what realistic chance was there to keep the Eastern Europeans oppressed under a system they despised? As prior unrest had shown, in the end it was only Soviet tanks that could prop up the various governments of the Warsaw Pact nations--how was a military that couldn't defeat the mujahadeen supposed to put down uprisings in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc., all at the same time, all while the natives were getting restless at home, and all with a newly confrontational America seemingly just waiting for an excuse to attack?

It's impossible to assign blame/credit precisely among the three players--Reagan, the dissidents, and Gorbachev--but safe to say all three were integral to the process as it played out. Still, we--especially conservatives--should note that in the long run none of them mattered that much: communism was doomed because of what it is, not because of what anyone did. It's just as possible that had there been no Reagan the Soviet Union would have tried to reform a few years earlier and fallen apart then. It's possible that had a hard-liner taken over instead of Gorbachev he'd have tried keeping up with the U.S. for longer and done even more damage to Russia, maybe even tried to "win" in Afghanistan and clamp down on protests in Eastern Europe. This would have been bloodier but would not have delayed the collapse for long, might even have hastened it by sending the lumpenproletariat, whose sons were geing slaughtered in the Afghan War, into the street. Who knows? None of these plays of the hand were dealt.

Here's what we do know: by the 70s even normally sensible Republicans, like Henry Kissinger, considered communism to be a viable political/economic system that the West would have to learn to co-exist with for the duration. To the best of our knowledge, there was no reform movement at the high levels of Soviet government. Dissidents existed but went largely unheard. President Carter fairly accurately captured the dispiritedness of Westen man in his "malaise" speech. It seemed like the Cold War would end, at best in a draw, at worst with American capitalism collapsing upon itself.

And we know that this is what Ronald Reagan had to say to those who counseled accomodation (then, as now, a majority in Old Europe and on the American Left):

We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West but in the home of Marxism- Leninism, the Soviet Union. It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens. It also is in deep economic difficulty. The rate of growth in the national product has been steadily declining since the fifties and is less than half of what it was then.

The dimensions of this failure are astounding: a country which employs one-fifth of its population in agriculture is unable to feed its own people. Were it not for the private sector, the tiny private sector tolerated in Soviet agriculture, the country might be on the brink of famine. These private plots occupy a bare 3 percent of the arable land but account for nearly one-quarter of Soviet farm output and nearly one-third of meat products and vegetables. Overcentralized, with little or no incentives, year after year the Soviet system pours its best resources into the making of instruments of destruction. The constant shrinkage of economic growth combined with the growth of military production is putting a heavy strain on the Soviet people. What we see here is a political structure that no longer corresponds to its economic base, a society where productive forced are hampered by political ones.

The decay of the Soviet experiment should come as no surprise to us. Wherever the comparisons have been made between free and closed societies -- West Germany and East Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, Malaysia and Vietnam -- it is the democratic countries that are prosperous and responsive to the needs of their people. And one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: of all the millions of refugees we've seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward the Communist world. Today on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east to prevent their people from leaving.

The hard evidence of totalitarian rule has caused in mankind an uprising of the intellect and will. Whether it is the growth of the new schools of economics in America or England or the appearance of the so-called new philosophers in France, there is one unifying thread running through the intellectual work of these groups -- rejection of the arbitrary power of the state, the refusal to subordinate the rights of the individual to the superstate, the realization that collectivism stifles all the best human impulses....

Chairman Brezhnev repeatedly has stressed that the competition of ideas and systems must continue and that this is entirely consistent with relaxation of tensions and peace.

Well, we ask only that these systems begin by living up to their own constitutions, abiding by their own laws, and complying with the international obligations they have undertaken. We ask only for a process, a direction, a basic code of decency, not for an instant transformation.

We cannot ignore the fact that even without our encouragement there has been and will continue to be repeated explosion against repression and dictatorships. The Soviet Union itself is not immune to this reality. Any system is inherently unstable that has no peaceful means to legitimize its leaders. In such cases, the very repressiveness of the state ultimately drives people to resist it, if necessary, by force.

While we must be cautious about forcing the pace of change, we must not hesitate to declare our ultimate objectives and to take concrete actions to move toward them. We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings. So states the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, among other things, guarantees free elections.

The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.

This is not cultural imperialism; it is providing the means for genuine self-determination and protection for diversity. Democracy already flourishes in countries with very different cultures and historical experiences. It would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy. Who would voluntarily choose not to have the right to vote, decide to purchase government propaganda handouts instead of independent newspapers, prefer government to worker-controlled unions, opt for land to be owned by the state instead of those who till it, want government repression of religious liberty, a single political party instead of a free choice, a rigid cultural orthodoxy instead of democratic tolerance and diversity.

Since 1917 the Soviet Union has given covert political training and assistance to Marxist-Leninists in many countries. Of course, it also has promoted the use of violence and subversion by these same forces. Over the past several decades, West European and other social democrats, Christian democrats, and leaders have offered open assistance to fraternal, political, and social institutions to bring about peaceful and democratic progress. Appropriately, for a vigorous new democracy, the Federal Republic of Germany's political foundations have become a major force in this effort.

We in America now intend to take additional steps, as many of our allies have already done, toward realizing this same goal. The chairmen and other leaders of the national Republican and Democratic party organizations are initiating a study with the bipartisan American Political Foundation to determine how the United States can best contribute as a nation to the global campaign for democracy now gathering force. They will have the cooperation of congressional leaders of both parties, along with representatives of business, labor, and other major institutions in our society. I look forward to receiving their recommendations and to working with these institutions and the Congress in the common task of strengthening democracy throughout the world.

It is time that we committed ourselves as a nation -- in both the public and private sectors -- to assisting democratic development....

What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term -- the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people. And that's why we must continue our efforts to strengthen NATO even as we move forward with our zero-option initiative in the negotiations on intermediate-range forces and our proposal for a one-third reduction in strategic ballistic missile warheads.

Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace, but let it be clear we maintain this strength in the hope it will never be used, for the ultimate determinant in the struggle that's now going on in the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated.

The British people know that, given strong leadership, time, and a little bit of hope, the forces of good ultimately rally and triumph over evil. Here among you is the cradle of self-government, the Mother of Parliaments. Here is the enduring greatness of the British contribution to mankind, the great civilized ideas: individual liberty, representative government, and the rule of law under God.

Reagan said it. The dissidents believed it and repeated it. Gorbachev and his cronies feared it and sought to avoid it. It turned out to be true and the Wall came down. The great civilized ideas prevailed. There would seem to be plenty of credit to go around.

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OLD VS. NEW:

Profile in Conservative Courage (James K. Glassman, Feb. 21, 2003, Jewish World Review)

After months of noisy foreplay, Michael Powell has failed to produce. Today, one Republican and two Democrat members of the Federal Communications Commission forged a new working majority and thwarted their own chairman's plan to strip states of their power--and the four giant Bell companies of their telecom competitors.

The FCC decision was important. It means that the process of deregulation, begun with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, supported by every
conservative in the House and Senate, can continue. The Bells, the established regional monopolies in local service, have now entered the long-distance business in 70 percent of the states, and smaller competitive local exchange carriers, or CLECs, are now battling the Bells in the local arena and broadband, or fast Internet connections. The result: lower prices and better services for families and small businesses.

But with today's vote - an unusual and some would say humiliating defeat for the chairman of a powerful independent agency - the recriminations have
begun.

In an embarrassingly intemperate statement, Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.), the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, called the FCC decision "another body blow to the American economy" and heaped personal vituperation on Kevin Martin, the Republican who opposed Powell, calling him "a renegade" and the perpetrator of "a palace coup" and saying that "reform had been stabbed in the back." [...]

Well before the vote, the game for pro-Bell politicians and analysts has been to attack Martin - and any other Republican who opposes their position--as being disloyal to conservative principles.

But what do you call someone who says that the states, rather than the federal government, should make local decisions? Someone who believes that
competition, not Washington-dictated industrial policy, should determine winners and losers? Someone who thinks that investors need certainty before
committing their capital? Someone who believes that, when Congress passes a law, it should mean what it says, not what a group of changeable regulators opines?

I would call someone like that a conservative. [...]

Still, the Bells were not completely shut out. They did get what they wanted in broadband. And now they have to perform. They have to prove that they
will make the kind of investments in fast Internet connections that they have promised. We'll see.

Just hearing this on the radio this morning it sounded like they'd given the pols the right to regulate the old technology and deregulated the new. That seems like a reasonable deal. Let the bureaucrats tinker with something that's already dying and leave the future alone.

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THE GREATEST LOSS:

-OBIT: Malcolm X Shot to Death at Rally Here Malcolm Knew He Was a 'Marked Man' (Theodore Jones, 2/21/03, NY Times)

I live like a man who's already dead," Malcolm X said last Thursday in a two-hour interview in the Harlem office of his Organization for Afro-American Unity.

"I'm a marked man," he said slowly as he fingered the horn-rimmed glasses he wore and leaned forward to give emphasis to his words. "It doesn't frighten me for myself as long as I felt they would not hurt my family."

Asked about "they," Malcolm smiled, shook his head, and said, "those folks down at 116th Street and that man in Chicago."

The references, Malcolm quickly confirmed, were to his former associates in the Black Muslim movement and to Elijah Muhammad, the organizer and head of the movement. Before Malcolm X left the movement 18 months ago, he was the minister of the Black Muslim's Harlem mosque at 116th Street and Lenox Avenue.

"No one can get out with out trouble," Malcolm continued, "and this thing with me will be resolved by death and violence."

Why were they after him? "Because I'm me," he replied.

It's always seemed to me that the loss of Brother Malcolm was the most significant of the 60s--more than either Kennedy or Martin Luther King--because he was the one who was capable of thinking outside the box and had shown such personal growth before his murder. If his haj to Mecca really had the tranformative effect on his previously racist thinking that he claimed it did and if he'd maintained his message of self-help and self-improvement imagine how much different the past thirty years of black history might have been. Suppose that instead of, like Jesse Jackson, mau-mauing Washington for special privileges and benefits, the most charismatic black leader in America had demanded of blacks that they raise themselves up? Could black society be any worse off than it is today and mightn't it be much healthier?

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STOP THINKING OF ENGLAND!:

British Teens Told to Experiment with Oral Sex (Reuters, 2/21/03)

School children under 16 are being encouraged to experiment with oral sex as part of a Government-backed drive to cut Britain's sky-high teenage pregnancy rate, newspapers reported on Friday. The Times said the scheme, pioneered by Exeter University and backed by the Departments of Health and Education, trains teachers to discuss pre-sex "stopping points."

The idea is to reduce promiscuity by encouraging pupils to discover "levels of intimacy," including oral sex, instead of full sexual intercourse.

But family campaigners condemned the course, saying it would only encourage children to experiment with sex.

Robert Whelan, director of the Family Education Trust, told the newspaper: "I don't think that anyone believes that teaching pupils about oral sex will stop them having full sex--it is more likely to make them want to try it and it doesn't protect them against sexually transmitted diseases."

What ever happened to teaching them Algebra?

But wait, it gets worse:

Lynda Brine, a teacher from a Doncaster comprehensive who recently attended a training day for the course, says in today’s Times Educational Supplement that she was primed to deal with detailed questions about oral and anal sex. “I was amazed. Are these really the sort of questions to which we as a profession should be responding?” she writes.

“There was no framework for talking about responsibility or the emotional side of relationships. By following this course, I feel that teachers are implicitly supporting under-age sexual activity.”

If you've ever read And the Band Played On you can't be sanguine about anyone having anal sex. If you've not, suffice it to say there are reasons that our disease rates went down when we reduced our contact with fecal matter.

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FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES:

Frustrated Democrat Makes Friends in G.O.P. (KATHARINE Q. SEELYE,February 21, 2003, NY Times)

Two years ago, Donna Brazile, then Al Gore's campaign manager, was engaged in daily combat with Karl Rove, then George W. Bush's top campaign strategist.

Today, they chirpily exchange e-mail, chat on the phone and write letters, indulging in their shared zeal for the inner workings of politics.

"I like her a lot," said Mr. Rove, now ensconced in the West Wing as President Bush's chief political adviser.

Ms. Brazile, a committed Democrat who was the first black woman to manage a presidential campaign, has built similar relationships with other Republicans, like Grover Norquist, an influential conservative strategist. And her coziness with them comes as she is deeply frustrated with her own party for what she calls years of taking African-Americans for granted and for failing to organize for elections in a coherent way.

In fact, Ms. Brazile's alienation could well be viewed as emblematic of a Democratic Party in disarray. [...]

[A]s the new presidential season approaches, Ms. Brazile has spurned overtures from most of the Democratic candidates and opted out of the 2004 primaries. For the first time in her two decades in politics, she has hung out a shingle as a consultant who wants to be paid as well as other top Democratic strategists for her advice.

These days she pointedly calls herself a "totally independent Democrat." And she is not defensive about her chattiness with Republicans.

"I call Republicans because I can talk outside the box with them," she said. "I can talk with Democrats, but when I talk with Republicans, I learn a lot more." [...]

"The Republicans are in charge," she said. "I don't want African-Americans to wait four years or eight years for the Democrats to get back in the game before we make progress."

First Marty Peretz, now Donna Brazile...the Gorebots move Right?

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WERE THERE ANY MOROCCANS IN "CASABLANCA"?:

-REVIEW: of Gods and Generals (RogerEbert, Chicago Sun-Times)

Here is a Civil War movie that Trent Lott might enjoy. Less enlightened than "Gone With the Wind," obsessed with military strategy, impartial between South and North, religiously devout, it waits 70 minutes before introducing the first of its two speaking roles for African Americans; "Stonewall" Jackson assures his black cook that the South will free him, and the cook looks cautiously optimistic. If World War II were handled this way, there'd be hell to pay.

The movie is essentially about brave men on both sides who fought and died so that ... well, so that they could fight and die. They are led by generals of blinding brilliance and nobility, although one Northern general makes a stupid error and the movie shows hundreds of his men being slaughtered at great length as the result of it. [...]

"Gods and Generals" is the kind of movie beloved by people who never go to the movies, because they are primarily interested in something else--the Civil War, for example--and think historical accuracy is a virtue instead of an attribute. The film plays like a special issue of American Heritage.

When's the last time you saw a Frenchman in a John Wayne movie? Why should the people about whom a war is being fought be central characters if they aren't central to the fighting?

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THE COLD WAR? CAN YOU HUM A FEW BARS?:

An Axis of Appeasement: Why the "Old Europe" Balks (Daniel Pipes, February 21, 2003, NY Post)

"Appeasement" may sound like an insult, but it is a serious policy with a long history - and an enduring appeal highly relevant to today's circumstances.

Yale historian Paul Kennedy defines appeasement as a way of settling quarrels "by admitting and satisfying grievances through rational negotiation and compromise, thereby avoiding the resort to an armed conflict which would be expensive, bloody and possibly very dangerous."

The British Empire relied heavily on appeasement from the 1860s on, with good results - avoiding costly colonial conflicts while preserving the international status quo. To a lesser extent, other European governments also adopted the policy.

Then came 1914, when in a fit of delirium nearly all Europe abandoned appeasement and rushed into World War I with what Yale historian Peter Gay calls "a fervor bordering on a religious experience." A century had passed since the continent had experienced the miseries of war, and their memory had vanished. Worse, thinkers such as the German Friedrich Nietzsche developed theories glorifying war.

Four years (1914-18) of hell, especially in the trenches of northern France, then prompted immense guilt about the jubilation of 1914. A new consensus emerged: Never again would Europeans rush into war.

Appeasement looked better than ever. And so, as Adolf Hitler threatened in the 1930s, British and French leaders tried to buy him off. Of course, what worked in colonial wars had utterly disastrous results when dealing with an enemy like the Nazis.

This led to the policy of buying off totalitarian opponents being discredited. Throughout the Cold War, it appeared the Europeans had learned a lesson they would never forget. But forget they did, soon after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

In a brilliant Weekly Standard essay, Yale's David Gelernter recently explained how this happened. The power of appeasement was temporarily hidden by World War II and the Cold War, but with the passage of time, "The effects of the Second World War are vanishing while the effects of the First endure."

Why? Because, writes Gelernter, the First World War is far more comprehensible than the Second, which is "too big for the mind to grasp." Politically and spiritually, it feels increasingly as though World War II never took place.

It's not so much WWII that the Europeans wish to forget but the Cold War, when American hegemony forced them to confront a Soviet Union that they would just as soon have appeased. This resulted in a forty year period in which we made them defy their own nature and it unsettled them terribly. Nor is it readily apparent that this was a wise decision on our part. It seems likely that the Soviet Union would have fallen apart just as quickly had we withdrawn back into our typical isolation and it would certainly have crumbled even faster had it tried taking over and controlling all of continental Europe. It would have been ridiculously over-extended.

The correct lesson of the Cold War--given its cost in dollars, lives, and disruption of civil society--may well be that appeasement would have been preferable to containment. Of course, immediate preventative war with the Soviets in 1945 would have been the best option of all, but we've so much national pride invested in our Cold War "victory" that we find it impossible to accept such an idea. Still, it seems unfair to whip the Europeans with their attachment to appeasement when we're guilty of a just as deluded attachment to an equally wrongheaded containment, which remains at least as popular here as appeasement is in Europe.

MORE:
The Thirties revisited (Paul Greenberg, 2/21/03, Jewish World Review)

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NO BETTER WAR:

The immorality of losing (Hillel Halkin, 2/20/03, Jewish World Review)

I didn't have to move to Israel to outgrow my left-wing sympathies, nor to acknowledge the brutal nature of the North Vietnamese regime that took over South Vietnam, from which hundreds of thousands of "boat people" risked (and often lost) their lives fleeing; or the genocidal barbarism of its Khmer Rouge ally in Cambodia, which perpetrated an Asian Holocaust on its own people.

And I could have remained in America and realized that wherever in the world democratic, pro-American countries were compared with totalitarian, anti-American ones - South and North Korea, for example - the comparison was between prosperity and freedom on the one hand, and poverty, degradation and fear on the other.

There was nothing intrinsically wrong about the American intervention in Vietnam. It was a terrible war and the American conduct of it was often reprehensible. And yet had America won, not only would the peoples of Indochina have been far better off, the world would have been a safer place.

It might have been a world, for example, in which the Soviets thought twice about invading Afghanistan a few years later, thus setting off a chain of events that ended with the Taliban in power.

The perspective of Israel is hardly necessary to grasp this, even if it does help one to imagine more clearly how many South Vietnamese must have felt toward America in the 1960s: grateful that it cared about them, insecure about its ultimate intentions, and fearful of being cruelly abandoned by it - as indeed they eventually were.

It was not fighting the war in Vietnam that was immoral. It was losing it. Or rather, it was immoral to fight it if there was reason to believe it could not be won.

Perhaps, given the situation in Vietnam in those years, in which a series of weak and corrupt governments in Saigon could not rally the support of their own people, this was indeed the case. But Americans like me who did not make the distinction between a war that deserved to be fought if it was winnable and a war that did not deserve to be fought at all helped, by their protests, to make it unwinnable.

Those who still do not make this distinction are now marching blindly against a war in Iraq.

If anyone has failed to learn the lesson of Vietnam, it is they.

Unfortunately Mr. Halkin hasn't learned the lesson yet either and is, therefore, nowhere near harsh enough on himself for opposing America during the Vietnam War. Even though domestic opposition may have forced us to fight the war in ways that made little sense--for instance, not simply attacking North Vietnam--we nonetheless did manage to win it, in the sense of crushing the Viet Cong and leaving the South in a position where it was able to maintain itself against the North. It was only the subsequent cut off of all aid by the Democrats in Congress and the refusal to continue strategic bombing that enabled the North to finally triumph.

The lesson to be learned, as suggested below, is that we may well "win"a series of battles in the war on Islamicism--toppling the Taliban, Saddam, and maybe a couple other regimes--but sooner or later the opponents will prevail, long before the war has been seen to its completion, and we'll leave a sufficient problem in place that we'll end up having to go back in a few years and start the whole process over again. It may well be immoral to "lose", but we always do because we refuse to "win".

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REVOLT OF THE MASSES:

The Liberal Power (Peter Beinart, 02.19.03, New Republic)

"Last time, this nation entered a war to make the world safe for democracy and establish permanent peace; it was betrayed in the event because its aims were not embodied in the peace settlement. Do we now risk such a betrayal again?" Looking back to World War I, this journal asked that question on August 25, 1941, in an editorial called "For a Declaration of War." And that is the question again today.

Today's war debate also occurs against the backdrop of a past betrayal. The first Bush administration rallied the country behind war in the Gulf with impassioned denunciations of Saddam Hussein's cruelty. And that moralistic language helped win over the small contingent of hawkish liberals--people like Al Gore, Joseph Lieberman, Bob Graham, and the editors of this magazine--who gave the war its bipartisan veneer. But, when the Shia and Kurds rose up against Saddam, in the naive belief that the United States cared more about their freedom than Riyadh's displeasure, Saddam slaughtered them as America's nearby army watched. [...]

The unhappy truth is that, if the Bush administration wins the war but betrays the peace, the political consequences for the president will be small. Once the fighting is over, the American press will turn its attention elsewhere, just as it has in post-Taliban Afghanistan. But the consequences for hawkish liberalism will be great. Having been played for fools, most liberal hawks will retreat to a deep skepticism of American power. They will end up on the decent, feckless left--in the company of those who sincerely condemn men such as Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam but have no strategy for toppling them except empty exhortations to people power. And that soft isolationism will likely retake the Democratic Party. On the right, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney won't lose sleep if Chevron and Crown Prince Abdullah run things in post-Saddam Baghdad rather than Kanan Makiya. Paul Wolfowitz will either shut up or resign.

Many people would consider this ideological reshuffling an improvement. At home, liberals could reclaim the language of human rights for themselves, secure in the knowledge that it, and they, would no longer be sullied by an association with the 82nd Airborne. The collapse of hawkish liberalism might actually diminish anti-Americanism abroad since, absent their liberal allies, Rumsfeld and Cheney would be less likely to drape their actions in the moralistic talk Europeans find so grating. After all, no one protests Russia's intervention in Chechnya on the streets of Paris and Rome.

But, when the next Bosnia did come along, its leaders wouldn't find America's new separation between liberalism and power nearly so refreshing; between the realist left and the McGovernite left, they would have nowhere to turn. The truth is that liberalism has to try to harness American military power for its purposes because American tanks and bombs are often the only things that bring evil to heel. Opposing this war might have helped liberals retain their purity, but it would have done nothing for the people suffering under Saddam. If liberals are betrayed a second time in the Gulf, hawkish liberalism may well go into temporary eclipse. But one day we, and they, will need it again.

This is almost too funny for words. Note the "liberal" betrayal that goes unmentioned here, the descent of the Iron Curtain around ann Eastern Europe that FDR and Truman betrayed. This has little or nothing to do with liberalism or conservatism, it has everything to do with the fundamental weaknesses of democracy.

In a political system where the great mass of people make the decisions it's deuced hard to focus the state on anything beyond folks' narrow personal interests and they're seldom interested in expending their cash and blood on the freedom of strangers. So war almost always requires a spectacular provocation (often fake or at least overblown). That gives the nation's leaders just enough leeway to embark on a war of vengeance and destroy the malefactor (real or imagined). But by the time the war is approaching its logical conclusion--the rooting out of the ideologies with which you were at war and the restoration of freedom to states that weren't directly implicated--the peoples' attention has wandered back to their own bellies and no consensus any longer exists for the pursuit of such policies. Thus, we ended WWI with the Soviets in control of Russia. After WWII we left Eastern Europe under a communism indistinguishable from the Nazism we'd just "freed the world" of. We left North Korea in place. We bailed on South Vietnam even though it looked like they could hold out on their own with just minimal help from us. We've left Castro in place for forty years, even though he could have been toppled at any time. We left Saddam in power in '91 and we'll almost certainly end this war on terrorism with people like Assad and Qaddafi and Arafat and the rest still in power, meaning that we'll have had only a marginal impact on the Islamicism that created 9-11. In fact, the only real hope that we'll see the war through to its conclusion is if we're attacked again, preferably several times and with massive casualties. For it's only when we fear we might be the next to die that we're typically willing to lift our attention from our own navels. Mr. Beinart should know better than to believe that has anything to do with "hawkish liberals": it's just human nature.

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DEZIONIZATION:

Golden Calf still with us --- except it has multiplied (Rabbi Berel Wein, 2/21/03, Jewish World Review)

The narrative of the incident of Israel and the Golden Calf -- read this week publicly from the Torah -- is so riveting and fascinating that we return to it year after year with renewed and refreshed interest.

How did human beings that experienced godly Revelation at Sinai revert to worshipping a Golden Calf just a few short weeks later? What happened to the "the kingdom of priests and holy nation" to cause this terrible reversal of course?

The great biblical commentators and, in fact, the Jewish people itself, in its deepest soul, have all wrestled with the problem of understanding this unfathomable fall of Israel and its consequences. And even though a full solution to this problem is not present, at least not in this limited space, I think that there are a number of insights that are apparent from this event, and that these insights are pertinent and necessary to us, personally and nationally, today as well. [...]

In a wholesale manner, Jews are abandoning Judaism and are being encouraged to do so by others whose commitment to Judaism and Jewish survival is tepid, at best. In the present society's permissive atmosphere that allows one to construct the rules of one's own religion as one wishes, the "eiruv rav" agitates for the destruction of tradition and the elimination of explicitly stated Torah values and behavior. Is it any wonder, then, that the people yet dance around the Golden Calf?

Lastly, I wish to point out that saving the Jewish people from the clutches of the Golden Calf is not always pleasant and joyful work. When Moses returns to the encampment of the Jews and sees for himself the destruction -- both physical and moral -- that the creation of the Golden Calf has wrought, he calls for action, even for civil war in order to save the people. "Who is unto G-d, let him come unto me!" is his battle cry. And the men of the tribe of Levi who rallied to his cause at that fateful moment in Jewish history, slew thousands in order to save Israel from the wrath of Godly destruction.

Moses remembers the loyalty of Levi to the cause of Jewish survival in his final blessings to the people of Israel. "They spared not even family in their loyalty to G-d's covenant," he exclaims. Moses allows no compromise with the Golden Calf, for that will only lead the people down the slippery slope of spiritual annihilation.
It is an insight that we should ponder in our current society as well.

Secularization is an especially odd phenomenon in Israel--evidenced most recently in the electoral success of Shinui. Why should Israel exist if it's not a distinctly Jewish state?

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FUNERAL BLUES:

W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden (1907-73) was born in York, England on January 21, 1907. Here's a favorite:

Friday's Child
(In memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
martyred at Flossenburg, April 9th, 1945)

He told us we were free to choose
But, children as we were, we thought—
'Paternal Love will only use
Force in the last resort

On those too bumptious to repent'--
Accustomed to religious dread,
It never crossed our minds He meant
Exactly what he said.

Perhaps He frowns, perhaps He grieves,
But it seems idle to discuss
If anger or compassion leaves
The bigger bangs to us.

What reverence is rightly paid
To a Divinity so odd
He lets the Adam whom He made
Perform the Acts of God?

It might be jolly if we felt
Awe at this Universal Man
(When kings were local, people knelt);
Some try to, but who can?

The self-observed observing Mind
We meet when we observe at all
Is not alarming or unkind
But utterly banal.

Though instruments at Its command
Make wish and counterwish come true,
It clearly cannot understand
What It can clearly do.

Since the analogies are rot
Our senses based belief upon,
We have no means of learning what
Is really going on,

And must put up with having learned
All proofs or disproofs that we tender
Of His existence are returned
Unopened to the sender.

Now, did He really break the seal
And rise again? We dare not say;
But conscious unbelievers feel
Quite sure of Judgment Day.

Meanwhile, a silence on the cross,
As dead as we shall ever be,
Speaks of some total gain or loss,
And you and I are free

To guess from the insulted face
Just what Appearances He saves
By suffering in a public places
A death reserved for slaves.

MORE:
WH Auden (kirjasto)
- Audio Reading: W. H. Auden (A reading by W. H. Auden, at the 92nd St. Y's Poetry Center, March 27, 1972)

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DON'T THESE PEOPLE HAVE HOBBIES?:

Group asks Las Cruces, N.M., to stop using cross logo (The Associated Press, 02.19.03)

The city of Las Cruces has been asked to stop using its logo, which a group says is an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.

The logo has three crosses inside a symbol of the sun. Cruces is Spanish for “crosses.”

The southern New Mexico chapter of the Americans United for Separation of Church and State contends the logo violates the separation of church and state under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Jesse Chavez, chapter president, said that “the present logo is divisive, symbolizing an affiliation with a particular religion, that excludes those not so affiliated.”

“There is no justification for the city to adopt a logo that has this effect on its residents,” he said in a letter earlier this month to Jim Ericson, city manager.

These people really are out to expunge all evidence of religion from our public lives.

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PRO-OLD & WEIRD:

Film of the Week: 'Gods and Generals' (Steve Sailer, 2/20/03, UPI)

Recounting the first two years of the war, "Gods and Generals" tracks three heroes. Two are natural warriors from Virginia: Robert Duvall as Robert E. Lee and stage veteran Stephen Lang as Stonewall Jackson. The other is a painfully self-made one from Maine: Jeff Daniels as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the professor of rhetoric who may have single-handedly saved the Union at Gettysburg. [...]

[L]ang's Jackson, the central character, stands in battle like the proverbial stonewall, serenely convinced that his fate is in God's hands, but also ferociously willing to help as many Yanks as possible meet their fates. Lang's volcanic performance as this Old Testament prophet-conqueror demonstrates that Stonewall was a great man indeed (although perhaps Jackson was not so common and boring as to be wholly sane).

In a Hollywood that lusts after the under-25 demographic, Maxwell has done something very strange. He has made "Gods and Generals" in the style that his 19th century characters would have thought fitting. The pace of this nearly four-hour film is bucolic, the dialogue reverent, the people heroic, and the vision romantic.

Modern audiences will have particular trouble with the literary formality with which characters address each other. They speak in ways that seem unnatural to us -- they read the Bible aloud together and quote from memory 17th century poetry and Suetonius' Roman history.

Yet, that's how the educated classes talked in the 1860s. They read more than we do now, but owned less printed material. So, they read classics over and
over. Lincoln, for example, was marinated in the King James Bible and Shakespeare. They were adept at high rhetoric and loved orations.

"Gods and Generals" embodies what Greil Marcus, biographer of Bob Dylan (who contributes the closing song), called "the old, weird America:" those peculiar little communities that existed before mass media, rapid transportation, and widespread military service rationalized and homogenized our culture.

Perhaps Hollywood noticed that the top 6 grossing films of 2002 were essentially based on the themes of "old, weird America": Spider-Man; Star Wars: Attack of the Clones; The Two Towers; Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets; My Big Fat Greek Wedding; and Signs. They are steeped in ideas like the struggle between good & evil; responsibility; loyalty; respect, even adoration, for tradition; the orderliness of the Universe; etc.. Hollywood may be a den of iniquity, but they do notice what sells, and traditional Western values are moving product right now.

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WHERE EVERYONE IS MIDDLE CLASS:

We're Rich: But why is it so hard to admit? (Andy Crouch, February, 2003, Christianity Today)

There are a handful of Americans who consider themselves rich. I have met a few of them, and they generally are neither spendthrift nor spoiled, especially if they are Christ-followers. They possess what a friend calls the one true advantage of wealth: the personal and irrefutable proof that wealth cannot make you happy. Consequently, they are both diffident and shrewd about their riches.

But most Americans I know think that someone else is wealthy. Most of my friends are in the top third of Americans by household income, but few of us speak of wealth. We are just getting by, with enough to pay for the car and the rent, prepare for retirement and our children's college, and enjoy a few cups of tea in faraway places. We talk about our money the same way that Harvard students talk about their grades—in terms guarded, vague, and self-deprecating all at once. "How did you do on your paper?" "Oh, not so well-terribly, really." (One would later find that student's name on the short list for a Fulbright.) We won't say how much we have or make, but it certainly isn't ever enough.

In my imagination, I found myself trying to explain to Mary why I wasn't really rich. Somehow I'd have to help her understand the costs of daycare (although she has two children), the paradoxical costs borne by a two-income home (her husband works in a city five hours away), the price of college (in Kenya, school fees begin in first grade), the price of housing (outside the slums, Nairobi real estate is not much less expensive than that of many American cities). Somehow I'd have to explain that an American passport and fluent English aren't all they're cracked up to be.

Then again, I could just admit what God and the whole world already know is true. We are—I am—wealthy. Simply rich. Why is that so hard for us to say? Such an admission would, of course, make us responsible for the stewardship of our riches. It would put an end to both complaining and complacency. And since the Christian life starts where self-pity and self-justification end, to admit we are rich might also lead us closer to the life that is really life.

It's too bad we've lost the language and the intellectual framework with which to discuss such things as aristocracy, because in a sense that's what Americans are: the world's aristocracy. The part of that where we're the filthiest stinkin' rich people who ever lived is kind of fun, but we're dealing less well with the obligations that such status imposes upon us. (Of those to whom much is given, much should be expected.) And, of course, the Europeans are handling even less well the knowledge that they've been replaced by us.

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GODSPEED, JOHN GLENN:

Glenn Orbits Earth 3 Times Safely (Richard Witkin, 2/20/62, The New York Times)

John H. Glenn Jr. orbited three times around the earth today and landed safely to become the first American to make such a flight.

The 40-year-old Marine Corps lieutenant colonel traveled about 81,000 miles in 4 hours 56 minutes before splashing into the Atlantic at 2:43 P.M. Eastern Standard Time.

He had been launched from here at 9:47 A. M.

The astronaut's safe return was no less a relief than a thrill to the Project Mercury team, because there had been real concern that the Friendship 7 capsule might disintegrate as it rammed back into the atmosphere.

There had also been a serious question whether Colonel Glenn could complete three orbits as planned. But despite persistent control problems, he managed to complete the entire flight plan.

It's worth remembering that at this time twenty years ago John Glenn was considered a, if not the, front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

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FOR A MORE ROBUST DETERRENCE:

US plan for new nuclear arsenal: Secret talks may lead to breaking treaties (Julian Borger, February 19, 2003, The Guardian)

The Bush administration is planning a secret meeting in August to discuss the construction of a new generation of nuclear weapons, including "mini-nukes", "bunker-busters" and neutron bombs designed to destroy chemical or biological agents, according to a leaked Pentagon document.

The meeting of senior military officials and US nuclear scientists at the Omaha headquarters of the US Strategic Command would also decide whether to restart nuclear testing and how to convince the American public that the new weapons are necessary.

The leaked preparations for the meeting are the clearest sign yet that the administration is determined to overhaul its nuclear arsenal so that it could be used as part of the new "Bush doctrine" of pre-emption, to strike the stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons of rogue states.

North Korea offers a uniquely appropriate opportunity to begin to enforce a more serious form of nuclear deterrence. The U.S. should use whatever weapons are necessary to eliminate both its nuclear and its missile capabilities and warn other rogue nations that they face similar fates unless they desist in their own programs. If we instead demonstrate that the development of nukes suffices to make us back down then it would be irresponsible for these dictatorships not to try to get ahold of such weapons.

UPDATE:
PRE-EMPT NOW:
S Korean alert at jet incursion (BBC, 2/20/03)

South Korea has responded strongly to what it said was a violation of its airspace by a North Korean fighter jet early on Thursday.

The South scrambled two fighters to intercept the North Korean MiG-19 and put an anti-aircraft missile base on battle alert, the Defence Ministry in Seoul said.

The two-minute border crossing was the first aerial incursion by the North for 20 years. South Korea called it a provocation and said it would lodge a strong protest.

The incident came hours after the United States announced that Secretary of State Colin Powell would attend the inauguration of President-elect Roh Moo-hyun next week.

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THE HALT, THE LAME, AND THE BRAIN-DEAD:

Who's the Real Peace Candidate?: With Kucinich in, the anti-war vote is up for grabs (Doug Ireland, 2/21/03, LA Weekly)

Kucinich's late entry means he doesn't even have the bare bones of a campaign yet, and there are other problems. Although he's a passionate orator with red-white-and-blue rhetoric who can bring audiences to their feet, the diminutive, excitable Kucinich's demeanor provokes references to what journalists usually demurely call his “gravitas problem."

Then there's Kucinich's long record of voting against federal funding for abortions in Congress: A believer in "life from the moment of conception," Kucinich has gone so far as to vote against allowing female soldiers and military dependents to have an abortion in an overseas military hospital even if they pay for it themselves.

Kucinich is also considered a little flaky by the national media (a reputation not helped by his public embrace of New Age guru Marianne Williamson).

Kucinich is not alone in competing for the anti-war vote. There is, of course, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, who scores points with anti-war audiences by scolding his opponents for voting the blank check. Yet Dean's shifting positions on Iraq leave one wondering if they aren't propelled more by his desire to position himself against the rest of the field than by deep analysis and conviction. [...]

Then there's Al Sharpton, whose opposition to the war in Iraq is without nuance (nor is it his principal message). Sharpton is weighted down by too much baggage. Whenever he is grilled by the news media, Rev. Al has to spend much of his time explaining his false accusations in the Tawana Brawley rape hoax, his years as an FBI informant, his past financial scams, and his previous remarks tinged with anti-Semitism--so much so that his substantive message just can't get through.

His vote will be further undercut by former Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile's scheme to run "favorite son" black candidates in those states where Sharpton is expected to make an important effort, to dilute Rev. Al's appeal. Brazile has now found a favorite daughter: Former Illinois Senator Carol Moseley-Braun (who was chased from office by the voters in a hail of money and ethics scandals) is--at Brazile's urging--about to launch a presidential candidacy that would pit her against Sharpton in all the states. She, too, says she'll run as an anti-war candidate. [...]

As of now, it looks as though anti-war Democratic primary voters will have to choose among the unacceptable and the merely flawed.

Perhaps the message is attracting the messengers it deserves?

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POPSICLE STICK:

Friend details gruesome visit to cryogenics lab (ESPN.com, February 19, 2003)

What would Ted Williams have thought if he knew his body would be hanging upside down in a nitrogen-filled tank with perhaps four other full bodies and five heads at a cryogenics lab inside a strip mall in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Williams' close friend, Buzz Hamon, said the last time he spoke with The Splendid Splinter, Williams said, "I need a lawyer ... Because I made a mistake."

Then the phone went dead. [...]

When Ted Williams died last July 5, John Henry arranged to have his father's body frozen and moved to Alcor.

Sources familiar with what took place that day told the Daily News that the minute Williams drew his last breath, hospital officials filled his body with blood thinner and stuffed it into a bag filled with dry ice for transportation to the airport in Ocala, Fla., where a plane chartered by Alcor was waiting on the tarmac to fly it to Arizona. [...]

With the help of Bobbie Sgrillo, a friend and former mortician who lives in Phoenix, Hamon gained access to Alcor. According to the Daily News, Sgrillo's knowledge of the mortuary business enabled her to gain the confidence of overly protective Alcor officials, who -- after interviewing her for a half-hour -- agreed to give her a tour of the facility. She then asked if she could bring along Hamon, whom she introduced to them as "my friend Art, a public-relations man."

"After what I saw and experienced, I just can't contain myself any longer," Hamon told the Daily News by phone Tuesday. "I want the whole world to know what they've done to Ted. This was absolutely horrifying."

Hamon told the newspaper he was "appalled" by the cluttered conditions inside the facility, then gave the Daily News the following account of entering the containment room where Williams' body is stored:

"There were six huge cylinders along the wall, one of which was filled with liquid nitrogen to supply the other five. I was stunned when [Alcor CEO Jerry Lemler] told me they had 55 'patients,' as he called them. How could they have so many?

"Then he told me there were four full bodies and five heads in each of the cylinders. In addition, there were two short cylinders with just heads in them."

Hamon said he "was horrified" to hear that Williams' body was not stored in a separate cylinder.

"All I could think of was Ted and what he would have thought if he'd known what John Henry had done to him," Hamon told the Daily News. "It was bad enough knowing that somewhere in one of these cylinders, Ted was hanging suspended, upside down, with his head in a bucket. But he was in there with four or five other bodies and assorted heads.

"For all the money this supposedly cost John Henry, he wouldn't even see to it that Ted was alone."

What a crappy way to treat your father.

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APROPOS:

Rift With Europe Runs Deep: U.S. views on war, guns, religion strain the alliance that has defined Western democracy. (Sebastian Rotella, February 18, 2003, LA Times)

Some Europeans foresee a split with the United States, as increasingly hostile cultures disagree over fundamental values and issues: war, guns, the death penalty, the role of religion in everyday life.

"The biblical references in politics, the division of the world between good and evil, these are things that we simply don't get," said Francois Heisbourg, director of the Foundation for Strategic Research, a Paris think tank. "In a number of areas, it seems that we are no longer part of the same civilization. You have a fairly religious society on one hand and generally secular societies on the other operating with different references. What would unite us does not seem to be in the forefront."

As if to prove the point below.

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INSENSIBLE:

Fetus or baby? (Christine Chinlund, 2/17/2003, Boston Globe)

THE GLOBE WAS technically correct when it referred to the youngest shooting victim in the Feb. 5 MBTA Orange Line tragedy as a ''fetus.'' But sometimes you can be technically correct and wrong at the same time.This was one of those times.

The facts: On the night of Feb. 5, Hawa Adama Barry, in the ninth month of pregnancy, was shot in the abdomen during a stand-off between two groups of young men on the T.

Early reports from authorities suggested that the baby died in the womb. Thus, the Globe's headline the next day read: ''Passenger shot, her fetus dies as men clash on T.'' Other media outlets had similar accounts but used ''unborn baby'' rather than ''fetus.''

Readers were quick to object to ''fetus.'' A few echoed the abortion-related debate about when life begins, but most argued that the use of such a clinical word to describe an almost full-term baby made the Globe look silly and insensitive. [...]

While I agree with critics who say ''fetus'' was not the best word choice for this story, I don't agree its use had anything to do with political correctness or the abortion debate. Some pretty impartial sources, from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to Webster's Dictionary, say that any unborn child is considered a fetus. The US Supreme Court has said so, too. The Globe had plenty of reason to use the word other than to please abortion rights activists or make a political statement on behalf of abortion rights.

So how was the decision to use ''fetus'' made?

The night of the shooting, night desk staffers -- who didn't receive the story until after midnight -- debated the word choice question. There were clear arguments on both sides, says Night Editor David Jrolf. Finally, as third edition deadline loomed, he telephoned Michael Larkin, deputy managing editor for news operations, at home. Larkin ruled in favor of ''fetus,'' and the paper went to press.

The next day -- as newsroom discussion continued -- the issue was made moot by new information: The baby had been delivered in the hospital and had lived a short time. Thus, he died as a newborn. Globe stories thereafter switched from ''fetus'' to ''baby'' (further confusing some readers).

Larkin says be believed ''fetus'' was the correct word for the first-day story because Webster's definition clearly fit: ''An unborn offspring, especially in its later stages and specifically in humans, from about the eighth week after conception until birth.''

Case closed? Maybe not. The Globe's editor thinks the matter merits more discussion.

Remarkable the linguistic knots you can tie yourself into when you have to encode words to rob them of meaning.

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EQUALITY?:

Playing From the Men's Tee (NY Times, 2/19/03)

Ms. Sorenstam will be the first woman to challenge the men from their back tees since 1945 when Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the multi-sport Olympic legend, struck a blow for postwar feminism. She missed the cut after three rounds, a fact that will undoubtedly drive Ms. Sorenstam. At 5 feet 2 inches, she has great power and accuracy off the tee that is matched by a competitive zeal in which she does hundreds of sit-ups a day and maps a course with spreadsheets highlighting every peril and shot. Tiger is wise not to bow and scrape.

The beauty of this tournament will be in the game, not the hype. It should be a simple, free-flowing salute to a bit of creative progress, whoever wins. It may also serve as a needed antidote to the controversy over all-male admissions policies of Augusta National, host to the Masters.

Setting aside for the moment the fact that the only controversy over the Masters has been drummed up by the Times, real "progress" will come only when women take their claims seriously enough to give up the crutch of a "Ladies" golf tour and contend with men as equals.

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FULLABLUSTER:

This is how the filibuster will fall to pieces (Byron York, 2/19/03, The Hill)

Republicans know there are some moderate Democrats who do not passionately oppose Estrada but who have so far stuck with the party in upholding the filibuster. Republicans also realize that, since hard-line Democratic leaders have made specific demands and vowed Estrada would not be confirmed unless the White House met those demands, those moderate Democrats will need some sort of Republican gesture they can use as cover to change their minds and stop supporting the filibuster.

That might already be happening. It has not been widely reported, but while the filibuster has been going on, Estrada has met with several Democratic senators, among them Mary Landrieu (La.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Bill Nelson (Neb.), Herb Kohl (Wis.), and Thomas Carper (Del.). Presumably he has been answering some questions.

A few more such meetings, along with some reassuring words about the content of the Justice Department memos, and some moderate Democratic minds might change.

Mr. York explains in some detail--too long to quote--how the GOP can make, has already made, the necessary gestures.

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GIVE THE PEOPLE A CHOICE (via Reductio ad Absurdum)

Worst Choice: Why We'd be Better Off Without Roe (Jeffrey Rosen, 02.19.03, New Republic)

Rather than hanging by a five-to-four thread, the core principle of Roe is supported by six justices. And, even in the unlikely event that Roe were overturned, the core right it protects--the right to choose abortion early in pregnancy--isn't likely to be threatened on a broad scale. For the past 30 years, national polls have revealed a consistent and moderate consensus on abortion: Majorities strongly oppose bans on early-term abortions and strongly support restrictions on late-term abortions. If Roe were overturned, the relative political weakness of the extreme pro-life position would be exposed, and the Republican Party would be torn apart at the seams because many Republicans oppose early-term bans and would desert the party in droves. "The last thing in the world the White House would want is that Roe v. Wade is overturned," says a prominent Republican congressional aide. "The reason being is that it would energize the nation's pro-choice constituency, ... and it would cause a huge fissure in the Republican Party, which has been generally harmonious over the issue because of the belief that the pro-life position will never truly be tested." At the same time, if Roe were overturned, the expanded and moderate Democratic majority would be free to distance itself from extremists in the pro-choice movement who persist in fighting restrictions on late-term abortions, which most Americans embrace. In short, 30 years later, it seems increasingly clear that this pro-choice magazine was correct in 1973 when it criticized Roe on constitutional grounds. Its overturning would be the best thing that could happen to the federal judiciary, the pro-choice movement, and the moderate majority of the American people. [...]

In the 30 years since the decision, public opinion about abortion has remained remarkably stable. As Everett Ladd and Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute have noted, national polls from 1975 to the present suggest that public opinion on abortion for the past three decades has consistently included extremes on both sides that favor either no restrictions or total bans--each of which command about 30 and 20 percent support, respectively--and a vast majority in the middle that opposes both early-term bans and late-term abortions. Americans have reached a moderate consensus: In a CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll last month, 66 percent said abortion should be legal during the first three months of pregnancy; by the second trimester, when the fetus becomes viable, only 25 percent said abortion should be legal; and, by the third trimester, when so-called partial-birth abortions would be performed, only 10 percent say abortion should be legal. These numbers, too, have remained entirely consistent during the three decades since Roe was decided.

Despite these national trends, if Roe were overturned, it's true that some states would try to regulate early-term abortions. The precise number is hard to estimate. [...]

[E]ven if a handful of state legislatures did pass restrictions on first-term abortions, the political consequences would energize the pro-choice movement and hurt the Republican Party far more than it now benefits from pandering to the pro-life extremists. "You have a sizable number of Republican women and men who are in the vast middle group that tilt more toward the choice side," says Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. If Roe were overturned, "it would help to redefine the Republican Party as a pro-life party. If anything could lead to realignment, I imagine this could do it. We're talking about a country at parity, and, if we see a shift of two or three or four percent, it could make a significant difference." [...]

The fact that we are about to fight another Supreme Court nomination battle by flyspecking the nominees' views on Roe points to the real costs of the decision today. Thirty years after Roe, the finest constitutional minds in the country still have not been able to produce a constitutional justification for striking down restrictions on early-term abortions that is substantially more convincing than Justice Harry Blackmun's famously artless opinion itself. As a result, the pro-choice majority asks nominees to swear allegiance to the decision without being able to identify an intelligible principle to support it. And the pro-life minority can criticize the legal weakness of the decision without having to acknowledge its political weakness in the country as a whole.

Thirty years ago, opposing Roe on constitutional grounds, Alexander Bickel wrote for the editors of this pro-choice magazine, "[I]t may take some time before the realization comes that this will not do." After three decades, it has become more obvious than ever that Bickel was correct and that the costs of retaining Roe outweigh any benefits. For better or for worse, Roe will not be overturned any time soon. But, if it were, the Democrats, the federal judiciary, and the moderate majority of American people could breathe a sigh of relief.

For our money the most hilarious theory of 2002--given official credence by Timesman Rick Berke--was that George W. Bush and Karl Rove secretly hoped the Democrats would keep control of the Senate so that the Administration wouldn't have to pass any conservative legislation and could instead run against the do-nothing Democrats, while triangulation between the Republican House and the Democrat Senate would allow him to compromise and reach the moderate ends the President truly believes in. This is of a piece with the speculation in 2000 that George Bush didn't really want tax cuts, in 2001 that he was a closet protectionist, etc., etc., etc.... There may be no politician in modern memory who has had greater trouble getting people to believe what he says, at least none whose actions have so consistently matched his words but has still been unable to get people to believe him. Thus, before the State of the Union you got pundit pabulum predicting that Mr. Bush would not propose anything too extraordinary. Instead he came out with massive new tax cuts, a privatization plan for Medicare, a radical restructuring of retirement savings accounts, etc. Similarly, using his executive power he's effecting a conservative takeover of the judiciary, pushing his Faith-Based Initiative, removing environmental and business regulations, and so on and so forth.

But, comes now Jeffrey Rosen to tell us that George W. Bush secretly supports Roe v. Wade, even as Mr. Rosen himself acknowledges that it is an unprincipled, anti-Constitutional, and socially costly decision. But even if we assume that Mr. Bush doesn't sincerely care about the moral issue involved, and that he's unbothered by the judicial usurpation and misuse of power involved, it's difficult to follow Mr. Rosen's reasoning here. We currently have a legal regime where abortion is available on demand, even though large majorities of Americans support a variety of restrictions. Overturning Roe would, as Mr. Rosen says, probably only lead to complete bans in a very few states and complete permissiveness in a few, with the remainder allowing abortion but only in certain circumstances. So, what we'd have in the post-Roe political world is the GOP securing a series of victories that majorities support while Democrats oppose them at every step of the way. How exactly does that hurt Republicans?

Meanwhile, if we return to the moral, Constitutional, and social issues--it seems self-evident that bringing abortion law back into line with democratic legal structures and opinion and inhibiting the ease of getting an abortion all serves conservative purposes. Moreover, Mr. Rosen seems to have discounted the raw authority that the Supreme Court carries in our society. Even its most controversial rulings--Brown v. Bd. of Ed.; Miranda; Roe itself--have a tendency to be accepted by the American people. It would be all to the good for society to grapple with the idea that abortion is not a "right" and is therefore not secured by the Constitution, but a privilege and therefore granted by us as voters. Rather than being able to duck responsibility and blame the Court and Constitution, each of us will have to reckon with our own culpability in every abortion we allow. What's the downside of making us take responsibility for the moral choices of our own culture?

MORE:
If Roe v. Wade is overruled, what arguments should abortion rights supporters use? those who support abortion rights must be prepared to argue, even if fetuses are accorded the legal status of persons, that women should still retain the right to choose an abortion (Alec Walen, FindLaw.com)

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SPIRITS, IN A MATERIAL WORLD:

Kicking the Secularist Habit: A six-step program (David Brooks, March 2003, The Atlantic Monthly)

Like a lot of people these days, I'm a recovering secularist. Until September 11 I accepted the notion that as the world becomes richer and better educated, it becomes less religious. Extrapolating from a tiny and unrepresentative sample of humanity (in Western Europe and parts of North America), this theory holds that as history moves forward, science displaces dogma and reason replaces unthinking obedience. A region that has not yet had a reformation and an enlightenment, such as the Arab world, sooner or later will.

It's now clear that the secularization theory is untrue. The human race does not necessarily get less religious as it grows richer and better educated. We are living through one of the great periods of scientific progress and the creation of wealth. At the same time, we are in the midst of a religious boom. Islam is surging. Orthodox Judaism is growing among young people, and Israel has gotten more religious as it has become more affluent. The growth of Christianity surpasses that of all other faiths. In 1942 this magazine published an essay called "Will the Christian Church Survive?" Sixty years later there are two billion Christians in the world; by 2050, according to some estimates, there will be three billion. As Philip Jenkins, a Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University, has observed, perhaps the most successful social movement of our age is Pentecostalism (see "The Next Christianity," October Atlantic). Having gotten its start in Los Angeles about a century ago, it now embraces 400 million people—a number that, according to Jenkins, could reach a billion or more by the half-century mark. [...]

Secularism is not the future; it is yesterday's incorrect vision of the future. This realization sends us recovering secularists to the bookstore or the library in a desperate attempt to figure out what is going on in the world. I suspect I am not the only one who since September 11 has found himself reading a paperback edition of the Koran that was bought a few years ago in a fit of high-mindedness but was never actually opened. I'm probably not the only one boning up on the teachings of Ahmad ibn Taymiyya, Sayyid Qutb, and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.

There are six steps in the recovery process.[...]

The third step is getting angry. I now get extremely annoyed by the secular fundamentalists who are content to remain smugly ignorant of enormous shifts occurring all around them. They haven't learned anything about religion, at home or abroad. They don't know who Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins are, even though those co-authors have sold 42 million copies of their books. They still don't know what makes a Pentecostal a Pentecostal (you could walk through an American newsroom and ask that question, and the only people who might be able to answer would be the secretaries and the janitorial staff). They still don't know about Michel Aflaq, the mystical Arab nationalist who served as a guru to Saddam Hussein. A great Niagara of religious fervor is cascading down around them while they stand obtuse and dry in the little cave of their own parochialism—and many of them are journalists and policy analysts, who are paid to keep up with these things.

The fourth step toward recovery is to resist the impulse to find a materialistic explanation for everything. During the centuries when secularism seemed the wave of the future, Western intellectuals developed social-science models of extraordinary persuasiveness. Marx explained history through class struggle, other economists explained it through profit maximization. Professors of international affairs used conflict-of-interest doctrines and game theory to predict the dynamics between nation-states.

All these models are seductive and partly true. This country has built powerful institutions, such as the State Department and the CIA, that use them to try to develop sound policies. But none of the models can adequately account for religious ideas, impulses, and actions, because religious fervor can't be quantified and standardized. Religious motivations can't be explained by cost-benefit analysis.

Over the past twenty years domestic-policy analysts have thought hard about the roles that religion and character play in public life. Our foreign-policy elites are at least two decades behind. They go for months ignoring the force of religion; then, when confronted with something inescapably religious, such as the Iranian revolution or the Taliban, they begin talking of religious zealotry and fanaticism, which suddenly explains everything. After a few days of shaking their heads over the fanatics, they revert to their usual secular analyses. We do not yet have, and sorely need, a mode of analysis that attempts to merge the spiritual and the material.

The recovering secularist has to resist the temptation to treat religion as a mere conduit for thwarted economic impulses. For example, we often say that young Arab men who have no decent prospects turn to radical Islam. There's obviously some truth to this observation. But it's not the whole story: neither Mohammed Atta nor Osama bin Laden, for example, was poor or oppressed. And although it's possible to construct theories that explain their radicalism as the result of alienation or some other secular factor, it makes more sense to acknowledge that faith is its own force, independent of and perhaps greater than economic resentment.

Human beings yearn for righteous rule, for a just world or a world that reflects God's will—in many cases at least as strongly as they yearn for money or success. Thinking about that yearning means moving away from scientific analysis and into the realm of moral judgment. The crucial question is not What incentives does this yearning respond to? but Do individuals pursue a moral vision of righteous rule? And do they do so in virtuous ways, or are they, like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, evil in their vision and methods?

One of the more interesting discussions that goes on here--probably annoying to most of you by now--concerns Darwinism generally, and evolutionary psychology in particular, and their fundamental incompatibility with the idea of Free Will and moral choice. What we find especially fascinating is the vigor with which even self-proclaimed evolutionary absolutists refuse to accept the logical conclusions of the theory and protest that they can have the best of both worlds--Man created wholly by forces of Nature, but then men with consciences and souls that are wholly their own creation. So do even the materialists among us deny the dictates of pure reason and cling to the spiritual.

This is rather reassuring, on the one hand, because it suggests that no matter how ungodly such folks may wish to think themselves, they remain tightly moored to the traditional ways in which we in the West have comprehended ourselves. On the other, it points up a major problem with modern culture, because the prevailing philosophy of our intellectuals--rationalist, materialist, Darwinist--is implicitly acknowledged to be incoherent and inadequate at least to our psychological needs. One curious function of this cultural schizophrenia is that it is only the religious who are viewed as intolerant and fundamentalist, and it is demanded that they pay obeisance to such things as evolution, or else be adjudged somehow unfit for modernity. Meanwhile, it is never deemed proper to require the intellectual classes to acknowledge the reality of the spiritual realm. The element of faith that colors their own thinking must be ignored, like Grandma's goiter.

It's little wonder then that the two sides have such difficulty communicating with one another or even respecting each other. But, as Mr. Brooks points out, it is necessary to find ways around the barriers between the two sides because, where the secularists have for centuries assumed that time would prove them right, that religious belief, like other "superstitions" would merely fade away, it instead appears to be secularized society that dies off, as witness Japan, Western Europe, etc.--societies on such a demographic downslope that even if you only look at them from a Darwinian perspective you're forced to say that Natural Selection has selected them for extinction.

It can come as little surprise--though it has to many secularists--that the responses of America and Western Europe to the threat of Islamicism have been so different. The French and Germans, already headed towards minority ethnic status in their own countries and unable to access moral reasoning any longer, seem content to await their dooms. Compare their lassitude to the moral passion with which Americans--as exemplified by George W. Bush--discuss this confrontation and the seriousness with which America--a nation of rising population and still fervent faith--is responding. Mr. Brooks speaks of men like Osama and Saddam as pursuing evil visions and methods. Such a judgment imposes an obligation on those who believe in morality and righteousness to contend with that evil. But in a secular world there is no good, no evil, and no obligation. And, since ceasing to believe in evil seems unlikely to get rid of it, there may in short order be no secular society.

MORE:
Can We Be Good Without God?: On the political meaning of Christianity (Glenn Tinder, December 1989, Atlantic Monthly)

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OVER & OUT:

Down with Wilco (Yep Roc) (Robert Wilonsky. 2/20/03, Dallas Observer)

If you haven't figured it out by now--and how could you miss it, given the sudden ubiquity of The Band Warners Paid Twice to Release Once--Wilco's best selling point is its front man's nostalgia for an era when "pop" meant AM free-form, not FM formula; Jeff Tweedy thinks he's still on Reprise, only it's 30 years ago and Joni Mitchell's waiting on the tour bus to split an ounce with Van Dyke Parks and Neil Young. Sure, the albums may be getting "weirder" and more "eccentric," but all that static and heebie-keybie distortion's just there to throw the detectives off the scent of a man in his 30s pretending to be a man in his 50s stuck in the '60s while he crawls into the '70s. He could scrape a rusted nail across a tin bucket and shoot off a cannon in a closet, and still you'd hear in all that racket a perfectly formed tune that'd put a smiley smile on Roger McGuinn's beard.

This collaboration with old Fresh Fellow Scott McCaughey, Tweedy's Wilcomates, Pete Buck, Ken Stringfellow and assorted small-stars (Rebecca Gates, Sean O'Hagen, other people surprisingly not Jim O'Rourke) strips away the weapons of mass obfuscation that mar recent Wilco-etc. releases, especially that years-old Loose Fur art project just unleashed just 'cause. The noise that annoys has vanished, so you no longer have to assume that somewhere in all the perfectly placed clutter is a great song dying for some sun and air. You might even walk away from this joint humming a verse or whistling a chorus; nice to hear the band grinning again, which is what usually happens when friends gather in studios late at night to impress and outdo one another over a bottle or blunt.

But, alas, this ain't a Wilco record, because it's still Scott M.'s show, meaning he's still singing, meaning he's still whining, meaning he's still grating...

Ouch! Though the politics are sketchy, the Mermaid Avenue cds were good.

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THE [FRONT] RUNNER STUMBLES:

Gephardt, Taking Aim at White House, Sharply Attacks Bush (ADAM NAGOURNEY, 2/20/03, NY Times)

Mr. Gephardt, a Missouri Democrat who stepped down as House minority leader after Democrats failed to win control of Congress in November, used his announcement speech in St. Louis this morning to offer some of the harshest criticism of Mr. Bush voiced so far by any Democratic presidential candidate.

He portrayed the White House as overridden with "special interest lobbyists," and said that Mr. Bush's policies had undermined the nation's economic recovery, soiled the environment and neglected public schools. Attacking the centerpiece of Mr. Bush's economic plan, Mr. Gephardt vowed to "scrap the vast majority of the Bush tax cuts for wealthier Americans and corporations." [...]

Mr. Gephardt devoted barely 2 of the speech's 43 minutes to foreign policy, and that included an affirmation of support for Mr. Bush's effort to disarm Saddam Hussein--including military action if necessary.

His overriding and relatively detailed focus on domestic issues, coming as the nation seems to be on the verge of war, contrasted sharply with many of his major rivals. The focus appeared intended to reinforce his credentials with Democratic activists and labor unions who could prove crucial in the early presidential nominating caucuses.

Even setting aside all his other problems--well detailed in Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes--the early schedule is gruesome for Mr. Gephardt. He has to win Iowa, having done so last time, but can't wing NH, which will go to John Kerry, as MA politicians always win here. This will seem to nip what little momentum he had in the bud and to get it back he'll have to win in Southern states, despite black opponents, Southern opponents, and more hawkish opponents, and the reality that unions aren't that important in the region. Stick a fork in him.

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IN POLITICS, ONLY HONESTY IS FORBIDDEN:

Landry unapologetic for 'tiny brains' comment about poor (The Canadian Press, February 20, 2003)

An unflappable Premier Bernard Landry refused to apologize yesterday for saying poor people should manage to feed their children because even birds -- with their tiny brains -- can do it.

Mr. Landry admitted he made the comment during a private meeting with officials from poverty groups, women's groups and advocates for single-parent families last Friday.

However, he said the remarks were misinterpreted and he expressed shock that some people were offended.

"I am surprised, I am disappointed and I regret that comments aimed at comforting the least fortunate, were interpreted to the contrary," Mr. Landry told reporters. [...]

Last Friday, Mr. Landry told a private gathering of social activists he didn't understand why many Quebec schoolchildren go to class hungry.

"If birds, with the brains they have, feed their young in the morning, how is it that there are still people who don't feed their children," Mr. Landry was quoted as saying in a government transcript released yesterday.

Somewhere James Watt smiles.

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GET ANOTHER STAR, BETSY:

Klein's conservatives plan to raise separatist spectre (Mark Reid and Rick Mofina, February 20, 2003, Ottawa Citizen)

Alberta's Progressive Conservative Party will discuss the issue of separation at the party's upcoming annual meeting, but Premier Ralph Klein says he doesn't want the debate to overshadow the convention. [...]

The issue of separation arose earlier this week during the provincial government's throne speech when it asserted that Alberta's ability to be a partner in Canada is compromised by the federal government.

Mr. Klein said the comment in the throne speech should not be construed as a threat to separate, but rather to put the federal government on notice that Alberta intends to "strongly defend" its interests.

"Alberta's ability to be a partner in Canada is compromised by the current federal government, which does not listen to the people of this province," Mr. Klein's Conservative government said in its throne speech.

Following the throne speech, Mr. Klein said Alberta can't be part of the "Canadian family if big brother down there in Ottawa doesn't want you to be part of the family." [...]

Rob James, a member of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party and gun registry opponent, has drafted a resolution calling for a referendum on separation, but party executive director Marilyn Haley said it won't be debated on the convention floor.

Mr. Klein's political opponents in Alberta, along with some political experts, say there simply isn't strong support for separation in the province, and accused the premier of "trotting" out the spectre of separation to deflect attention from troubles on the homefront.

"This is just something the province trots out when things get a little bit hot on the provincial level, to try to distract people from problems at home," said University of Calgary political scientist Doreen Barrie.

Randy Thorsteinson, leader of the fledgling Alberta Alliance party, said "there is a tremendous amount of frustration in Alberta," but added Mr. Klein's comments are nothing but "hollow rhetoric" after his recent failure to stop the federal government from implementing the Kyoto Protocol, and his inability to obtain major concessions in health care.

It's all about oil.

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KEEP STOKING THE FIRES:

European clash over UK spending plans (George Parker, February 18 2003, Financial Times)

Gordon Brown, UK finance minister, on Tuesday clashed with EU colleagues over his spending plans, providing more ammunition for British opponents of joining the euro.

Some ministers implied Mr Brown should raise taxes or trim his programme to rebuild Britain's public services, because he risked breaching the EU's budget rules. The chancellor left the meeting early. His aides made it clear he had no intention of heeding the warnings.

Opponents of the euro are likely to use the dispute as proof that Britain's fiscal room for manoeuvre could be limited inside the single currency zone.

Even if the economics are dubious, the politics are good. Anything that keeps Britain out of the EU is helpful.

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WHAT?:

Daily Philosophical Quotation (20 Feb 2003)

However jewel-like the good will may be in its own right, there is a morally significant difference between rescuing someone from a burning building and dropping him from a twelfth-storey window while trying to rescue him.
--Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions

I don't get it: what, in moral terms, is the difference between succeeding and failing so long as you're trying to do the right thing?

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THE MYTH OF HETEROSEXUAL AIDs (cont.):

Botched vaccinations blamed for Aids in Africa: An international team of scientists says only 30 per cent of HIV cases were sexually transmitted (Nigel Hawkes and Michael Dynes, February 20, 2003, Times of London)

THE African Aids pandemic was caused more by careless use of needles in healthcare than by unsafe sex, a report published today by an international group of scientists says.

They estimate that more than half the cases of Aids in Africa before 1988 were caused by unsterilised needles. The claim, directly challenging the belief that 90 per cent of cases were sexually transmitted, implies that the African Aids pandemic is largely the result of unsafe medical practices and mismanaged vaccination campaigns.

Thus does political correctness blind science.

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LATE GREAT:

Honky-tonk stylist and outlaw Johnny Paycheck dies after lengthy illness. (TOM ROLAND, 2/19/03, The Tennessean)

''All my friends are dressed in black and they're standing reverently/Let's have a few moments silence for the late and great me.''

Johnny Paycheck examined the possibility of his own death - a death caused by heartache - in a 1960s recording called The Late and Great Me. That possibility came to pass, as Mr. Paycheck, 64, died in his sleep overnight Tuesday after a lengthy illness. The Grand Ole Opry, of which he was a member, confirmed his death, though no other details were immediately available. [...]

Mr. Paycheck was born May 31, 1938, in Greenfield, Ohio, with the given name of Donald Eugene Lytle. He received his first guitar at age 6, entered talent contests before turning 10, and in his early teens, became a regular performer at Club 28, a Greenfield honky-tonk owned by family friend Paul Angel.

At age 15, he became, he once said, a ''gypsy,'' jumping trains or hitchhiking, traveling around the eastern U.S. He scored another regular club gig in Columbus, Ohio, at age 16, then headed to Toledo, where he joined the Navy. There, while still a teen-ager, he was court-martialed for reportedly fracturing the skull of a superior officer. He escaped twice from a military prison during his subsequent incarceration.

Returning to his wanderlust after his release in 1958, Mr. Paycheck ended up in Nashville, where bass player Buddy Killen helped him get a recording contract with Decca Records. Under the name Donny Young, Mr. Paycheck recorded four songs for Decca, then another two for Mercury.

Killen, who later ran Sony/Tree publishing and would produce Exile and soul man Joe Tex, played bass on George Jones' 1959 hit White Lightning, on which Mr. Paycheck provided backing vocals. It was an early moment in Mr. Paycheck's career as a sideman. He toured - still under the name of Donny Young - with Jones, Porter Wagoner, Faron Young and Ray Price, his raucous carousing contributing to his revolving employment.

There are those who believe that Jones' inimitable, lonesome vocal style was derived from his on-again, off-again work with Mr. Paycheck during that period.

In 1965, he took the name of Johnny Paycheck from a Midwestern boxer, legally adopting the name the following year. [...]

In 1966, Mr. Paycheck scored his first Top 10 hit, The Lovin' Machine, a celebration of the automobile. It marked the beginning of a period at Little Darlin' Records that many critics have viewed as the most remarkable of his career. Mr. Paycheck embraced a series of strange characters and soap opera storylines through such oddly titled songs as (Pardon Me) I've Got Someone to Kill, He's in a Hurry (To Get Home to My Wife), Don't Monkey with Another Monkey's Monkey and If I'm Gonna Sink (I Might as Well Go to the Bottom).

Getting thrown out of a George Jones band for drunkenness seems difficult.

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DO SMART BOMBS SPARE STUPID PEOPLE?:

Winnie Mandela - Iraqi 'human shield' Winnie Madikizela-Mandela has offered to go to Iraq as a human shield. (BBC News, 2/19/2003)

Her office said that she would first consult with the women's league of South Africa's ruling African National Congress, which she still heads.

Her former husband, Nelson Mandela, is also opposed to the United States-led plans to attack Iraq.

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WHOSE ALLY?:

FRANCE: SADDAM'S ALLY (Dick Morris, Feb. 05, 2003, Jewish World Review)

Throughout the '90s, France constantly pushed for the lifting of economic sanctions against Iraq. Bemoaning the fate of the Iraqi people, the French pushed to allow Saddam to sell oil on the global market (the so-called oil-for-food program). When America and Britain demanded tough controls on the funds from oil sales to be sure they did not go for arms, France objected that such controls would undermine Iraqi sovereignty. Largely as a result of French pressure, the oil-for-food program was implemented, allowing Saddam to sell 500,000 barrels per day on the open market (about a sixth of his pre-war production).

But Saddam couldn't do much rearming with the oil money, because U.N. inspectors were looking over his shoulder. So in November 1997, he announced that he would bar Americans from the 77-member inspection team. The other inspectors withdrew in protest and solidarity with their American mates. The world was plunged into crisis. Once again, France took Saddam's side. President Bill Clinton sent two aircraft carriers to the gulf and vowed that Saddam "must comply unconditionally with the will of the international community." French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine criticized Clinton for giving Saddam the impression that "there would never be a way out of the tunnel [of sanctions]," even if he got rid of all his weapons programs."

France demanded an end to all sanctions and called for unlimited oil sales by Iraq. Then suddenly Saddam seemed to back down in the face of Clinton's pressure and admitted the U.S. inspectors back in. Had there been concessions to Saddam? Oh no, said Deputy National Security Adviser Sandy Berger: "There's no deal. There's no concessions." But the French knew better. As Vedrine said, "The Americans bent a little." Pushed by France, the United States agreed to let Saddam increase his oil sales, ultimately letting sales grow to 2 million barrels per day. A concession to Iraq? No way, said Clinton's people: It was a concession to France; we were not giving in to Saddam. Then, the next year, Saddam barred all U.N. inspectors.

The final nail in the coffin of controls on Iraq came in 1999 when, again as a result of a French initiative, all limits on Iraqi oil sales were lifted. With no U.N. inspectors to inhibit him and $20 million a day in oil revenues, Saddam could build whatever weapons he wanted. Courtesy of France. The only consistency in French policy toward Iraq since the Gulf War has been support for Saddam Hussein to weaken U.N. and U.S. measures against him. [...]

Mark Twain known for his insights and aphorisms, wrote: "France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks, it is a fine country." Twain died in 1910, but his comment is as timely as ever.

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ANOTHER GREAT DEMOCRATIC VICTORY:

'McCain-Feingold School' Finds Many Bewildered (ADAM NAGOURNEY, 2/19/03, NY Times)

Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a Republican Party lawyer who has conducted seminars for the other side of the aisle, said lawmakers were startled to hear that once-standard practices like acting as host at a fund-raiser for a home-state governor might now be illegal. "There's an initial stage where the reaction is, 'This can't be true,' " Mr. Ginsberg said. "And then there's the actual anger stage."

The chief provision of McCain-Feingold was a ban on the national parties' raising of soft money, the large, little-regulated contributions that were supposed to encourage general party-building activities but as a practical matter had become the chief method of raising millions from the wealthy during the campaign season.

Most of the party lawyers and fund-raising officials now explaining the new law were never fans of it to begin with. Adjusting to the measure's detailed workings, however, has proved bewildering and anxiety-producing even among those who supported it. As members of Congress begin refilling their coffers for 2004, the law's full effect is just beginning to sink in.

The law, being challenged as unconstitutional by dozens of groups spanning the political spectrum, has already had sobering financial consequences for the Democrats, who, it is becoming clear, have been put at a decided fund-raising disadvantage by a measure that many of them championed.

With federal candidates and national party committees now barred from raising soft money, they have been forced to finance their activities from the contributions of hard-money donors, who are limited to $2,000 per candidate in any one election.

Soft-money contributions were previously the main source of financing for the national Democratic Party, which roughly kept pace with the Republicans in collecting them. By contrast, Republicans last year raised nearly twice as much hard money as the Democrats, evidence of a much broader base of contributors that Democrats believe has put the Republicans in a dominant fund-raising position as the 2004 presidential and Congressional races approach. While campaign experts had predicted that the Republicans would have an advantage, the gap has been even wider than expected.

The law is, of course, unconstitutional and we'd support the impeachment of George W. Bush for signing it, but you can see why it was so hard to resist politically. The Democrats will have very little money with which to spread their incoherent messages in the coming elections, increasing the already great likelihood that 2004 will be a watershed.

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GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN:

The heroes (AFP, FEB 20, 2003)

More commuters might have died if not for two engineers who sacrificed their own lives to save others trapped in the underground subway fire.

Mr Chang Dae Sung, 37, and Mr Kim Sang Man, 32, led panicky passengers by the hand up the stairs to safety. Then they turned back to help more.

But their second trip was one way. [...]

'We are taking shelter with some 10 other passengers inside the machinery room,' one of them said in a phone call to subway colleagues.

When rescuers finally reached the scene, their bodies were found huddled close to the rest inside the room.

If they were Americans their names would be on all our tongues. We honor their courage and their sacrifice.

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THE HIGH COST OF NOT TAKING RESPONSIBILITY:

Jackson meant for these moments (MARK BROWN, February 18, 2003, Chicago SUN-TIMES)

Derrick Mosley is an upstart community activist who thought he had something special to contribute in the aftermath of Monday's deadly stampede at the E2 Chicago nightclub: a letter he says he sent two months ago to the club's president warning about overcrowded conditions and the potential for "catastrophic" results.

Mosley brought copies of his letter to Rainbow PUSH headquarters, where the Rev. Jesse Jackson was holding a combination prayer vigil and press briefing. Mosley said he'd been invited. It seemed like the kind of thing Jackson might showcase.

But when he started passing out his letters, Mosley found himself about as welcome as the proverbial skunk at a garden party. Urged to cool it, he kept quiet during Jackson's presentation. Afterward, when he consented to interviews, he was told by PUSH personnel to take it outside.

"There's a time and a season for all things," Jackson explained later.

Jackson said Monday's meeting, attended by the grieving family members of victim Antonio Myers, wasn't the time to be discussing who did what wrong at the nightclub.

Mosley found that a little odd, especially when it came out during the press briefing that Jackson had gone to bat for the club last summer at a time when city officials were seeking to crack down on the establishment.

"I don't know what their angle is, but I just don't think they're dealing with this candidly," Mosley said of Jackson and PUSH.

Before Central America turned her looney, Joan Didion said something quite profound, which the Jesse Jacksons of the world seem intent on keeping black America from discovering: "The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs."

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DAMMIT, ED, I WISH I'D THOUGHT OF THAT:

ANN COULTER TELLS GOP, LISTEN TO DAVID DUKE (Ed Driscoll, 2/19/03)

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THE POLES DEBT TO FRANCE?:

The shame! We've mischaracterized the French (Tony Blankley, Jewish World Review, Feb. 19, 2003)

[T]his Monday, in the European Union meeting, M. Jacque Chirac...revealed himself to be a vulgar, unsubtle, bullying thug. According to the Associated Press, M. Chirac "launched a withering attack ... on eastern European nations who signed letters backing the U.S. position on Iraq ..." He accused them of acting irresponsibly by expressing their opinions. France, which can't stop talking herself, would silence others who speak but rarely. [...]

The list of countries under the French whip is ironic: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania and Bulgaria. All these countries were on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain during the Age of Communism.

They were unlucky enough to be occupied by the Soviet Red Army in the closing months of WWII and thus lived in enforced slavery for half a century. But geography was destiny. France was occupied by American, British, Canadian and other British Empire troops, and was thus saved from such a fate by their English-speaking liberators.

It is worth recalling that while French soldiers were throwing down their rifles in 1940 as the Germans advanced, the flower of Polish manhood charged into the invading Nazi tanks on horseback in the last and most gallant cavalry charge in history. Of course, they were killed to the last man. While the Poles were dying with their boots on, the French were living on their knee-pads (during which, they cheerfully ferreted out and shipped their French Jews off to the German death camps).

How dare the French attempt to blackmail the Poles -- of all people (and the Czechs and Slovaks, who they helped to sell out at Munich).

He left out the French refusal to be part of the NATO military structure during the Cold War, which would have let them off the hook had WWIII commenced, a war that would have determined whether these countries were liberated or remained under Soviet tyranny.

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A STICK:

Administration fine-tunes religious rights in public education (Terry Eastland, Feb. 19, 2003, Jewish World Review)

Every so often, news is made that tells a story larger than first appears. That happened earlier this month when the Education Department issued a four-page document titled "Guidance on Constitutionally Protected Prayer in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools."

The document drew restrained interest from the media, probably because half of it was a dry statement of familiar constitutional principles and the other half was an attempt to apply those principles to particular situations. The document looked like the sort of thing that only school administrators and lawyers might read. Yet the guidance is the latest chapter in a story that involves much more than the public schools. [...]

The Bush Education Department's "guidance" builds on the Clinton guidelines. That itself is worth noting, for it is clear there is little difference between the current president and his predecessor on the matter of ensuring religious freedom in the public schools. Indeed, in an interview, a Bush administration attorney who advised on the just-released guidance praised the Clinton guidelines: "They were great. They laid out the rights of students, and they made clear that schools don't have to be religion-free zones."

The Bush guidance is more explicit than the Clinton guidelines about students' free-exercise rights. And it makes clear that teachers also have rights: They may meet with each other for prayer or other religious purposes before school or after lunch – so long as they aren't acting in official capacities. The guidance embraces a basic First Amendment principle: Government speech endorsing religion is forbidden, but private speech endorsing religion is protected.

The Bush guidance isn't merely an exercise in updating the Clinton guidelines. The "No Child Left Behind" law of 2001 actually requires a document from the Education Department on "constitutionally protected prayer" in the schools. Schools are to use the department's guidance to make sure they aren't abridging rights. Indeed, the law imposes on the schools a requirement that they comply with the guidance. A school that fails to do that stands to lose federal funds. As the administration attorney told me, "We didn't have a stick before. We have one now."

There's just all kinds of good stuff in the No Child Left Behind Act, eh?

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RISKY OR RISK-FREE?:

Parties Gamble on Estrada Nomination: Fight Over Appeals Court Hopeful May Set Tone for '04 Presidential Campaign (Mike Allen, February 19, 2003, Washington Post)

One of the early skirmishes of next year's presidential race is being fought over President Bush's nomination of a Hispanic lawyer to a federal appeals court, with both parties gambling that their decision to engage in a Senate stalemate over his confirmation is worth the political risk.

Republicans see the nomination of Miguel Estrada to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia as a chance to build goodwill among Hispanics and erode Democrats' solid standing among minority voters. Democrats contend that Bush is trying to run roughshod over the Senate to try to pack the federal courts with conservatives.

Both parties are treating this as a dress rehearsal for Bush's first Supreme Court nomination. Estrada -- who has no judicial experience -- often appears on GOP lists of potential Bush nominees to the high court, and the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District is often viewed as the nation's second most powerful court because it rules on the constitutionality of federal laws and regulations, and resolves disputes between the executive and legislative branches.

Thus Democrats have refused to let the nomination come to a vote, mounting what is effectively a filibuster, although the Republicans have not yet called their bluff by demanding round-the-clock talkathons. [...]

A drawn-out battle poses problems for both parties. Republicans hope to repeat their success of last fall in using a deadlock over the creation of a Department of Homeland Security to paint Democrats as obstructionist. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said Friday that Democrats were sending a message of "obstruction, obstruction, obstruction."

Democrats argue that Republicans will be blamed for gridlock and bickering now that they control the Senate.

How is this a risk for the GOP: it either gets a conservative Hispanic judge or an issue with which to stir Latino resentment of the Democrats? And what conceivable upside is there for Democrats, who either lose or get an equally conservative nominee in his place, having alienated Hispanics either way?

And let's see how long the Democrats are willing to bring Senate business to a halt once the war starts...

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WHEN IN DOUBT, BLAME THE JEWS:

Toxic Talk on War (Lawrence F. Kaplan, February 18, 2003, Washington Post)

From the musty precincts of the Old Right, the contention that Israel and a powerful "cabal" of its American supporters have manufactured the present crisis with Iraq has become canonical. Buchanan, who writes that President Bush has become a client of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the "neoconservative war party," has transformed his new magazine, the American Conservative, into a regular forum for those who share this conviction. One of its contributors, University of Illinois history professor Paul W. Schroeder, deems it self-evident that the plan for an invasion "is being promoted in the interests of Israel."

"Certainly it is being pushed very hard by a number of influential supporters of Israel of the hawkish neoconservative stripe in and outside the administration (Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, and others)," Schroeder writes.

Seconding this appraisal, conservative writer Georgie Anne Geyer, whose column appears weekly in the Washington Times, reveals how "the fanatic neoconservatives around the administration, the rabid Israel supporters in the White House and the Pentagon," plan to wage war in Iraq and then to "democratize the entire Middle East, including Syria and Saudi Arabia, if necessary by military means, in order to secure Ariel Sharon's Israel."

Meanwhile on the left -- where many cannot fathom why, absent the urging of Israelis and their American co-religionists, the Bush administration would be so eager to topple Saddam Hussein -- the socialism of fools has been enjoying something of a vogue. Writing in the Nation, Jason Vest reports that the Bush team's "attack-Iraq chorus," working in tandem with "far-right American Zionists," subscribes to "articles of faith that effectively hold there is no difference between U.S. and Israeli national security interests." The respected liberal intellectual Ian Buruma has managed to locate the reasons for a U.S. war against Iraq in, among other places, "Jewish-American hysteria" and the fact that "macho images of suntanned Jewish soldiers gathered round laughing tough guys such as Ariel Sharon wiped out, as it were, 2,000 years of being Woody Allen."

Nor is this sort of fare the exclusive property of the political fringe. The ubiquitous talk-show host Chris Matthews pins blame for the impending war on "conservative people out there, some of them Jewish, who are very tough on foreign policy. They believe we should fight the Arabs and take them down. They believe that if we don't fight Iraq, Israel will be in danger." Matthews even thinks that Sharon is "writing [Bush's] speeches sometimes" and that Sharon's cabinet ministers are "in bed with the vice president's office and the Defense Department." Syndicated columnist Robert Novak has described the U.S conflict with Iraq as "Sharon's war," adding that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's branding of Hezbollah as the world's most dangerous terrorist organization suggests that "the U.S. war against terrorism, accused of being Iraq-centric, actually is Israel-centric." Twice in
recent speeches, former senator Gary Hart has said that we "must not let our role in the world be dictated by Americans who too often find it hard to distinguish their loyalties to their original homelands from their loyalties to America and its national interests."

One interesting offshoot of this, though it's necessarily anecdotal, is that many Jews oppose the war precisely because it stirs up anti-Semitism.

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ANY WAY THE WIND BLOWS...:

Post-Gore Marty Re-Refurbishing The New Republic (Sridhar Pappu, 2/19/03, New Republic)

Here we go again: The New Republic's railing on the Democratic Party. This time, they've got a publicist calling up reporters, touting a hot new redesign and bragging that the magazine is getting "daring" and "more conservative."

This happens from time to time. The New Republic has a long tradition of within-the-party tree shaking, including stances against Jimmy Carter's foreign policy and to nuclear freezes. It supported the deployment of advance missiles to Germany; it opposed what owner Martin Peretz deemed the "racialization" of the party by men like Jesse Jackson. During that time, remembered former editor Michael Kinsley, The Wall Street Journal's editorial board accused the magazine of "attacking conservatives while stealing their ideas," and staffers joked that TNR should change its name to "Even the Liberal New Republic Says", because it was used so many times to support conservative positions.

Now, amid the George W. Bush era--and, it should be noted with Mr. Peretz's guy, Al Gore, out of the 2004 presidential race--TNR's going after its woebegone Democratic flesh and blood with renewed vigor.

"It's back to the future," said TNR editor Peter Beinart.

We're not sure how daring it is to be a predictable liberal rag except for when Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush usher in conservative epochs.

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EXPANDED VIEW (via Kevin Whited):

Kucinich opens campaign with change on abortion (Tom Diemer, 02/17/03, Cleveland Plain Dealer)

Cedar Rapids, Iowa- U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich opened a long-shot bid for the White House yesterday by altering one of his long-standing positions, promising Iowa Democrats he would be "pro-choice" on the question of abortion.

Kucinich, starting his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in a state that will host the first major contest of the 2004 presidential race,
said in answer to a question that "as president, I would protect that right [to abortion], and I would also make sure that appointees to the Supreme
Court protected that right."

In Congress, Kucinich, who represents Cleveland's West Side and western suburbs, has generally voted against abortion rights and has consistently opposed federal funding of abortion for poor women, a record he acknowledged at a later stop in Iowa City.

He was met in that college town by three women holding abortion-rights placards.

"He has a very poor record with Planned Parenthood," said Gina Shatteman, holding a sign that read "No Forced Motherhood."

Outside the small caucus meetings in the two cities, Kucinich conceded that he had expanded his view on abortion. He said he had grown "increasingly uncomfortable" with debates in Congress that focused narrowly on that issue while ignoring the needs of poor families.

This was inevitable, but even cynics like us have to be startled by the rapidity with which Mr. Kucinich just sold his soul to the Democrats' abortion lobby. one might parse his campaign this way, he's willing to kill American babies in order to stop George W. Bush from killing an evil dictator. So here's the question if you're a voter: if he'd reverse his core beliefs on the most important moral question of our time just to get elected, what wouldn't he do? Who wouldn't he kill?

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BLAME SAM:

A small-town Republican revolt (Christopher Caldwell, February 18 2003, Financial Times)

Disaffection with "untrammelled" capitalism is rising among America's conservatively inclined, in a way that could mean trouble for Republicans. The suburbs and edge cities where the vast majority of Americans now live - and where "big-box" corporate retail outlets have left their deepest mark - appear to be shifting their political allegiance. Republicans held the suburbs from the moment they were first built until Bill Clinton wrested them from Bob Dole in the 1996 elections.

That defeat could be explained away as the work of an extraordinarily weak Republican candidate, but George W. Bush defeated Al Gore in the suburbs by only 2 percentage points. Given that Mr Bush won southern suburbs by 20 percentage points, that amounted to a Democratic landslide in non- Sunbelt suburban America - the part of the country with a culture vulnerable to being wiped out by mall-builders.

David Brooks, the taxonomist of information-age society, has shown that "Bobos" and others on the commanding heights of the new economy tend to vote liberal - 13 of the country's 17 richest congressional districts are solidly Democratic. But those voters appear to be balanced out electorally by another Brooksian new-economy creature: "Patio Man", the appliance-buying denizen of the outer suburbs, who tends to vote Republican.

Now Patio Man's world is being turned upside-down. One of exurbia's bulwarks, the bankrupt chain Kmart, has undergone two rounds of closures in the past year, wiping out 607 stores and 57,000 jobs. In the world Kauffman describes - communities that had vibrant small businesses before Kmarts arrived - the now-vanished chain store appears as little more than an economic wrecking ball. Even in newer communities, such closures may signal the departure of the only job base the now heavily populated area has known. [...]

The political fallout of the shrinking suburban and rural economy is still unclear. But it is unlikely to include an endorsement of the untrammelled free market. At the zenith of small-government Republicanism almost a decade ago, voters who were asked to choose between lower taxes and more government services opted for the tax cuts by a margin of two to one. Today, that position barely gets a majority. In the last elections, Democrats were so giddy at this shift that they ignored the war on terrorism and got a well-deserved trouncing. Republicans would be unwise to count on similar luck next time.

Mr. Caldwell is usually more sensible than this. Within a couple miles of almost every one of those closing K-Marts there is likely a Wal-Mart that's cheaper, better run, and employs more people. We can certainly lament the closing of country stores and other local businesses, but to view the replacement of one mammoth chainstore by another as the end of an era is ludicrous.

Even worse, as far as the political analysis here is concerned, he says that George W. Bush won big in the suburbs that have already been Wal-martified (the Sun Belt) and lost in those that hadn't succumbed yet. So if there's a relationship between the strip mall and voting Republican, isn't the free market about to hand the GOP those other suburbs too?

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ZBIG MISTAKE (via Kevin Whited):

Why Unity Is Essential (Zbigniew Brzezinski, February 19, 2003, Washington Post)

The manner in which the United States has reacted to European reservations regarding Iraq has created the impression that some U.S. leaders confuse NATO with the Warsaw Pact. Even worse, the glee in Washington over European division regarding the U.S. position has nurtured the European penchant for conspiracy theories. Not only is the United States suspected of welcoming European disunity; some Europeans are beginning to believe that the United States, largely under the influence of those policymakers most eager for war, is actually planning a grand strategic realignment. The Atlantic alliance would be replaced by a coalition of non-European states, such as Russia, India and Israel, each with special hostility toward various parts of the Muslim world. [...]

Several basic conclusions thus follow:

* The United States should not engage in tit-for-tat polemics directed at its most important allies. That is as demeaning as it is destructive. There is an urgent need for a reaffirmation at the highest level of the priority of the Atlantic alliance as the anchor point of America's engagement in world.

Mr. Brzezinski is an elderly man with a disappointing career behind him and it must be painful to watch the continent of his birth pass into its twilight years too, but the above is a reflection of a mind that's stuck in the 1970s, or earlier. The simple truth is that the Europeans aren't our most important allies anymore and that the Muslim world, about which they are unconcerned, does contain the main threat to our security in the world today. Europe (or France and Germany which is what we mean when we say Europe) with its post-Western belief systems, declining population, ever growing welfare states, and its lunatic project for a massive authoritarian bureaucracy is, unless a radical retrenchment can be affected, doomed to rapid and catastrophic decline. It has more to fear from exploding deficits and large and unassimilated cohorts of Muslim immigrants than it does from nations like Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and North Korea and its people will under no circumstances tolerate the diversion of welfare dollars to a military build-up, so it's pointless to look to Europe as a strategic ally any longer.

It is therefore logical and necessary to forge a new coalition of the states whose economic futures are brighter and whose interests lie in confronting Islamicist terror and in reforming the Muslim world to bring it freedom, peace, and prosperity. In this regard, and because of its historic rivalry with the last significant communist state (China), India is our most important 21st Century ally in trade and military terms. Several states of dubious economic promise are nevertheless key allies because of geography, military prowess, shared values, or all three: these include, especially, Israel, Turkey, and Taiwan. There is, further, a set of states, less important in geostrategic terms, with whom we are bound by a shared past or a common culture: Latin America, maybe still Britain and the rest of the Commonwealth, perhaps Eastern Europe, and probably an increasingingly Christianized Africa. They will become or remain allies just because we're relatively similar.

For fifty years, the Atlantic Alliance served its purpose and served it rather badly. While we confronted the Soviet Union we allowed our European allies a nearly free military ride during which they became addicted to government services and, as wards of the state, jettisoned old religious and philosophical beliefs and the structures of civil society--church, family, neighborhood, etc.--leaving the individual with only one relationship that really matters, that with the government, which dispenses benefits and cares for all material needs. Sure, communism was eventually driven from the continent, but what remains of Europe? Naught but an atomized people with no care beyond where their next check is coming from.

I'd always been inclined to accept Paul Kennedy's argument that it is large military budgets that pose the greatest threat to the stability of Great Powers. But now it may be time to start considering an alternative possibility, perhaps largish military budgets divert a sufficient amount of money from social spending that they act as a brake on economism. H.W. Brands has written that America almost accidentally became something of a welfare state because the American Right allowed the Left higher social spending as the cost for getting higher military spending. Yet, thinking about it now, what's most noticable about America's welfare system is not that we have one but that it's so much less extensive than that of other Western nations. Perhaps it was precisely the Cold War military budgets that kept us from becoming France? Whatever the case, the fact remains, we avoided the fate of Western Europe and, if we privatize things like Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and primary education, we may just be able to avoid it for much longer.

What we're left with at the end of the day though is the perhaps sad realization that just as Europe no longer matters much in military terms and soon won't matter much in economic terms, we no longer even share a similar vision of the proper division of responsibility in a state between the people, social institutions, business, and the government. Mr. Brzezinski is in effect trying to force us down a path we chose not to take, one that seems to have little future. The American future, as always, lies in freedom, not security, in risky ascent, not in comfortable decline. France and Germany need not be our enemies--they hardly matter enough to even warrant the term--but the way they've chosen to structure their cultures is antithetical to the American way. Their ideas, if not they themselves, are the enemy.

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WHATTA YA' GOT?:

Another March of Folly? (CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY, February 19, 2003, NY Times)

Twenty years ago this month, I was an aide to Vice President George Bush during another trans-Atlantic crisis. There were demonstrations in European capitals in which America was portrayed as the threat to world peace and the American president was called a warmonger, a "cowboy" and worse. Vice President Bush's response in February 1983 may hold some lessons for President Bush in February 2003.

Two decades ago the vice president was dispatched to London to calm things down, to hold hands, to remind our European friends and allies that we were still all in this together. What made his trip necessary was the controversy over deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe; several years earlier, the Europeans had requested that the United States place Pershing 2 missiles in Europe to counter Soviet medium-range missiles that were aimed at the Continent.

But when the missiles were ready to be put in place, Europe changed its mind. We don't want those missiles after all, Europe decided, under pressure from its left and the Soviet Union. You'll just use them to wage nuclear war on our soil. [...]

That night in Guildhall, as the vice president gave a positively brilliant speech, the shouting of the demonstrators seemed loud enough to rattle the stained-glass windows of the historic building. There was a question-and-answer session afterward. A politician wearing the clerical collar of the Church of England rose and in a tone of high moral revulsion denounced the United States for bringing emotions in Europe to the present boil and for forcing on an unwilling England and Continent these ghastly weapons. He had children, he announced with umbrage, and he rather hoped he would be able to see them grow up and not be incinerated in a nuclear exchange initiated by America.

The vice president began to answer, in his usual earnest, thoughtful and patient way. And then he stopped. I saw the air go out of him. He sighed. It was as eloquent and sincere a sigh as I have ever heard from a politician.

"Look, I have kids too," he said. "Don't you think I want to see them grow up?"

He followed this remark by saying that these missiles--he did not add, "That you asked us for, bub"--were intended to make Europe safer, not more dangerous. He reminded the gentleman that President Ronald Reagan had pledged to meet with General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev "at any time" and "any place" to sign an agreement eliminating all intermediate-range nuclear missiles.

The moment was defused. I had never seen the vice president in better form.

It's a moment in time that it's vitally important we remember, even as the Left tries to forget. Appeasement wasn't one brief mistaken moment in the 1930s; it's been the strategy of Europe and of American liberals for decades. Perhaps because their political ideology is based on the fundamental goodness and ultimate perfectibility of mankind, they seem to believe that we can change the behavior of the world's worst regime simply by being nice to them. So they (one or the other or both) left the USSR
in control of Eastern Europe, so they refused to carry the Korean War to China, so they refused to carry the Vietnam War to even North Vietnam and then undercut the South Vietnamese when it looked like they'd be able to hold out without us, so they countenanced and then defended Castro in Cuba and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and so they fought to preserve the Soviet Union (via detente) rather than confront and finally defeat it. And so, today, they seek to prop up Saddam, and Yassar Arafat, and Assad, and all the rest, rather than face the tragic flaw in their own worldview and accept that evil is real, that it must be dealt with by the good, and that we are justified in judging others to be the former and ourselves to be the latter.

If you can stomach listening to an interview with the one of the protestors who're out in the streets these days, you'll hear them talk about the uniqueness of their movement, in its size, passion, moral position, and power. That's bunk. They resemble nothing so much as those '80s marches against the intermediate missile upgrade and SDI and in favor of the Nuclear Freeze. In fact, the issues don't much matter; they'd march for any anti-Western cause you trotted out. Because the real point of their protests is a futile attempt to assert control over our enemies. It is necessary for them to believe that Saddam is not a bad man who's beyond our control, but an essentially decent and reasonable man who our own actions have caused to behave badly.

Many have wondered why these folks would bad mouth their own countries and political systems and cuddle up to every two-bit dictatorship that comes down the pike. And people are mystified by the obvious disregard that such demonstrators have for the victims of such tyrannical rulers: how can these ostensible humanitarians care so little about particular humans, like those in the Gulag, then, or in Iraq now? The answer, of course, is that the protests aren't about the lives and rights of people in other countries; they're a desperate assertion of personal powerfulness by the demonstrators themselves. They are an act of contempt for Saddam and the Iraqi people, an attempt to reduce them to mere results of our own behavior rather than serious moral agents in their own right, responsible for the Iraq they've created, a place of evil.

So, when George W. Bush and Tony Blair declare their intent to hold the Iraqi regime responsible for its actions and the peace movement demands that this not be done, it's not a question of the Left disagreeing that those actions were terrible, but rather they disagree that Iraq is responsible. Only we can be responsible, because if what the Right calls "evil" can exist without our having created it ourselves then all of Leftist ideology is a lie and the world, which is truly beyond our control, is too scary a place to even be contemplated.

We should hardly be surprised then that the Western Left--already buffeted by the collapse of communism and socialism as viable alternatives to capitalism, and reeling from the American people's ready acceptance of the idea that 9-11 and after represents a clash between good and evil--has poured into the streets to hysterically proclaim that it's all our own fault, that it's big oil, or fundamentalist Christians, or our arming of Saddam, or our support of the Afghan mujahadeen, or our support of Zionism, or whatever...that has "caused" the conflict. The Left believes it can control the world, can reshape humans, and can create a utopia. Such a dream must die hard and we can't expect its death throes to look pretty. Were they not abetting evil, it might even be possible to pity these folk.

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LAY LOW, LIKE SNAKES?

If Democrats lay low on war, Bush will defeat himself (DeWayne Wickham, 2/18/03, USA TODAY)

It's time for Democrats who oppose George W. Bush's push for war with Iraq to shut up.

Congressional Democrats, in particular, should muzzle their criticism of the president. Instead of publicly questioning his reasons for wanting to invade Iraq, they should voice strong support for the men and women Bush will send into battle — and give the president no reason to blame them for the bad things that almost certainly will result from his handling of this situation.

In the coming weeks, the president is expected to order a "first strike" on Iraq. The televised images of U.S. troops pouring into that Muslim country will be a recruitment poster for Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization and the cause of widespread protests around the world.

"If they continue to criticize Bush, Democrats will be blamed for creating the atmosphere for his failure to build multilateral support for war with Iraq," said William Gray, the former Democratic Pennsylvania congressman who was the House majority whip during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. [...]

If Bush proceeds, it's a good bet that, although Saddam Hussein's regime will be gone by the time the 2004 presidential campaign gets underway, thousands of U.S. troops still will be in Iraq. The price tag for both the war and the "nation building" that will follow this conflict will deepen the federal deficit and push the United States closer to a recession.

By the time voters go to the polls in the next presidential election, the question on the minds of many will be the one Ronald Reagan used so effectively against Jimmy Carter in 1980: Are you better off today than you were four years ago? This is the fight that Democrats must wage--and it is the one they have the best chance of winning, if they don't get bogged down in protesting a war they lack the power to stop.

"Democrats have to avoid being cast as obstructionists when it comes to war with Iraq," Gray said. "They had their say last year, when the war resolution was before Congress--and they lost that vote. If it happens, this will be Bush's war."

He's right. The body bags and the price tag will all be the president's cross to bear.

You know, we used to labor under the delusion that Democrats were patriots first and partisans second. Anyone who really thought this scenario was going to play out but kept silent about it would be unworthy of governing his fellow citizens.

But, bad enough that he'd give such despicable advice, Mr. Wickham is simply blind to what's going on around him. This strategy might make some sense from a purely political standpoint, if stasis were going to follow the fall of Saddam. But if the Democrats fade to black while the Administration moves on to deal with places like North Korea, Iran, Palestine, Syria, South Lebanon, etc., they'll rightly be seen as the party of insignificance.

Even recognizing that it's only mid-February, this one may have locked up worst column of the year.

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DELIVER US:

Time for a Boxer rebellion?: Republicans lining up for the chance to replace state's liberal poster child (Doug Gamble, February 18, 2003, Orange County Register)

A few weeks before the Democrats moved into the White House in 1993, Vice President Dan Quayle told me the defeat that stung the most, aside from that suffered by the Bush/Quayle ticket, was Bruce Herschensohn's loss to Barbara Boxer in California's Senate race.

The conservative Los Angeles radio and TV commentator and ex-Nixon aide had kept the 1992 campaign close until its waning days, when he was blindsided by a smear of his character sprung by state Democratic political director Bob Mulholland. It made the difference in a five-point Boxer victory.

The GOP's hope for revenge in 1998 evaporated when their senatorial nominee - bland, moderate state Treasurer Matt Fong - allowed Boxer to get away with portraying him as a right-wing lunatic. He was also unable to raise enough money to be competitive with ads, and was off the air most