Glossing over the negative aspects of the latest report by the weapons inspectors, a government statement issued from a meeting presided over by Saddam Hussein and editorials in the government-controlled press all reached the same conclusion: that Iraq had been declared sufficiently free of weapons of mass destruction to warrant the cancellation of sanctions imposed after the 1991 Persian Gulf war. . . .The Iraqi demands to the United Nations included a call to strip Israel of its weapons of mass destruction and force it to abide by Security Council resolutions requiring its withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territory. The government statement also said the United States and Britain should officially be branded "liars."
The statement by the Iraqi cabinet said the United States was still trying to use the cover of the Security Council reports to attack Iraq despite the cooperation detailed by the weapons inspectors.
A prominent economist has sounded a warning about China's troubled state banks, bulging budget deficits and hidden debts, which he said could hobble its economic growth.Professor Wu Jinglian, who is a member of the country's top advisory body, said on Friday that the amount of non-performing assets (NPAs) held by the four state-owned commercial banks was far too high.
He said China's asset management companies, created to restructure bad bank loans, can only fix about 30 per cent of the 1.4 trillion yuan (S$294 billion) of NPAs transferred to them.
The rest is left to the government to deal with.
The state banks themselves still have 1.8 trillion yuan of NPAs on their books that must be written off by the government.
Prof Wu estimated that China's NPAs represent some 30 per cent of current gross domestic product.
Just as unsettling for the economist was the country's ballooning budget deficit, which hovered at around 3 per cent of GDP.
The Ethical Society of Austin ("the Ethical Society"), a congregation of individuals who meet regularly to practice a belief system known as Ethical Culture, seeks tax-exempt status as a religious organization under the tax code. The Texas Comptroller denied the application on the ground that the Ethical Society must demonstrate that it requires belief in a "God, Gods, or higher power" (hereinafter "the Supreme Being test") in order to qualify. The trial court found that the Ethical Society should not have been denied tax-exempt status because the Comptroller's test was unconstitutionally underinclusive and that the Ethical Society should have qualified for the requested tax exemptions. We must now decide whether a state government may, consistent with the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, require a group to demonstrate its belief in a "Supreme Being" in order to be considered a religion for statutory purposes. Because the Comptroller's test fails to include the whole range of belief systems that may, in our diverse and pluralistic society, merit the First Amendment's protection, we will affirm the trial court's judgment. [Citations omitted] . . .Ethical Culture has the marks of a traditional religious organization. Indeed, with a history dating back to 1876, Ethical Culture does appear to function in a way analogous to more established religious groups. It maintains a bona fide separate corporate existence. It possesses a coherent literature. Ethical Culture groups meet regularly, typically on Sundays, for services including ceremonial practices. Those services are led by a group of clergy, most of whom have been educated at theological institutes and seminaries. The same trained clergy perform life cycle rituals, including marriages and naming ceremonies. The services are supplemented with religious instruction for children. The Ethical Society of Austin has such meetings, coordinated by professional clergy, and meets regularly on Sundays. Taken together, these factors indicate to us a sincere attempt by the Ethical Society, and its sister groups, to undertake to provide the benefits of a traditional religion. In light of our understanding of the structure of Ethical Culture's principles, these external indications of religious faith mark an important factor for determining whether the Ethical Society is a religion.
He is acclaimed in north Africa as anti-Bush, anti-America and pro- Saddam. Not quite the image he wants to convey to Washington, of course, but a useful counterweight to the notion, widespread in the Muslim world, that US policy towards Iraq is part of a Christian crusade against Islam.But reality was an intrusive, if unwelcome guest, at the party. France has the largest Muslim population in Europe and it is growing fast and immigration is a hot political issue. While Chirac was in Algiers, the French town of Nimes was convulsed by violence. Gangs of youths ran riot after the police shot dead a 17-year-old man of north African descent. Shops were burnt and looted, a police car was shot at.
There are more than two million Algerians in France. Last year, almost 200,000 more got visas to enter the country. The demand is ever growing. Wherever he went, Chirac was greeted by chants of 'Vi -- sas! Vi -- sas!'
But France is shutting its doors. While Chirac spoke in Algiers of opening frontiers, his ambitious interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, was tightening down the hatches and sending refugees home. This is a country that is no longer sure of its place and role in the world. France is bewildered by the pace of change, by globalisation, the evolution of the EU and the ebbing power and significance of national institutions.
The French are disturbed by the speed of demographic change and worried that the enlargement of the EU into Central and Eastern Europe will bring them no good. They fear that it will mean the end of the rural France that has so shaped the nation's identity -- the notion of La France profonde. Without the agricultural subsidies of CAP, the depopulation of the countryside will gather pace.
In last year's elections, the far-right National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, shocked the country and its political establishment by winning almost 20% of the vote in the first round . Of course, Le Pen's followers included the fascist bully-boys that make up the far-right all over Europe, but they were a minority. Most of those who marched behind his banners came from middle-class, rural and artisan France.
After Chirac's crushing victory in the second round, he sent his ministers on a fact-finding mission to the provinces to discover why Le Pen did well. There were no surprises: insecurity, a decline in law and order and fears of a dilution of national identity.
Few who saw him accept the presidency on a snow-swept day in January 2001 ever thought that young Dubya would step up from being an insipid interloper to a world leader, about to embark on adventures that will change the shape of the world. First the Taliban and their evil ideas were sent packing from Afghanistan, the noose is tightening around the al-Qaeda terrorist network that attacked the US homeland, and now the Iraqi leader is in Bush's sights. Two momentous events saw to that: the September 11 atrocities, which demanded strategic realignment, and the mid-term elections a year later, which provided Bush's power base with unshakable foundations.Yet, for all that Bush has adopted the complexion of the chameleon, many still believe that grey is still the predominant colour. The man who will take the world into a largely unwanted war, once said: 'When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world and you knew exactly who they were. It was us versus them and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who they are, but we know they're there.' Dubya knew what he meant, or at least thought he did, but, somewhere along the route followed by the presidential thought processes, the synapses clicked at the wrong moment and the sentiment came out the wrong way round, upside down, and decidedly mangled.
In the Chevy Chase world of US politics, it is easy to smirk at Bush's solecisms and snicker at the commonly-held view that he's a few beans short of a full burrito, a dyslexic who gets it so wrong that he once went to a fancy-dress toga party dressed as a goat. It is even simpler to write him off as a numbskull or a front man who needs others to wind up the clockwork before he speaks or acts. It needs no second prompting to suggest he is driven by religious fanaticism, almost fundamentalist in its intensity, to save souls and bring them to the redemption stool. Such thoughts might be diverting for unreconstructed cynics, they might give comfort to those of a nervous disposition, but they do not tell the whole truth. [...]
But like many other bitter jests from those days when the heavens seemed to be falling, there was more than a knowing smile behind the words. The jury is still out on whether or not Bush is a blockhead -- he seems to possess a sly, animal intelligence -- but one thing cannot be denied or rewritten. It was money that got Dubya into the Oval Office. Here was a rich kid living off his father's reputation, a guy who had been handed everything because it had been bought for him, a thin-skinned semi-failure with a tendency to reinvent his own life history, an oil baron wheeler-dealer whose money came from dubious sources, yet this bluff Texas cowpoke with a penchant for homely maxims suddenly found himself occupying the world's most powerful position .
As he stands on the brink of plunging the Middle East into turmoil or, if you prefer, of leading the next stage of his crusade against terrorism, Dubya is that curious amalgam of modern times -- a man who came from nowhere going somewhere, a latter-day Peter the Hermit blessed or cursed with big bucks, who has been permitted to decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people. His election was as shabby an example of power exercised without responsibility as could be found in Richard J Daley's Chicago during the heyday of boss politics. Here was Tammany Hall meeting Midland, Texas. [...]
Due to the collegiate system Bush encourages in his inner Cabinet, a vital factor in understanding him is to know the last person to whom he has spoken. If it's Cheney or Rumsfeld, hang 'em high will be the way forward. If it's Powell, the agenda will include compromise and caution. Condoleezza Rice brings her own brand of pragmatism, balanced by Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz's ferocious realpolitik. Since quitting drink , Bush has become a good listener and enjoys moderating his argumentative Cabinet as they kick options back and forth. Here he is among friends who know where he is coming from. That counts in Team Bush.
And President Bush demonstrated his faith in his own leadership qualities when he surrounded himself with this cabinet, the most qualified since George Washington's. After all, there was no political constituency for Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, and much bureaucratic danger in bringing aboard two former presidential chiefs of staff. But he not only hired them, he also brought aboard Colin Powell, John Ashcroft, Tommy Thompson, etc.--men who'd run governments or, in General Powell's case the U.S. Military, and have significant support within the party in their own rights. No man who was insecure about himself would have built such a team, one where he could easily have ended being overshadowed by his putative subordinates.
One particularly hilarious example of how much smarter--at least in terms of management skills--Mr. Bush is than Mr. Royle is that last bit about doing whatever the last advisor said. That is, of course, how you handle staff, allowing a Colin Powell to believe that he's convinced you to do what you've already decided, then taking him out to the Rose Garden to announce it to the press with him by your side, thereby making him beholden to you for what you'd do anyway. This continuing refusal, or inability, of pundits to examine Mr. Bush's political career through the lens of his business background seriously diminishes the quality of their analysis, and leaves them needlessly perplexed and their readers shortchanged.
SADDAM HUSSEIN has been trying to acquire a fleet of 300 drones equipped with spraying devices capable of delivering chemical and biological weapons, it was revealed last week.Iraqi documents seen by The Sunday Times show orders for kits to make the pilotless planes and for gyroscopes and guidance systems enabling them to be flown at targets from a distance. The documents also contain requests for small spraying devices normally used in agriculture that would be specially adapted for use in the air. [...]
Details of the orders emerged as the United Nations declassified a report on Iraq’s prohibited weapons programme. Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, said there was “credible information” that Iraq never destroyed 21,000 litres of biological warfare agents, including 10,000 litres of anthrax, stored during the 1990 Gulf war. There was also “credible information” that Iraq had 7,000 litres more biological warfare agents in bombs and warheads than it had declared.
Blix mentioned that inspectors had recently discovered an undeclared Iraqi drone with a wingspan of 25ft, which he said had been test-piloted by Iraq and could carry anthrax or other biological weapons to neighbouring countries.
To the fury of British and American officials the disclosure was buried deep in his 173-page report and not mentioned in an oral presentation to foreign ministers. The plane is being studied by inspectors to determine whether it can exceed the authorised range of 92 miles.
Two young sons of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks, are being used by the CIA to force their father to talk.Yousef al-Khalid, nine, and his brother, Abed al-Khalid, seven, were taken into custody in Pakistan last September when intelligence officers raided a flat in Karachi where their father had been hiding.
He fled just hours before the raid but his two young sons, along with another senior al-Qa'eda member, were found cowering behind a wardrobe in the apartment.
The boys have been held by the Pakistani authorities but this weekend they were flown to America where they will be questioned about their father.
Last night CIA interrogators confirmed that the boys were staying at a secret address where they were being encouraged to talk about their father's activities.
"We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children," said one official, "but we need to know as much about their father's recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care."
Geopolitics has intruded into the obscure world of shoe sole sales, with the first publicly documented case of a US company scrapping a German business deal because of Berlin's opposition to an attack on Iraq.Enefco, a Maine-based buyer of leatherboard - used in shoes and belts - has cancelled a L25,000-a-month ($27,494-a-month) contract with Lederett, a small east German company, citing "the lack of support for the US by the Federal Republic of Germany".
Enefco - whose internet home-page features an animated US flag and the legend "God Bless America" - confirmed on Friday it had withdrawn from the contract but said Norman Farrar, its owner, would not comment further.
German business organisations have long warned that Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's opposition to US foreign policy is damaging trade relations. But they have not cited specific cases of US companies wrapping themselves in the stars-and-stripes and turning down business with German companies. In the US, some Republican senators have called for trade sanctions against Germany and France, and a number of popular protests have gained publicity.
They're calling it the "baby summit." Host Sweden hopes a March meeting of European leaders will launch an appeal to reverse Europe's declining birth rates, rejuvenate the population and banish fears that a shrinking workforce will soon be unable to pay the continent's pensions bill."You can find no worse threat to sustainable development than to have too few children born," Environment Minister Kjell Larsson said recently. [...]
A UN report last year said Germany would need to import 487,000 immigrants a year to keep the working-age population stable up to 2050 at current birth and death rates. France would need 109,000 and the EU as a whole 1.58 million.
To keep the ratio of workers to old-age pensioners steady, the Union would need the influx of outsiders to swell to 13.5 million a year.
The Swedish government believes the population slump is the greatest social problem facing Europe. Its plan to reverse the decline is simple - create a "family friendly" society to make it easier for today's dual-breadwinner couples to have more babies without sacrificing their careers. The Swedes will be making the point when they host their first ever EU summit in Stockholm March 23-24. [...]
Sweden is already taking a lead, with the government planning to phase in a series of improvements to a support programme already among the world's most generous. New measures include increasing paid parental leave from 12 to 13 months, of which fathers must take two months; increasing monthly child benefit payments beyond the current 950 kroner ($102) per child; and introducing free pre-school for four and five-year-olds by 2003.
Swedish officials say paying to promote a baby boom has been shown to work.
When benefits were raised in the late 1980s, the birth rate soared to 14.5 per 1,000 citizens - second only to Ireland among the EU nations. When a recession forced cuts in the early 1990s the babies stopped coming and Sweden finished the decade with just 10 births per 1,000 people - almost bottom of the EU birth table.
Sweden has an advantage over other EU nations: Its people have shown they are prepared to tolerate some of the world's highest tax rates in return for cradle-to-grave welfare.
It is estimated that Swedes, numbering about nine million, pay around 60 per cent of their income on taxes. Increasingly that's the sort of price other nations may have to consider paying to keep the population going, experts say.
The Taliban supreme leader Mulla Omar and two sons of Osama bin Laden were arrested in southeastern Afghanistan while intensified search continues for the most sought after man Osama Bin Laden in a joint operation involving US forces . . . The brothers were captured in the Rabat region in the extreme southwest of Afghanistan’s Nimroz province where the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan meet, they added. Sources said that the joint forces were sure that they have captured an important Taliban figure Mulla Omar but his identity was yet to ascertained by the top intelligence high command in Pentagon.
Earlier this week we wondered what Old Europe could hope to gain from being humiliated when they fail to stop the war; Patrick Ruffini says It's Not About Iraq.
The President has carefully set about action in ascending order of difficulty. First the Taliban. Then Saddam. Then the next step, Iran - the world's leading financier of terror. North Korea will be left to China to deal with, with Mr Bush making clear to China that, if it does not take its responsibilities seriously, Japan will be given nuclear weapons.This is not speculation; talk, as I have, to those within the Bush circle . . . and they will take you through the plan step by step. . . .
Iran is, if you like, the Henry Ford of modern terror: it invented an assembly line, from the local mosque to the terrorist training camp . . .
Well-connected advisers tell me that if, as now seems likely, the UN refuses to back action against terror, Mr Bush will announce a "temporary" suspension of America's membership, to be accompanied by an offer: if the UN gets its act together and carries out long-overdue reforms, America (and its money) will return. But if there is no reform, the temporary withdrawal will, de facto, become permanent.
Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader, will not be permitted to shake hands with President George W Bush or visit the Oval Office during next week's St Patrick's Day celebrations at the White House.The decision was taken after the Farc, a Colombian narco-terrorist group, used its training from the Provisional IRA to launch a campaign of urban bombing and began to target Americans.
A defence contractor working for the US Army was murdered and three more taken hostage by the Farc last month after their single engine Cessna plane crashed in the jungle 200 miles south of Bogota. [...]
Last year, Mr Adams was among a group of five party leaders photographed with Mr Bush in the Oval Office along with Bertie Ahern, the Irish premier, and John Reid, then Northern Ireland Secretary. This year, there will be no photograph and no contact between Mr Adams and Mr Bush.
The politically correct position on the war against terrorism is "this is not about Islam". Two groups dissent: American fundamentalist Christians and European fundamentalist secularists. Born-again Christians of the American midwest think that the reunification of all the biblical lands of Israel will hasten the Second Coming, in which Rapture they will be forever saved. European fundamentalist secularists think that all religion is blindness and stupidity, a kind of mental affliction, of which Islam is a particularly acute example.The polite form of this attitude is to say "Islam must have its Reformation". After all, Muslims are still living in the Middle Ages aren't they? In 1424, to be precise. This, apart from being unbearably condescending ("come on you chaps, reform yourselves and maybe we'll let you into the house"), is also half-baked. The Reformation started as a revolt against the pope in the name of a true reading of the holy books. Islam doesn't have a pope, which is one reason it's so hard for it to have a Reformation. But anyway, would those who say "Islam must have its Reformation" really want Muslims to get back to a strict, literal interpretation of the Koran? No, what people who say this really mean is "Islam must have its Enlightenment". Or, better still, its post-Darwinian secularisation. Muslims must, in short, evolve .
The one form of evangelism that is still acceptable on the European left is evangelical Darwinism. Its fundamental belief is that all other forms of belief are symptoms of intellectual backwardness. Thus Martin Amis wrote on this page a couple of days ago "we are obliged to accept the fact that Bush is more religious than Saddam: of the two presidents, he is, in this respect, the more psychologically primitive". By this logic, Archbishop Rowan Williams is more psychologically primitive than Stalin and Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is more psychologically primitive than Hitler.
Europe is the place where post-Darwinian secularisation is most advanced. It's now the most secular continent on earth. And it's precisely the fact that Europeans, especially on the left, have such a secular imagination that makes it so difficult for us to understand and accept the religious Muslims who have come among us in growing numbers. You need a religious imagination to respond to the music of other religions. Jonathan Sacks expressed this well in his account of a meeting with radical Muslims, including a senior Iranian Ayatollah. "We established within minutes a common language, because we take certain things very seriously: we take faith seriously, we take texts seriously. It's a particular language that believers share." [...]
The leap of imaginative sympathy from Christianity or Judaism to Islam is much smaller than that from evangelical secularism to any of them. That's why America, which has preserved the religious imagination it imported from Europe, may actually be better placed to accept the Islamic other. That's not all. America has a rare combination of religious imagination and an inclusive, civic identity. Europe has a fateful combination of secular imagination and exclusive, ethnic identities.
A couple of months ago, taking a crash course of enculturation in the American Bible Belt, I sat in Homer's coffee house, in a suburb of Kansas City, talking to Chris Mull, a singer of rather excruciating "Christian rock". He said some interesting things about the local Muslims. Being religious themselves, he said, the local Christians were better able to understand Muslim religiosity. Since this was an area of so many competing religious sects, everyone accepted that religion had to be a matter of private choice and community life. In this sense, a place where most people are religious can come closer to the pluralist ideal in which, as Rabbi Sacks has memorably put it, "Values are tapes we play on the Walkman of the mind; any tune we choose so long as it does not disturb others." Finally, my Christian rocker said that local Muslims made more efforts to adapt to American ways because "they're living the American dream".
Pie in the sky, you may retort. Apple pie in the sky. But can you imagine anyone in Marseille or Hamburg or Oldham even thinking of saying of the local Muslims that "they're living the European dream"? Contemporary Europeanness is secular, but it's not an inclusive, civic identity, as Americanness is. That's Europe's double problem. The Iraq war may be America's crusade, but it's Europe which is closer to the likely Muslim backlash and worse equipped to deal with it.
None of this is to deny that there are large dangers in Islam itself, especially in radically politicised Islam. The captured al-Qaida commander Khalid Sheikh Mohammed chillingly reminds us of this when he describes the 9/11 terrorist attacks as "the holy raids on Washington and New York". But the beginning of the Islamic new year is a good moment for post-Christian Europe to look not at the mote in our Islamic neighbour's eye but at the beam in our own.
We happen to believe that Islam must be reformed and fear that, lacking a central authority, that reform will have to be generated from without. However, that reform, while it must secularize economics and politics, must not secularize the entire culture, lest Islam follow Europe into terminal decline.
Having grown weary of receiving e-mails telling us that the only thing that makes our site worthwhile is the comments, we've decided to cut to the chase and just have the nearly mythical "pj" post for himself. It can, therefore, now be revealed that he is Paul Jaminet, about whom you can find out more at his website. We are honored to have him participate.
The stirring events of the Exodus from Egypt, the splitting of the Red Sea, the revelation at Sinai, the disaster of the Golden Calf, the war with Amalek, all do not appear in the report at the end of the book. Instead we have an accounting of monies and goods and services donated by the Jewish people in order to build the Mishkan (Tabernacle).There is nothing as boring and undramatic as an accountant's report, a statement of profit and loss and of budgets raised and spent. Yet an accurate accounting of money lies at the heart of all civilized societies. Cooking the books, filing false financial statements destroys confidence and eventually leads to far-reaching negative consequences. Remember Enron and Arthur Andersen? The Torah therefore prefers to end this stirring book on the somewhat mundane note of honest and open accountability. And this is a great lesson in life.
Accountability is the name of the game in Jewish life. The Torah teaches us that "adam muad lolam" --- a person is always liable and responsible for one's actions and behavior. Corruption in monetary matters is a symptom of the corruption in one's heart and soul. [...]
Accepting the Torah at Sinai is dramatic and inspiring. Maintaining its precepts and living its values in a dangerous and inimical world is taxing and many times uninspiring. People crave excitement --- "spirituality." But oftentimes people think that such spirituality comes without the necessary price tag of inhibited human behavior and personal accountability.
It is only the message of accountability that this parsha stresses that can give us the courage and fortitude to continually rise in the face of adversity and proclaim "chazak, chazak, v'nischazek" ---" Let us be strong, let us be strong and let us strengthen others as well."
MORE:
-ESSAY: Rights, Responsibilities, and Communitarianism (Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D., friesian.com)
UPDATE:
Speaking of Communitarianism, one of its fathers has started a blog:
Miscellaneous (Amitai Etzioni, March 03, 2003, Amitai Etzioni Notes: Personal and Communitarian Reflections)
Until a few months ago I did not know a blog from a hole in the wall. Then I joined Lawrence Lessig at a Catholic University Law School symposium in which he laid out his opposition to copyright laws. He favored free access to cultural products in cyberspace for the common good, which he defined as creativity and innovation. I shared that characterization of the good, but wondered if the best way to protect the vary same good would be ensuring that innovators and creators receive some benefits for a reasonable period. I asked Lessig for examples of damages that creative people incurred because access to music, texts, films, and other cultural material in cyberspace is not unencumbered. Lessig did not have a sizeable list, but he suggested that the creators of blogs would be unable to incorporate, say, Disney images into their web logs, as many like to do. (He was quick to note that this matter could be readily handled by extending the fair use laws that exist in the rest of the world to cyberspace, still maintaining copyright laws).I had no idea what Lessig was referring to, but soon I found a whole slew of blogs. Many of them seem to be on the light side; quite a few are even hacking products, anything from digital cameras to underwear. But then the "wonder kid" of the UCLA law school, Eugene Volokh, invited me to what is known as the "Volokh Fest"; when he snows into town, he invites some of his considerable number of friends to a Dutch dinner. Turns out, he has a highly regarded blog site, the Volokh Conspiracy; and he introduced me to others, including the most popular one, Instapundit. These blogs inspired me to form one. I would love to have comments on my attempt to use this new medium to share pieces of information, sources, and ideas in which I naively believe everybody must be interested. And I promise you that in my case .com means communitarian, not commercial.
A number of police departments in the United States have created `cold-case squads' to investigate unsolved crimes that are years or even decades old. To `clear' old cases, detectives often use new methods such as DNA analysis and other modern forensic techniques to analyze data that was collected but not comprehensible when the crimes were committed. Professor Fox's intriguing book is about an historical `cold case' that took more than 50 years to clear.The crime in question was the cold-blooded murder of some 4,500 Polish officers and soldiers whose bodies were discovered in April 1943 in the Katyn Forest, located 12 miles west of the Russian city of Smolensk. The hero of Fox's book is a self-taught photo-interpreter of professional caliber named Waclaw Godziemba-Maliszewski. The data collected at the time of the crime were aerial reconnaissance photographs taken by the German Luftwaffe, which were seized, classified, and stored in the "evidence room" of the US National Archives until they were declassified in 1979. The methods used to finally solve the crime were modern photo interpretation and photogrammetry.
German occupation forces stumbled onto mass graves at Katyn in April 1943. Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels charged the Soviets with mass murder, hoping to exploit the grisly discovery to shatter the Anglo-American-Soviet wartime alliance. The Germans exhumed many of the corpses and brought in an international team of forensic experts and other observers to substantiate the Soviet atrocity. The plan backfired. All of the forensic experts were from Nazi-occupied countries, with the exception of one pathologist from neutral Switzerland. Stalin blamed the Germans for the massacres, and London and Washington accepted his version of the story as the truth. As time went on, most historians in the West concluded that the Soviets were to blame, since what little evidence there was suggested that the Poles were killed while in Soviet, not German, captivity. Nevertheless, doubts persisted for decades.
God's Eye is part history and part biography. The historical part tells the story of Katyn and other killing fields where more than 20,000 Polish officers, soldiers, border guards, police, and other officials, as well as ordinary citizens, were executed during World War II. The narrative stretches from 1940 to the present, tracking successive investigations that uncovered the truth bit by bit. The biographical part of Fox's book focuses on Maliszewski's indefatigable efforts to identify execution and burial sites, establish Soviet culpability, and pressure Warsaw and Moscow to complete a full official investigation.
A number of causes, working together, brought the crisis momentarily to a head, although I do not personally believe there can be serious trouble while the Duma is sitting.A number of baker shops were destroyed, and at others crowds seized bread from those who succeeded in buying it. A crowd last night broke the windows of a factory because its workers refused to strike.
The methods of the Cossacks, as I saw them this afternoon, are to make a cordon with their horses at opposite ends of the streets. Meanwhile, other troops ride through the crowd. The feeling of the people is not hostile to the Cossacks. For the most part the crowds are good tempered, and there is still hope that serious conflict will be avoided.
The general character of the excitement is vague. Throughout yesterday the streets were full of people, although Petrograd is heavily patrolled by Cossacks and mounted police; most of the crowd, including many women, were out to watch other people make trouble. The general atmosphere of excitement is like a bank holiday with thunder in the air.
Solzhenitsyn's appreciation of Stolypin has been largely unknown because it appears in the second edition of August 1914: The Red Wheel I (1989), which few have read. What Solzhenitsyn claims in the Stolypin chapters is that a moderate alternative to Tsarist autocracy existed in Russia in the early twentieth century-namely, a peaceful evolution toward a European-style constitutional monarchy under the enlightened statesmanship of Prime Minister Stolypin.The main features of Stolypin's plan were the preservation of the Romanov dynasty and Orthodox Church, combined with economic and political reforms-reforms that would have given land to peasants and established local self-governing councils. Tragically, Stolypin was assassinated by terrorists who feared the success of his plan (which Solzhenitsyn estimates could have created an independent peasantry in twenty years and prevented Communist revolution). Mahoney's analysis shows Solzhenitsyn to be a Burkean-style admirer of constitutional monarchy that gradually evolves toward ordered liberty while preserving his nation's distinctive traditions.
MORE:
Here's a recent treat, Richard Pipes reviewing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Alone Together: SOLZHENITSYN AND THE JEWS, REVISTED (Richard Pipes, 11.14.02, New Republic)
As Justice Holmes grew old he became a figure for legend. Eager young students of history and the law, with no possibility of an introduction to him, made pilgrimages to Washington merely that they might remember at least the sight of him on the bench of the Supreme Court. Others so fortunate as to be invited to his home were apt to consider themselves thereafter as men set apart. Their elders, far from discouraging this attitude, strengthened it.A group of leading jurists and liberals filled a volume of essays in praise of him, and on the occasion of its presentation Chief Justice Hughes said:
"The most beautiful and the rarest thing in the world is a complete human life, unmarred, unified by intelligent purpose and uninterrupted accomplishment, blessed by great talent employed in the worthiest activities, with a deserving fame never dimmed and always growing. Such a rarely beautiful life is that of Mr. Justice Holmes."
Perhaps the first to recognize this was H.L. Mencken, Mr. Justice Holmes: A Review of The Dissenting Opinions of Mr. Justice Holmes (H.L. Mencken, May 1930, The American Mercury):
My suspicion is that the hopeful Liberals of the 20s, frantically eager to find at least one judge who was not violently and implacably against them, seized upon certain of Mr. Justice Holmes's opinions without examining the rest, and read into them an attitude that was actually as foreign to his ways of thinking as it was to those of Mr. Chief Justice Hughes. Finding him, now and then, defending eloquently a new and uplifting law which his colleagues proposed to strike of the books, they concluded that he was a sworn advocate of the rights of man. But all the while, if I do not misread his plain words, he was actually no more than an advocate of the rights of lawmakers. There, indeed, is the clue to his whole jurisprudence. He believed that the law-making bodies should be free to experiment almost ad libitum, that the courts should not call a halt upon them until they clearly passed the uttermost bounds of reason, that everything should be sacrificed to their autonomy, including apparently, even the Bill of Rights. If this [sic] is liberalism, then all I can say is that Liberalism is not what it was when I was young.In those remote days, sucking wisdom from the primeval springs, I was taught that the very aim of the Constitution was to keep law-makers from running amok, and that it was the highest duty of the Supreme Court, following Marbury v. Madison, to safeguard it against their forays. It was not sufficient, so my instructors maintained, for Congress or a State Legislature to give assurance that its intentions were noble; noble or not, it had to keep squarely within the limits of the Bill of Rights, and the moment it went beyond them its most virtuous acts were null and void. But Mr. Justice Holmes apparently thought otherwise. He held, it would seem, that violating the Bill of Rights is a rare and deliberate malice, and that it is chief business of the Supreme Court to keep the Constitution loose and elastic, so that blasting holes through it may not be too onerous. Bear this doctrine in mind, and you will have an adequate explanation, on the one hand, of those forward-looking opinions which console the Liberals- for example in Lochner v. New York (the bakery case), in the child labor case, and in the Virginia case involving the compulsory sterilization for imbeciles- and on the other hand, of the reactionary opinions which they so politely overlook- for example in the Debs case, in Bartels v. Iowa (a war-time case, involving the prohibition of foreign-language teaching), in the Mann Act case (in which Dr. Holmes concurred with the majority of the court, [sic] and thereby helped pave the way for the wholesale blackmail which Mr. Justice McKenna, who dissented, warned against), and finally in the long line of Volstead Act cases.
Making the world safer for us - defusing terrorism and beginning to reform a region that is a source of toxic hostility to what we stand for - happens to make the world safer for Israel as well. But the idea that Israel's interests are driving one of the most momentous shifts in America's foreign policy is simple-minded and offensive. (There is also a simple-minded and offensive flip side, which holds that opposition to the war is heavily fueled by anti-Semitism - another sweeping slander with a grain of truth in it.)What is demonstrably true is that Israelis believe that the war in Iraq is - to use a phrase that is a staple of Jewish satire - good for the Jews. Even though Israel is a likely target of Iraqi reprisals when war breaks out, it is the only country I know of where polls show overwhelming support for an invasion to oust Saddam, preferably sooner. [...]
There are obvious reasons that Israelis would like to rid the region of a man who trains terrorists and pays blood money to suicide bombers' families. But the deeper explanation, says Stephen Cohen, an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, is profound despair over the bloody dead end in which Israeli-Palestinian politics sit. A conquest of Iraq offers the prospect that the United States will take the region in hand. It is, to many Israelis, the only hope of change for the better.
In his speech last week to the American Enterprise Institute, President Bush for the first time seemed to embrace this thankless responsibility. He declared that success in Iraq could break the impasse and move Israel and the Palestinians toward the obvious two-state solution. He underscored this as "my personal commitment."
The speech may have been a sop to European opinion, but a successful war would offer Mr. Bush a precious opportunity. A lot of people wish that he had engaged the Palestinian question intensively and earlier, if only to gain some credibility with the Arabs prior to disarming Saddam. But later would still be better than never.
The question is, What will Mr. Bush make of this moment? If the U.S. manages to make a more benign Iraq - and perhaps a chastened Syria - the Israelis could decide to dig in their heels: Our friend Mr. Bush is here, he's on our side; we can now sit tight, wait for the Palestinians to read the handwriting on the walls of Baghdad and maybe offer them half a state.
Or the Americans could seize the opportunity to say to Ariel Sharon, who has shown no prior gift for strategic statesmanship: "We are here now - you know we won't let you down. It's time to roll back the settlements and close a deal."
Will Mr. Bush choose to lead on this? We know now that the man isn't afraid of a big gamble. But we also know that he likes his stories black and white, and no amount of conquest will make the Middle East a simple plot.
In the United Nations' most recent population report, the fertility rate is assumed to be 1.85, not 2.1. This will lead, later in this century, to global population decline. [...]The United Nations divides the world into two groups, less developed countries and more developed countries. The most surprising news comes from the poorer countries. In the late 1960's, these countries had an average fertility rate of 6.0 children per woman. Today it is 2.9 - and still falling. Huge and continuing declines have been seen in countries like Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Turkey and (of great importance to the United States) Mexico.
The more developed countries, in contrast, have seen their fertility rates fall from low to unsustainable. Every developed nation is now below replacement level. In the early 1960's, Europe's fertility rate was 2.6. Today the rate is 1.4, and has been sinking for half a century. In Japan the rate is 1.3. [...]
Among the more developed countries, the United States is the outlier nation, with the highest fertility rate - just under 2.1. Moreover, the United States takes in more immigrants than the rest of the world combined. Accordingly, in the next 50 years America will grow by 100 million people. Europe will lose more than 100 million people.
When populations stabilize and then actually shrink, the economic dislocations can be severe. Will there be far less demand for housing and office space? Paradoxically, a very low fertility rate can also yield labor shortages, pushing wages higher. Of course, such shortages in countries with low fertility rates could be alleviated by immigration from countries with higher fertility rates - a migration from poor countries to rich ones. But Europeans are actively trying to reduce immigration, especially since 9/11. Wisely, America has mostly resisted calls for restrictions on immigrants. [...]
Still, it is the geopolitical implications of this change that may well be the most important. There is not a one-to-one relationship between population and power. But numbers matter. Big nations, or big groups of nations acting in concert, can become major powers. China and India each have populations of more than a billion; their power and influence will almost surely increase in the decades to come. Europe will shrink and age, absolutely and relatively.
Should the world face a "clash of civilizations," America may find itself with weaker allies. It may then be forced to play a greater role in defending and promoting the liberal, pluralist beliefs and values of Western civilization. We may have to do more, not because we want to, but because we have to.
Pondering...morally complex incidents from the annals of modern combat and debating the lessons they provide for the current crop of military leaders and foot soldiers is the aim of a new scholarly publication, the Journal of Military Ethics.Determined skeptics - like Groucho Marx, who joked that "military justice is to justice what military music is to music" - can roll their eyes. But serious talk about the proper moral conduct of combat has been around almost as long as war itself. [...]
"We are consciously committed to showing the moral tradition relating to war is very old and embedded in Western culture," explained James Turner Johnson, a professor of religion and political science at Rutgers University and the journal's co-editor. Among armies operating today, he said, the United States has led the way in making ethical concerns a priority, and not just in cadet classrooms.
"It's pretty clear if you look around at the various militaries," Mr. Johnson said. "People think war is mainly about the technology, but the point is that it's not the technology that determines whether a particular war is discriminate or indiscriminate. It's the strategy and tactics behind that, and the training aimed at discriminating between combatants and noncombatants. The U.S. military has always said we do not directly target noncombatants."
Consider, for example, the protocol surrounding target selection, a topic covered at length in the journal's second issue. American military policy requires legal advisers to approve combat targets in advance. As a consequence, soldiers can find themselves within range of enemy forces but without permission to strike. This situation occurred repeatedly during the war in Afghanistan, where, according to American Air Force officials, clearance delays and denials allowed important Taliban and Qaeda members to escape unscathed.
The problem, the officials complained at the time, was that the military's Central Command was overly concerned about killing civilians. "The whole issue of collateral damage pervaded every level of the operation," The Washington Post quoted one officer saying in November 2001. "It is shocking, the degree to which collateral damage hamstrung the campaign."
But in the journal, scholars defended the policy, arguing that its ethical advantages outweighed its tactical costs. As Michael N. Schmitt, director of the Executive Program in International and Security Affairs at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, put it: "Legal advisers are crucial clogs in any mature targeting system."
MORE:
Center for the Study of Professional Military Ethics
Links to other Ethics related Websites (Center for the Study of Professional Military Ethics)
In a just world, Roman Polanski's film "The Pianist" should win the Academy award . . .For me, the horror of German abuse of Jews was never more vivid than when a group of Germans stormed into an apartment, demanded that everyone stand, and then threw a man in a wheelchair out of the window to his death because he could not obey them. . . .
Yet the film has come under criticism from some Jewish critics . . . [One] argues that it is wrong to suggest that Wladyslaw Szpilman (the pianist) survived because he was helped by Polish Catholics--even though it is true that both he and Polanski were kept alive by Polish Catholics. If the younger generation is to understand the horror of the Holocaust, they must not think that there were any good Poles. Nor must they know that Szpilman escaped because of the help of a Jewish traitor and survived at the end because of the help of a German captain. . . . In other words, one should distort historical truth about Polish Catholics to make propaganda.
There is a serious social science literature--written mostly by Jewish scholars--about the ''righteous Poles'' who protected Jews. The literature asks why some Poles risked their own lives that Jews might survive. The answer is that most of them were deeply religious men and women, though not pious in the traditional sense.
The critic to whom Greeley refers, Thane Rosenbaum ("Films Show Skewed Version of the Holocaust," 1/09/2003, Wall Street Journal, unavailable online) argues, "The impulse to honor the good in man is . . . disingenuous and misapplied when depicting an atrocity. . . . [B]oth Mr. Szpilman and Mr. Polanski . . . would not have survived without the assistance of Polish Catholics. But in their gratitude lies a distortion that favorably colors the anti-Semitic attitudes that the vast majority of Poles had toward Jews." Mr. Rosenbaum wishes the movie to depict Polish Catholics as anti-Semites, even though in real life Mr. Szpilman appealed to a Catholic friend and was helped, by her and a series of Catholic strangers. Surely Mr. Rosenbaum would not applaud the efforts of Holocaust deniers to conceal Nazi evil; why then does he wish Mr. Polanski and Mr. Szpilman to conceal the kindness of Catholics?
We recently discussed the accusations against Pius XII, and in the comments I recommended Ronald J. Rychlak's comprehensive refutation ("Goldhagen v. Pius XII," First Things, June/July 2002) of Daniel Goldhagen's deceitful screed in The New Republic (January 21, 2002, "What Would Jesus Have Done? Pope Pius XII, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust," unavailable online). (If you don't have time to read all of Rychlak's piece -- and few will -- search down to the discussion of Goldhagen's accusations against Father Peter Gumpel.) When I consider the many errors, misrepresentations and mistranslations of primary sources, all skewing in the same direction and seemingly motivated by animus, from Goldhagen and similar writers such as James Carroll and John Cornwell, I wonder: how, precisely, do these critics differ from the anti-Semites they so eagerly deride?
A female shop assistant had beans and other foodstuffs poured over her feet by a man who falsely claimed he was raising money for charity.The man entered a shop in the New Town area of Edinburgh and told the woman he was performing bizarre stunts for Comic Relief.
He asked the young woman to close her eyes and guess what foods he was covering her feet with.
He then poured various tinned foods over her feet, including baked beans.
The man, believed to be in his early 30s, took a number of photographs of her feet before leaving.
