WHY NOT US?

REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS ISSUE WARNS AGAINST "PRO-AMERICANISM" (IPS, 4/30/03)

As Iranians expresses more and more their wishes to see the Americans take action against the present regime, the Revolutionary Guards issued warnings against those who call for normalising relations with the United States.

"The Revolutionary Guards would issues warnings and cautions for the society whenever it feel it is needed. This is one of its duties to enter the arena when it considers it as a necessity", said Mr. Ali Sa'idi, the acting Representative of the leader at the Army of the Guards of the Islamic Revolution, better known as Pasdaran, or Revolutionary Guards.

This was the Pasdaran's second stern warnings in as many days, coming after foreign media reported of wide spread and generalised deception of the Iranians with the present rule of hard line clerics.

In an article carried on its 25 April issue, the influential French daily "Le Monde" said the Iranian rulers are worried by a "fierce pro-Americanism" expressed by the Iranian population. "They are especially worried of the vox populi, that asks for a change of the regime with the help of the American marines", the daily wrote in an article dated from Tehran.

"If one admits that the Iraqis are delighted with Saddam Hoseyn's end, one must also think about the possibility that maybe, the Iranians would celebrate at the end of the Islamic Republic as well", the paper quoted Mr. Behzad Nabavi, an influential member of the reformist camp and a Majles Deputy-speaker. [...]

According to "Le Monde", most Iranians are openly calling for American intervention in Iran.

"We don't want the Islamic Republic anymore", an architect told the paper on condition of anonymity. "It took us a quarter of century to realise that the revolution is a failure", he added, calling like many other Iranians, for the American help for change the regime".

"The Afghans and the Iraqis have been freed from dictatorships, why not us?" a filmmaker said.

Here's why we're unfazed by the prospect of an Iraqi Islamic Republic oriented towards Iran. The Islamic revolution happened first there and has already been adjudged a failure, as all totalitarianisms must be once they're tested in the real world.

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THERE WERE GIANTS IN THE LAND

Lady Thatcher, the video star (Mark Davies, 4/30/03, BBC)

This probably wasn't what the doctors had in mind. Lurking in the shadows stage left, clutching her handbag close to her as ever, Lady Thatcher prepared to make her entrance.

The former prime minister is, of course, under orders from her physicians never to speak in public again.

Perhaps they forgot to add: "Oh yes, and no appearances before capacity crowds at one of London's most prestigious venues."

We were at the Royal Albert Hall to see the living legend in the flesh, to hear words of wisdom, to be awed by astonishing commitment and remarkable achievements.

And after Sir Steve Redgrave had finished, we were to be granted a few moments of Lady Thatcher's time. [...]

The interview was, we were told, her first for two years. And, said proud interviewer Andrew Main Wilson, the institute's chief operating officer, it might even be the last she ever grants. [...]

In essence, Lady Thatcher's message was that she'd duffed up the unions big style, saved Britain from the socialist plague, won a war and transformed the economy.

There was classic Thatcher too. The miners' strike - that "last gasp of militancy" - had been a victory, she said. Mr Blair and the Labour Party sound too much like us

And then she lowered her voice in the way she does when she really wants to stress her point: "You could say that by the end of it the extremists had lost. But I prefer to say that ... Britain ... had ...won."

As for Tony Blair, he won brickbats and bouquets. His handling of the war, for instance, was top notch.

He understands business too, she suggested.

But his wider philosophy took a drubbing. You can't have a "middle way" - Tony prefers to call it the third way, but we all knew what she was talking about - between capitalism and socialism, she said.

And as for those people who flounder around scratching their heads wondering "what works", well really....

"I have always known what works - free enterprise works, limited government works, encouraging initiative and responsibility works," she said.

It's all OK, though, because Tony Blair is pretty much following her creed.

Indeed, the transformation of the economy by her government had also transformed Labour, she said. On that, many Labour supporters will agree and you don't come across that sort of alliance very often.

"Indeed, that has been a bit of a problem for the Conservatives - Mr Blair and the Labour Party sound too much like us," she said.

But the danger within is still lurking, Lady Thatcher warned, citing "irresponsible" policies of tax and spend as showing Labour's true colours.

Public spending is growing too fast, taxes are being raised, Gordon Brown's forecasts are dubious.

Trade unions are finding their feet again, Europe is imposing red tape. As for the euro, joining would only make matters worse.

"This does not signal a wholesale return to the 1970s, but it does mean that Britain is now moving in the wrong direction towards the failed European model and high spending, high taxing and high regulation," she told Mr Main Wilson.

"So I am very concerned for the country's future if those trends continue."

That said, she didn't think the government would take the plunge and recommend euro membership.

Good to see she too thinks Tony Blair her protege.

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THANK GOODNESS FOR AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

Mysterious Decline-Where Are the Men on Campus? (Glenn Sacks on 04/30/03, American Daily)

Everybody wants to know where all the men have gone. The Washington Post calls their disappearance the "question that has grown too conspicuous to ignore," and USA Today notes "universities fret about how to attract males as women increasingly dominate campuses."

Females now outnumber males by a four to three ratio in American colleges, a difference of almost two million students. Men earn only 43% of all college degrees. Among blacks, two women earn bachelor's degrees for every man. Among Hispanics, only 40 percent of college graduates are male. Female high school graduates are 16% more likely to go to college than their male counterparts.

"This is new. We have thrown the gender switch," says Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men. "What does it mean in the long run that we have females who are significantly more literate, significantly more educated than their male counterparts? It is likely to create a lot of social problems. This does not bode well for anyone."

"As a nation, we simply can't afford to have half of our population not developing the skill sets that we are going to need to go into the future," says Susan L. Traiman, director of the Business Roundtable's education initiative.

Researchers from Harvard University, the University of Michigan and the United Negro College Fund have now agreed to study the issue.

"This is a powerful issue we need to stop talking about in generalities and really dig into," says Michael L. Lomax, president of Dillard University in New Orleans. "We just can't figure out how to get more male applicants, and we're not going to turn students down on the basis on gender," Lomax says. "I don't understand what is happening in the male community that is making education seem less attractive and less compelling."

The trend is unmistakable and some fear it is irreversible. Men made up the majority of college graduates when the first national survey was conducted in 1870. Except during World War II, when slightly more females enrolled than men, males were in the majority until men?s graduation rate began to decline in the late 1970s. By the early 1980s women began to represent the majority of graduates.

In total, the U.S. Department of Education estimates that 698,000 women received bachelor's degrees in 2002, compared to 529,000 men.

Gee, who'da thought that several decades of systematic discrimination against men would have an effect? Luckily, thanks to affirmative action, we can just let in a bunch of unqualified men until it gets back to 50/50.

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SOMETIMES I ENVY THE OMEGA MAN

: Talk of brainstorming 'may offend epileptics' (Liz Lightfoot, 26/04/2003, Daily Telegraph))

The term "brainstorming" has become the latest target of political correctness, according to a charity.

Trainee teachers are being told to avoid the word for fear of offending pupils with epilepsy. Instead they are being advised to use "word storm" or "thought shower".

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THE NEXT JOHN McCAIN

Democratic presidential candidates attempt to pick up Sen. McCain’s maverick mantle (The Hill, 4/30/2003)

As the 2004 presidential campaign heats up, Democratic hopefuls are competing in ... what some political operatives are calling the “McCain primary.”

While Democratic operatives cautioned that it may be too early to declare a winner in this category, they say former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean is emerging as the frontrunner to become the Democratic avatar of Sen. John McCain....

“To be frank, almost any Democrat would like to have the ex-McCain [mantle]. There’s a tremendous benefit there,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster....

Other pollsters and operatives agree that there’s a race among Democrats to be anointed as this year’s straight-talking candidate as they attempt to re-create McCain’s success in appealing to independents and swing voters....

“Dean is the most McCain-like character because he doesn’t waver in his opinions,” said Lake....

Veteran Democratic strategist Donna Brazile said: “There’s no doubt that Howard Dean has the buzz around him like McCain did”...

It hardly strikes fear into Republican hearts that the Democrats want to model their 2004 campaign on that of a guy George Bush defeated handily in 2000.

But this McCain-philia gives me a thought. It's possible that Dean will win the nomination: Democratic senators are largely discredited, and primary voters know that the last two Dem winners were governors. But Dean would be vulnerable in the general election because of his hard-left stands, and will need a running mate who balances the ticket. What better balance could there be than John McCain as VP on the first bipartisan ticket?

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EXPECTATIONS AND REALITIES

A new Iraq: Media memo: Time to learn history lessons (James Lindgren, April 27, 2003, Chicago Tribune)

We are playing a game of expectations--some reasonable, some not. Like a New Hampshire primary in which a winner is treated as a loser because he did not win by as wide a margin as pundits expected, the war's domestic opponents keep raising the bar for success.

Predictions of enormous coalition and Iraqi civilian losses, a bloody battle for Baghdad and the ultimate quagmire melted into the Iraqi countryside along with scores of thousands of Republican Guard. With the war being easier than nearly everyone expected two weeks ago, people now are worrying about a humanitarian crisis.

A few days ago Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld referred to the continuing confusion and death in Iraq as "untidiness"--a euphemism for something far more serious. Yet community upheavals can be deadly--even in the absence of war, cruise missiles, and attack helicopters.

Just last year, more than 200 people died in riots in Nigeria over newspaper comments about the Miss World contest. In the three days of burning and looting in the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, 52 people died and 1,200 businesses were destroyed. Looting was also a big part of the 1990 Detroit Pistons riots, which killed 7 people. In the 1993 Chicago Bulls riots, our fellow Chicagoans killed 3, shot 20 more people, looted 197 businesses, and damaged more police cars than the chase scenes in "The Blues Brothers" movie--139 cruisers in all.

These numbers, of course, are mere shadows of what can happen when a people are freed from colonial rule and millions are forced to relocate, as happened in 1947 with the partition of India and Pakistan. In a recent issue of the scholarly journal Asian Ethnicity, professor Ishtiag Ahmed offers estimates that 2 million people were killed and 750,000 women raped in the violence accompanying the partition. [...]

The French were so angry after only four brutal years of Nazi occupation that more than 9,000 collaborators were summarily killed at the end of the war, according to standard academic accounts. And these vigilantes were the oh-so-civilized French.

The comparison problem goes far deeper than even Mr. Lindgren suggests here, because by any impartial measure, WWII was a disaster for U.S. interests. The worst case scenario had we not intervened is that the Nazis and the Soviets would have settled in for a generation long war of attrition, at the end of which both or the "winner" would have been completely enfeebled. Had there been a "winner" they would then have had to occupy the incredibly hostile other. Had it been a draw, they'd have been tied down by concerns that the whole thing could start over again. At any rate, it's impossible to imagine either or both nations being able to control conquered nations, like France and whonot, for very long given this self-inflicted damage. It seems likely that , within a span of no more than twenty or thirty years, most, if not all, of the nations of Central and Eastern Europe would have been able to reassert their independence and in all likelihood, even the government of Germany and Russia would have faced significant internal unrest.

What did we get instead, by intervening?--even setting aside the monetary and human costs of "winning" WWII, we then paid far higher costs for a 50 year Cold War, while half of Germany, all of Russia, and all of Europe East of Berlin suffered under communist tyranny. Because we helped the Soviets to prevail in WWII, communism was seen to be a viable system and was adopted in places like China, Vietnam, N. Korea, Cuba, etc., all with disastrous results for the people there, and here.

For purposes of comparison, in order for the Iraqi peace to turn out as badly as the end of WWII did the South, along with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Gulf States, Turkey, Syria, Pakistan, & Afghanistan would have to be subsumed by an Iran that then remained radical Islamic and became expansionist for the next five decades. During this entire period we'd have to pump an average of twice what we are now spending into the Defense Department, while intervening in inhuman civil wars in various Muslim states around the periphery of this new menace that we'd be seeking to "contain". As a result of this over-extension on our part, we would have significant dissent and resulting repression at home, be forced to buy off the Democrats with ever increasing social spending, etc., etc., etc. This was what our "victory" over Nazism and the process of defeating communism looked like. There is simply no possibility that the aftermath of the war on terror will turn out worse.

Which brings us to another essay, this one discussing Paul Berman's new book, The Orwell Temptation: Are intellectuals overthinking the Middle East? (Joshua Micah Marshall, May 2003, Washington Monthly)

May you live, as the Chinese curse has it, in interesting times. For the last 18 months, we've all been living in "interesting times"--often frightfully so. Yet for intellectuals there is always a craving that times would be ... well, just a little more interesting.

That's been especially true for the last half century because a shadow has hung over political intellectuals in the English-speaking world, and in some respects throughout the West. It is the shadow of the ideological wars (and the blood-and-iron wars) that grew out of World War I--from communism, to fascism, appeasement, vital-center liberalism, and the rest of it. Even as these struggles congeal into history, their magnitude and seriousness hardly diminish. Understanding fascism, understanding that it could be neither accommodated nor appeased, understanding that Soviet communism was really rather like fascism--these were much more than examples of getting things right or of demonstrating intellectual courage and moral seriousness. These insights, decisions, and moments of action came to define those qualities.

Since then, things have never been quite the same. Like doctors who want to treat the most challenging patients or cops who want to take down the worst criminals, it's only natural for people who think seriously about political and moral issues to seek out the most challenging and morally vexing questions to ponder and confront. Yet, since the Cold War hit its middle period in the late 1950s, nothing has really quite compared. For a time, the struggles of the 1960s came to rival those heady days from earlier in the century. But the tenor was too antic, the stakes too meager, and the legacy too mixed to ever quite match up. And while momentous, the collapse of communism in the late 1980s was bittersweet for intellectuals. In his essay "The End of History," Francis Fukuyama even posited that history had "ended" with the collapse of communism, ushering in an era in which there would be no more great debates or challenges, but rather a bourgeois millennium of endlessly growing investment funds, a brave new world of consumer appliances. Later, the Balkans provided a crisis of moral weight sufficient to rival those earlier times--especially for those writers and journalists, mostly on the center-left, who had the courage and intrepidity to go there. But Yugoslavia's collapse was essentially a local affair, with no clear connections to the world beyond the mangled and rancid history of the region.

September 11 changed all that. Al Qaeda's war on America and America's war on terrorism provided just such a vast field for thought and action. In the months after the attacks, especially on the right, writers began identifying the radical Islamist menace with fascism--Islamo-fascism, as the catch phrase had it. The idea that the war on terror should be seen as the latter-day equivalent or extension of the battles against last century's totalitarianisms has been bandied about in opinion columns and magazine articles for more than a year with varying degrees of seriousness. Paul Berman's new book Terror and Liberalism aims to give it intellectual ballast, a moral seriousness, and analytic grounding. [...]

The heart of Berman's argument is that the violence of al Qaeda is neither simply the extreme response of an oppressed group nor the alien and unknowable product of a religion and culture fundamentally different from our own. Much of the book's first half is taken up with an effort to show that Islamism is ideologically and historically tied to the extremism's that rocked Europe and most of the rest of the world through much of the 20th century. Berman's most powerful passages are those that show the deep similarities between radical, martyrdom-obsessed Islam and the nihilist, irrationalist totalitarian movements of the early and middle 20th century. (In arguing that Baathist Arab nationalism is a latter-day variant of fascism, he seems on considerably weaker ground.)

Berman forces his readers to see the irrationalism of the extremist branch of political Islam, recognizing that the movement is not just anti-American or violent or dangerous but, in fact, deeply pathological. Like every extremist movement that posits a sufficiently transcendent utopia, it is capable of rationalizing almost any degree of brutality and butchery in achieving that goal. In radical Islamism, as in the totalitarianisms of the past, one sees the same mixture of ancient, seemingly immutable, and thus reassuring beliefs coming into vexed confrontation with modernity--and producing some hideous amalgam that combines the worst of the two. One is reminded of Churchill's warning that Nazism might cast the world into "a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of a perverted science." [...]

Berman, in other words, seeks to lay the template of fascism and anti-fascist commitment onto the current reality of fanatical Islamic terrorism and Arab nationalist authoritarianism. Yet reading his book one cannot help but feel that the equation never quite works. There are similarities both meaningful and suggestive. But the analogy is not only incomplete, it is fundamentally wrong. One can recognize the grave dangers posed by radical Islamism without forcing it into a mold in which it does not fit.

One of the book's shortcomings is Berman's argument that the world of Islam and its fanaticisms are really not so exotic or distinct from the intellectual and ideological history of Europe. When one considers the long relationship between Christianity and Islam, as well as the more recent interpenetrations brought about by Western colonialism, there is much to be said for this argument. But Berman would have to be much more thoroughly grounded in Islamic theology and history to make that argument credible, and he is quite candid with readers that this is a depth of expertise he lacks. A deeper shortcoming crops up when Berman begins to chart the course we must take to do battle against the Muslim totalitarian menace. Though the battle may sometimes require bullets and bombs, it is also a battle of ideas. That battle, Berman argues, will be principally fought in London and Paris, Jersey City and Lackawanna, the Buffalo suburb where six Yemeni immigrants recently pled guilty to visiting a bin Laden training camp in Afghanistan in 2001. [...]

When comparing "Muslim totalitarianism" to fascism, communism, or other totalitarian utopianisms, the most striking thing about radical Islamism, and the Muslim world generally, is not its strength but its weakness. Indeed, the weakness of the world of Islam--an ideology and culture that sees itself not only as superior to the West and the world's other great civilizations but as properly in the vanguard of history--is the kernel of the threat it poses, the heart of violent Islamism's toxicity. At the beginning of the 21st century most of the world is, for better or worse, rushing along the current of globalization. By any measure, the world of Islam lags far behind. With the exception of a few countries with vast amounts of wealth based on natural resources, it is impoverished and trailing the rest of the world on numerous fronts. Where is the great Muslim power? There is none. Where is the world of Islam's advanced technology-driven economy? There is none. [...]

If it weren't for the fact that fanatical Islamist terrorists might get their hands on weapons of mass destruction, the sad fact is that few would even care. Of course, the fact that they could get their hands on weapons of mass destruction is a serious caveat. But it does place the issue in a certain context. It is a grave threat, but in a very specific, physical way--a threat to liberal societies but hardly the kind of ideological or political threat that great totalitarianisms posed a half a century ago. Islamist fanatics might destroy a whole city in the West, a catastrophic event. But they'll never conquer or subvert a country. And this is the heart of the difference. To paraphrase Arthur Schlesinger, Islamism is a danger to the West but hardly a danger in the West--or China, or Latin America, or anywhere else where Islam is not already the dominant religion.

For intellectuals, however, there is always a temptation to take momentous, morally serious questions and make them out to be slightly more momentous and world-historical than they really are. Call it the Orwellian temptation. George Orwell not only epitomized what an intellectual can and should be. He has also become the symbol of the role the best intellectuals played in those critical mid-century years. Along the way, however, the image he cast--or rather his ghost, or his shade--has also become part of the pornography of intellectuals. Berman has given way to this craving.

Note the series of errors here, in fact the "Orwell Temptation" that Mr. Marshall has fallen prey to himself. He's absolutely right that Islamism is not a serious threat to subvert our government, but neither, as we've seen, were Nazism and communism. The desire to puff up the latter two "ism's" until we can pretend that they were dire threats to our very way of life is perfectly understandable; after all, we beat them and would like to freight that with as much meaning as we possibly can. Who that would celebrate themself and their nation would seek to minimize past victories? No, as Ernest Renan (1823-92) said: "To forget and--I will venture to say--to get one's history wrong are essential factors in the making of a nation."

Turning our attention back to Islamism though, even if we need not be concerned here in America it is certainly a threat to all of the non-fundamentalist nations in the Middle East, including several democracies (Israel, India & Turkey) and several soon-to-be-something-like-democracies (Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan). Furthermore, given demographic trends, it is a more serious threat to continental Europe than ever were fascism and communism, because where those were by their very nature only temporary pathologies, the
combination of Europe's imploding birth rates and the rise of an empowered and hostile Islamic soon-to-be-majority, could spell the end of European culture, even of Europeans, within a couple generations. Of course, this would be the expansionist phase, and just the energy and repeated successes would be enough to keep Islamism going. But then, when it stretched from Kashmir to the English Channel to Central Africa, the reality of governing would set in and, like the other totalitarianism, it would be doomed to fall apart quite quickly. If Iran is a reliable indicator--and given the advantages it started out with thanks to the Westernizing of the Shah it probably offers the best case scenario, not an average one--totalitarian Islam has a life expectancy of about twenty years, or one generation. Still, over the period of expansion and then rule it would be a rival we'd have to worry about, so though not really a threat to us, it would inevitably become a focus of our policy. When you add to this prospect the likelihood of weapons of mass destruction proliferating--for instance, if we fail to attack North Korea, it will soon be building and selling nuclear weapons hand over fist--and the willingness of the Osama bin Ladens of the world to use them, and you have a world situation that is certainly no less threatening than the ones that led to WWII and the Cold War respectively. The three conflicts, just like the three totalitarianisms, are of a sameness.

So, why then does Mr. Marshall dismiss this threat? Because, of course, he opposes the wars on terror that we're waging now. Fifty years ago, he'd have been opposing the Cold War and writing the exact same column only telling us that George Orwell had succumbed to temptation by inflating communism into as great a menace as Nazism. And, fifty years from now, when we're squaring off against some new "ism" and Islamism is long since gone, some successor, or maybe Mr. Marshall himself (God willing), will be writing about how, though we obviously had to take on Islamism, just as we had to fight Nazism and communism, this new "ism", though yet another iteration of totalitarianism, is of an entirely different nature, because it's not really a threat and anyone who believes it is has given way to the craving.

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Abu Mazen Funded Munich Massacre (Arutz Sheva, 4/30/2003)

Abu Mazen is ... connected with one of the 20th century's most infamous terrorist crimes: the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes - including American citizen David Berger - at the Olympic Games in Munich, Germany in 1972.

Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, long the treasurer of the PLO, was the man who provided financing for that attack, according to information compiled by Israeli attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of the Shurat Hadin Israel Law Center.

Darshan-Leitner told Arutz-7 that PA sources themselves told her that it is ridiculous to claim that Abu Mazen was never involved in terrorism. In addition, Abu Daoud, who masterminded the Munich attack, has said that Abu Mazen provided the funds to carry it out. He made these charges in his autobiography, "Palestine: From Jerusalem to Munich" (published in French in 1999) and again in an interview last August in Sports Illustrated magazine.

Public diplomacy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the last two years has been nothing but charade -- today's "roadmap" included. All the main parties believe that their advantage lies in delaying tactics. The U.S. thinks there is little chance to end Palestinian terrorism until the terror-sponsoring regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria have been changed, and Israel is going along. Arafat doesn't want to risk his power by too aggressive attacks on Israel, nor look powerless to the Palestinian people by ending attacks.

Mahmoud Abbas's appointment as figurehead is not meant to actually change the Palestinian Authority, but only to give the illusion of progress. Despite the public pretense of conflict between Arafat and Abbas, Abbas is surely as much Arafat's henchman as ever.

Real progress toward peace, I suspect, will come only after the 2004 election. And it will begin with the destruction of the Palestinian terrorist leadership -- Arafat, and Abbas as well if he does not reform.

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ANOTHER DARK DAY

I still think of Elian (Nat Hentoff, Jewish World Review)

As soon as Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, I saw on television the firing squad execution of an array of political prisoners, which he ordered. He then began filling his brutal prisons with Cubans whose sole crime was a desire to breathe freedom after the Batista dictatorship -- only to find themselves in another totalitarian quicksand.

At one point, interviewing the already legendary Che Guevara -- an international Cuban revolutionary icon -- at the Cuban mission to the United Nations, I asked him if he could foresee, anytime in the future, free elections in Cuba. Crisply dressed in his military outfit, Guevara burst out laughing at my callow naivete.

Having interviewed Cubans who survived Castro's gulags, I have never understood or respected the parade of American entertainers, politicians and intellectuals who travel to Cuba to be entranced by this ruthless dictator who, for me, has all the charisma of a preening thug, akin to any killer on "The Sopranos."

These Castro-philes are among those who discredit liberalism because they're unable to recognize and be repelled by unbridled evil. Consider Steven Spielberg, who has developed impressive resources through his Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation to keep alive the horrifying presence of the Holocaust. Yet, as quoted in the April 11 Wall Street Journal, Spielberg described his audience with Castro last November as "the eight most important hours of my life."

Was Spielberg's life that barren until those gloriously transcendent hours with the chief warden of Cuba's prisons?

From time to time, I still think of Elian Gonzalez, so vivid a free spirit here until condemned by Janet Reno and Bill Clinton to a land where schoolteachers must keep a record of any signs of their charges' lessening fealty to the relentless light of their lives.

At least Elian will be alive in a couple years when Cuba is a democracy again, one way or another. I think of his mother, who died that he might have a better life right then. In an administration not exactly filled with high points, the day they seized him to restore him to slavery was a particularly low one.

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BIG MO

Cheeks Lends Harmony To 1st Round of Playoffs (Michael Wilbon, April 29, 2003, Washington Post)

The lasting, even impacting impression from the NBA playoffs so far is not of Kevin Garnett exhorting his teammates from the bench during overtime, nor Tracy McGrady swooping toward the basket, nor Allen Iverson dropping a double-nickel on the Hornets. It's the unforgettable sight of Maurice Cheeks leaving his team's bench Friday in Portland to put his arm around 13-year-old Natalie Gilbert as she stood at mid-court holding a microphone but having fumbled the words to our national anthem, all alone and visibly in despair.

For 20 years, Marvin Gaye's version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" has been, for my money, the most compelling rendition ever. But now, I've got a new favorite, the duet of Gilbert & Cheeks, impromptu, off-key, slapped together as it was. I get goose bumps every time I see the clip of Cheeks hugging Gilbert, telling her everything is going to be okay. People forget the lyrics to the national anthem every single night at a sporting event somewhere.

But when have you ever seen someone moved to the point of walking over to comfort the embarrassed singer, in this case somebody's scared little girl singing the national anthem in public for the first time? How often, in a sports setting, do we ever see such a demonstration of human kindness?

What an extraordinarily decent thing to do.

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KERRY BY DEFAULT

Slow start for Gephardt in Iowa money primary (Sam Dealey, 4/29/03, The Hill)

Where Rep. Richard Gephardt needs the most help to advance his presidential prospects, he isn?t getting it ? at least publicly.

Early support from two chief constituencies ? Iowans and organized labor ? that are essential to the White House hopes of the Missouri Democrat has been surprisingly tepid so far.

Documents filed with the Federal Election Commission show that Gephardt reported raising a scant $1,000 in all from only three donors in Iowa in the first quarter of 2003.

His presidential campaign amassed nearly $6 million during the same period, including $3.35 million from individuals. Candidates are required to report donations from individuals of $250 or more.

Gephardt?s campaign pooh-poohed the poor fundraising results in Iowa and said the $1,000 total does not adequately reflect the candidate?s support in the state, which he won in his first presidential outing, in 1988.

With its first-in-the-nation caucus, tentatively scheduled for Jan. 19, Iowa is a pivotal state for the Gephardt 2004 campaign. It was the only state he carried in his abortive 1988 presidential campaign, and his status as the only Midwesterner among Democratic frontrunners is presumably an asset. Additionally, Democratic politics in Iowa is dominated by organized labor, a constituency Gephardt has staunchly supported.

Given that he won there last time he ran, Gephardt really has to win and win big or his candidacy ends in IA, not that it survives getting buried in NH anyway....

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NOT DYING BY THE SWORD

Iraqis to form government within four weeks (James Drummond, April 28 2003, Financial Times)

The US-led administration in Iraq?on Monday?ended a meeting held to discuss the country's future, setting out guiding principles and agreeing to meet within three to four weeks to form an interim government.

The gathering, of about 200 delegates in the Baghdad conference centre attracted fewer, and less powerful, Iraqis than had been expected. While Saddam Hussein supporters celebrated the former dictator's 66th birthday, Shia groups sent only low-level delegates. Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the opposition Iraqi National Congress did not attend, sending a junior delegation. The religious establishment based in the southern city of Najaf, which claims to speak on behalf of Iraq's majority Shia community, sent no representatives.

The agreed principles stressed general issues such as democracy and the rule of law, but did not contain details of how the country would be governed. However, delegates welcomed the chance to express themselves in a way they could not under Mr Hussein. Splits emerged between returned Iraqi exiles and those who had lived through the Saddam years.

Here we see that despite the hawks' delusion that we'd stay and govern Iraq ourselves for a period of years, we'll instead, as was always inevitable, cede control just as quickly as we can, even though we don't know what the new state that emerges will look like. Call this, The Other Road Map.

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THE PERSISTENT PRESENCE OF ABSENCE

:Geologists Raise Questions About Controversial Theory Of Species Survival (Space Daily, 4/30/03)

First proposed in 1995 by Carl Brett of the University of Cincinnati and Gordon Baird of the State University of New York at Fredonia, coordinated stasis attempts to describe the emergence and disappearance of species across geologic time by suggesting that species living together in the same environment go through long periods of stability--some six million years—and then undergo a rapid, almost complete turnover, during which old species disappear and new ones emerge.

A recent study by a team of Syracuse University geologists has punched holes in a relatively new theory of species evolution called coordinated stasis; the theories involved are based on findings from fossil-bearing rocks that underlie Central New York. The SU study was published in "Geology," the premier journal of the Geological Society of America.

First proposed in 1995 by Carl Brett of the University of Cincinnati and Gordon Baird of the State University of New York at Fredonia, coordinated stasis attempts to describe the emergence and disappearance of species across geologic time by suggesting that species living together in the same environment go through long periods of stability—some six million years—and then undergo a rapid, almost complete turnover, during which old species disappear and new ones emerge.

Until 1995, most researchers believed that species emerged and disappeared independent of each other throughout time.

"Our study suggests that there may be more variability in species composition through time than predicted by coordinated stasis," says Linda Ivany, one of the co-authors of the SU study. "It will be the blueprint study against which other researchers will present their data sets to determine whether coordinated stasis is present or not."

Darn! It would be nice to be able to explain a long period of stasis in all species at any given time, especially since we're ostensibly in one right now. Either that or it would be helpful if something would evolve, even just a little.

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THE DARKEST DAY

Communists Take Over Saigon; U.S. Rescue Fleet Is Picking Up Vietnamese Who Fled in Boats (George Esper, 4/30/03, The Associated Press)

Communist troops of North Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam poured into Saigon today as a century of Western influences came to an end.

Scores of North Vietnamese tanks, armored vehicles and camouflaged Chinese built trucks rolled to the presidential palace.

The President of the former non-Communist Government of South Vietnam, Gen. Duong Van Minh, who had gone on radio and television to announce his administration's surrender, was taken to a microphone later by North Vietnamese soldiers for another announcement. He appealed to all Saigon troops to lay down their arms and was taken by the North Vietnamese soldiers to an undisclosed destination.[...]

Between General Minh's surrender broadcast and the entry of the Communist forces into the city, South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians jammed aboard several coastal freighters tied up along the Saigon River, hoping to escape. They dejectedly left the ships as the Communist troops drove along the waterfront in jeeps and trucks, waving National Liberation Front flags and cheering.

As an American, there aren't to many days when you have to be deeply ashamed of your country, but this was one of the worst, as the allies we'd used and betrayed could no longer hold out once we broke our word and stopped helping them entirely.

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HAD WE BUT WORLD ENOUGH, AND TIME

We are not with you and we don't believe you (Patrick Wintour, April 30, 2003, The Guardian)

Tony Blair's first public attempt to heal the diplomatic wounds of the Iraq war suffered a humiliating rebuff yesterday when Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, refused to lift UN sanctions and mocked the possibility that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq.

Mr Putin also clashed with Mr Blair by demanding UN weapons inspectors be allowed back into Iraq and challenged Mr Blair's vision of a new world strategic partnership, arguing it would be unacceptable for the US to dominate the international community.

The public dressing down for Mr Blair came during a 63-minute press conference staged by the two men at Mr Putin's private residence outside Moscow. The two men had a fabled special relationship and Mr Blair had high hopes he would be able to wean Mr Putin away from his new anti-war alliance with France and Germany.

Mr Blair started with the full diplomatic niceties but became increasingly animated until he issued a dire warning of a new world order in which two different poles of power act as rivals to one another. The world faced a choice between a partnership between the US and the main countries of the world or a continued "diplomatic stand off", he said.

Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush should just back off while Mr. Putin plays coy. A couple years of alliance with the French and Germans will drive the Russians back into our arms. We only really need them if there's a wider conflagration in the Middle East anyway, and at that point they'd have no choice but to help because of their own Islamicist problems on their borders.

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ARAFAT DELENDA EST

Arafat lives (David Warren, 4/30/2003)

[P]rospects for peaceful mutual accommodation between Jew and Arab were almost irretrievably set back by the Madrid and Oslo agreements of the early 1990s. From cynical motives on all sides -- including those of Israeli Labour politicians -- the terrorist, Yasser Arafat, was put right at the black heart of the "peace process". He had left nothing but a trail of destruction behind him in Jordan, Lebanon, indeed everywhere he'd been. From the moment he arrived, the West Bank and Gaza began to be transformed into a terror network....

Arafat lives today as the principal impediment to any workable peace agreement. Keeping him sidelined, and gradually disarming his terror brigades, will distract much creative energy from a main task, which itself cannot be easy. It will be like trying to come to some agreement with an Iraq, in which, say, Tariq Aziz were nominally in power, while Saddam Hussein continued to sit glowering beside him at the cabinet table. There is necessarily an element of farce in the spectacle.

Whatever the "roadmap" says, progress will require the imposition on the West Bank and Gaza of an international, probably American force, to replace the Israeli. For there is no conceivable Palestinian civil force that can stand up to Arafat's multiple networks of goons and suicide bombers.

Orrin, as his post below shows, strongly supports the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state. While Orrin's view is reasonable, it seems to me irresponsible to create a Palestinian state in which Arafat remains in control -- whether publicly or behind the scenes. Arafat's long record shows that he is a tyrant over those in his control and a murderer of those out of his control. To establish a Palestinian state with Arafat in a position of power would be as much a betrayal of the Palestinian people as it would have been a betrayal of the Iraqi people had we, in the 1970s, collaborated in Saddam's coup establishing himself as dictator.

An Arafat-controlled state would continue to oppress the Palestinian people, and continue terrorism until its acquisition of WMD led to the destruction of Israel, or, more likely, until Israel conquered and re-occupied Palestine. Neither outcome would count as progress.

David Warren poses another alternative to Orrin's: some outside force, either Israeli or American, attempts a coercive nation-building exercise in Palestine. Again, if Arafat remains in control of his terror networks, the schools, and other civil institutions, the occupying force will be subject to terror and, with Arafat off limits, unable to reply. This would be a recipe for a failure worse than Vietnam.

This is why the road to peace needs to begin with the destruction of Arafat, and preferably his terror network as well. To make the point that terrorism is unacceptable, the United States should seize Arafat, try him publicly with a complete airing of the evidence connecting him to murders, and then punish him appropriately -- preferably by execution. Once that is accomplished, several roads to peace may succeed -- either immediate statehood as Orrin prefers, or a continuing nation-building exercise leading to statehood.

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LIVING BY THE SWORD

Suicide Bomber Hits Tel Aviv; Top Palestinian Denounces Terror: A suicide bomber killed at least two other people hours after the Palestinian parliament voted to confirm a new government. (JAMES BENNET, 4/30/03, NY Times)

The Palestinian parliament voted Tuesday night in Ramallah to confirm a new government, clearing the way for an American-backed peace plan after the Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, denounced terrorism "by any party and in all its shapes" and appealed for a "lasting peace" with Israel.

Hours later, underlining the fragility of every step toward peace, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up outside a seaside pub here early this morning and killed at least two other people.

After Mr. Abbas's speech, the Palestinian parliament overwhelmingly approved his new government on Tuesday night, in a jubilant session that met President Bush's condition for proceeding with a new peace plan, known as the road map. After the suicide bombing, the White House confirmed that it would proceed with the peace plan, which calls for creation of a Palestinian state and a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace in three years.

There's an understandable but absurd bit of juvenalia going on among the hawks, who are insisting that continued terrorism proves that the Palestinians don't deserve a state or even a plan for one. It's worth considering that had the same logic been applied to the terrorists from 1945-48 there would be no Israel.

We've mentioned this letter previously, in another context, but it's worth looking at it again, The Meaning of the American Revolution: A letter to H. Niles (John Adams, 13 February 1818):

The American Revolution was not a common event. Its effects and consequences have already been awful over a great part of the globe. And when and where are they to cease?

But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations. While the king, and all in authority under him, were believed to govern in justice and mercy, according to the laws and constitution derived to them from the God of nature and transmitted to them by their ancestors, they thought themselves bound to pray for the king and queen and all the royal family, and all in authority under them, as ministers ordained of God for their good; but when they saw those powers renouncing all the principles of authority, and bent upon the destruction of all the securities of their lives, liberties, and properties, they thought it their duty to pray for the continental congress and all the thirteen
State congresses, &c.

We need not think the PLO and Hamas comparable to the Founding Fathers in order to recognize that the first Palestinian Revolution is already over-- just as the first Israeli Revolution was over long before there was a state--and the Palestinians will not ever give up violence until they are governing themselves in their own state, just as Americans and Israelis continued violence until they had their own states.

MORE:
The Road Map to Nowhere: Do we really need another doomed Mideast peace process? (Joshua Muravchik, April 30, 2003, Jewish World Review)

The first thing one might say about the plan itself is that its pace is breathless. Comprehensive political reform, a new constitution, free elections--all within the first few months? Never mind that this seems unrealistic. (We are now 19 years past the deadline for Palestinian self-rule set in the Egypt-Israel peace agreement of 1979 and four years past the date for completing "final status" talks under the Oslo accords.) It is even undemocratic. Aren't the citizens of Palestine entitled to a little time to acquaint themselves with their new political system, not to mention to assent to it, to discover what the offices are for which they will vote, to form political parties, to debate the issues? From there, we press on frantically to sovereignty within a few more months and a complete laying to rest of the Arab-Israeli conflict by 2005. Inshallah. There is no disgrace in a rush to peace, provided one's hurry does not result in losing one's way. [...]

THE STILL DEEPER FLAW in the road map's premises is the presumption that with the terms of settlement fairly apparent, all that is needed is a guide for getting there. In the final analysis, however, the missing ingredient for peace between Israel and the Palestinians is not a blueprint of the destination, nor is it the route. The missing ingredient is a decision by the Palestinians and the other Arabs to accept the existence of a Jewish state in their midst and to live in permanent peace with it. Despite all the Palestinians have suffered these two and a half years, public opinion polls show that a clear majority of them support continuing the intifada and suicide bombing and that about half say that the goal should be the "total liberation of Palestine," in other words, the elimination of Israel. The other half of the Palestinians say they want a two-state solution. When that half grows and becomes dominant, then and only then, will real peace be possible.

Since the Six Day War, the critical divide in international approaches to the Arab-Israeli broil has been between a negotiated settlement and an imposed one. Israel has insisted on the former precisely because it wants a settlement to be more than pro forma. In an imposed settlement, the Arab representatives might make some empty prescribed gestures in return for concessions that could facilitate future efforts to destroy Israel.

Two problems with this analysis: (1) Palestine has more deeply planted civil institutions right now than Israel had when it was told it would become a state and the pace of that statehood was no slower; (2) there's a third option, one supported by members of Sharon's own circle, a settlement imposed by Israel instead of upon Israel. As even Mr. Muravchik concedes, the terms of the settlement are "fairly apparent"--so why not just impose them?

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DISPOSITIVE MAN

Why I nearly resigned: Mark Steyn says he is disgusted by what he sees as The Spectator's ill-judged and idle defence of the UN (Mark Steyn, The Spectator)

"The UN should be appointed overseer of the peace not because that organisation possesses planning skills which America doesnot, but because to shut it out will cause resentment in the Arab world. However irritating are many of the do-gooders among its ranks, the UN has the advantage of being seen as an antidote to alleged Western imperialism."

After reading those words in The Spectator's leading article of 12 April, I hurled the magazine across the room and typed up my letter of resignation.

Section III, Part D of the official rules of blogging states that anytime that Mark Steyn or James Lileks agree with you, you win. Mr. Steyn's disgust with the Spectator would appear to vindicate this.

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CRUSADER

Paradise regained: Once tortured by personal demons, ruining his life and career with drink and drugs, Peter Howson has let Christ into his life and art. Unveiling here the first major work since his conversion, the 14 Stations of the Cross, he talks about visions, revelations and finding God (Peter Ross, 06 April 2003, Sunday Herald)

A FEW years ago, well after the time he was putting E800 worth of cocaine up his nose each week, but slightly before he had his religious awakening and gave up alcohol, Peter Howson was asked by Wolverhampton City Council to create a large painting representing the dreams of its citizens.

'All these people in Wolverhampton sent me their dreams,' he recalls. 'Most of them were very boring. They were dreams like 'My cat suddenly started talking to me.' So I ended up using a lot of my own dreams in the painting.

'The dreams I've had in my life have been apocalyptic epics where I'm escaping from Nazis, running through woods, finding lost cities, crawling through deserts, fighting battles and dying and going up to heaven or going into hell.'

You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to realise that such dreams say a lot about Howson, Scotland's best-known and most controversial painter of the last 20 years. Part showman, part shaman, he has spent two decades jabbing a brush in the public eye.

Although it was his astonishingly vibrant figurative work which first brought him to wide attention, he has remained highly visible thanks to regular confessional interviews in which he described addictions, autism, break-ups, breakdowns, and latterly his conversion to Christianity. Little wonder his dreams should feature fear, heroism, combat, death, praise, damnation and religion. There's simply no room for a talking cat in Howson's head.

And you could barely swing one in his studio. On the top floor of a former school in Glasgow's West End, Howson sits and smokes amid the clutter. Hundreds of classical music CDs are stacked round the walls, sworls of hardened oil paint crest like frozen waves on a table, a giant portrait of a bound Jesus dominates the room, and finds a profane reflection on the opposite wall in a picture of Trevor from EastEnders ripped from a magazine.

I'm here to interview Howson because he is just finishing a major commission. He has painted the 14 Stations of the Cross for a wealthy American collector to hang in his private chapel, where they will be used as devotional objects, hung alongside major works of religious art from the medieval and Renaissance periods. The paintings, which tell the story of Christ from being condemned to death to being laid in his tomb, will first be exhibited in London.

It seems right that the public should get a chance to see them, as they are among the most significant works of Howson's career.

'I don't think too many artists today are capable of coming to grips with spiritual themes,' says the collector, who wishes to remain anonymous. 'We are in an age now which is swinging from a very materialistic 20th Century to, I think, a very spiritual 21st century. I think this war we are going through now is the turning point. And if you look at Peter Howson's work, he is very timely. You can't paint the way he paints and not have a deep spiritual underpinning. He takes the soul and turns it inside out.'

Here's a piece called: "Crusader".

He means it as a warning. I take it literally instead and quite like it.


MORE:
-www.peterhowson.co.uk | The Official Howson Site
-Home Page of Peter Howson (ARTEXPERTS.COM)
-Contemporary War Art - Peter Howson
-Peter Howson (Belloclowndes)
-Peter Howson Collection
-VoyForums: Peter Howson
-Peter Howson Photography (CafePress.com)
-Peter Howson (ArtNet)
-Peter Howson @ Britart.com
-Art Gallery Vieleers - Salon d'Art - Painters
Beautiful South: Peter Howson's Other Art

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MORE BUTTERMILK

BUTTERMILK-GARLIC CRUSHED POTATOES (Lynne Rossetto Kasper, The Splendid Table)

Serves 4 and doubles easily

2 pounds buttery waxy potatoes (such as Yellow Finn, Red Bliss, red-skinned
San Luis Valley, or Desiree), peeled and thinly sliced
2 cups buttermilk, or more as needed
2 cups water
4 large cloves garlic, sliced
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Place the potatoes in a 4-quart saucepan with the buttermilk, water, garlic, a little salt, and pepper to taste. Bring to a simmer, cover, and
cook 25 minutes, or until the potatoes are tender but not falling apart. Check for scorching, adding equal parts buttermilk and water if necessary to
have the consistency of a thick stew.

2. Uncover and cook down the liquid, stirring and crushing the potatoes until creamy and thick, 5 to 10 minutes. Season to taste. (They can be set aside, covered, for an hour or more. Reheat in the saucepan over low heat, stirring constantly.)

3. Serve the hot potatoes mounded in a warmed bowl.

Sharing this recipe with the Iraqis would just about make up for exposing them to Christina Aguilera.

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THE LIBERTARIANS' ALGER HISS

Software Engineer Is Charged in Plot to Fight U.S. Forces (Blaine Harden, April 29, 2003, Washington Post)

An Intel Corp. software engineer, whose five-week federal detention in Oregon triggered protests from outraged colleagues, was charged today with conspiring to travel to Afghanistan to fight with al Qaeda and the Taliban against American soldiers.

Maher Hawash, who worked for Intel for more than a decade, joined six other suspects based in Portland, Ore., in a plot to wage war against the United States, according to a federal arrest warrant affidavit released in Portland today. The other six -- five men and a woman -- were charged in the same conspiracy last October.

Hawash traveled in October 2001 with five members of the Portland group to China, where they tried but failed to enter Afghanistan to fight against U.S. forces, according to the affidavit. Hotel records in China show that Hawash stayed in the same hotels on the same dates as the five others, according to the affidavit.

"No independent evidence exists to corroborate any business purpose of the travel," the document said.

Federal investigators were tipped to Hawash's alleged connection to the "Portland Six" after their arrest by a neighbor who identified him, and his wife, Lisa, as "close friends" of two of the other suspected conspirators, Ahmed Bilal and Habis Al Saoub, according to the affidavit.

Hawash, 38, was born on the West Bank and became an American citizen in 1990. Known as "Mike" to his colleagues and family, he lives in suburban Portland and is married with three young children.

The FBI arrested him in an Intel parking lot on March 20. Until today, he had been detained without charge under the federal material witness statute, which the government has used since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hold some terror suspects indefinitely. Civil liberties groups have sharply criticized that practice.

The detention of Hawash, who has worked for Intel since 1992, angered many of his colleagues at Intel. They organized a media campaign, set up a Web site and demonstrated outside a federal courthouse in Portland during a closed hearing on Hawash's detention.

The announcement of the charges today seemed to do little to change their views. "These charges only show that Mike was acquainted with some members of the Portland Six, which is what you would expect in a small Muslim community like we have in Portland," said Steven McGeady, a former Intel executive and founder of a group called "Free Mike Hawash." McGeady said the allegation that Hawash traveled in China with five of the suspects showed only that friends sometimes bump into each other abroad.

It's been instructive to watch libertarians denounce John Ashcroft over the Hawash case, seemingly for no other reason than that they assume a fellow technocrat must be a good guy.

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IDEOLOGY OVER LIVES

Bush pushes global AIDS bill (Kathy A. Gambrell, 4/29/2003, UPI)

President George W. Bush on Tuesday unveiled an initiative intended to pump another $15 billion in the global fight against HIV/AIDS, as he fielded criticism that legislation did not focus enough on abstinence as a solution to the pandemic.

"Fighting AIDS on a global scale is a massive and complicated undertaking, yet this cause is rooted in the simplest of moral duties. When we see this kind of preventable suffering, when we see a plague leaving graves and orphans across a continent, we must act, " Bush said.

The president appeared in the East Room of the White House with lawmakers and global AIDS activists to promote the bill providing $15 billion to the global fund established to fight the deadly disease that has infected 42 million people worldwide.

The World Health Organization reports of that number 38.6 million were adults, and 2.3 million were children under age 15. Some 3.1 million people worldwide died of AIDS in 2002.

In sub-Saharan Africa, some 28.5 million adults are infected and 2.6 million children under age 15. The pandemic has captured the attention of the international community as it figures out how best to stop the spread of AIDS on the continent.

The president warned "time is not on our side" and urged Congress to move forward "with speed and seriousness his crisis requires."

Bush said the administration's health experts believe the emergency plan for AIDS relief could prevent 7 million new HIV infections and treat 2 million people with life-extending drugs. [...]

Social conservatives and some congressional Republicans criticized the bill for not including more pro-family amendments that would promote programs that teach
abstinence and fidelity rather than only condom use. [...]

Michael Schwartz, vice president for government relations for Concerned Women for America, said the bill provides no conscious protections for faith-based groups. Schwartz told UPI that groups seeking to teach abstinence would have to also pass out condoms even if it were against their mission.

"We are quite sure that Congress must clearly outline the president's purpose within the bill. Without a clear mandate, future administrations will be able to use AIDS prevention dollars for ineffective condom based programs, rather than lifesaving ones based on abstinence and faithfulness," Schwartz said.

We're as pro-abstinence as anybody, but this is disturbing. They know that the Bush administration will write the regulations so as to meet their vision of the programs, but they're willing to hold up the money in order to make a likely futile attempt to tie the hands of some imaginary future Democratic administration? How many extra Africans should die so that these groups can vindicate such an impractical position?

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JUST ONE MORE REASON TO HATE TENNIS

CURTSY BOWS OUT OF WIMBLEDON, BUT MEN KEEP TRADITION OF MORE PRIZE MONEY (KRYSTYNA RUDZKI, 4/29/03, Associated Press)

One of Wimbledon's most enduring traditions is finished - players will no longer have to bow or curtsy to the Royal Box at Centre Court.

But while one custom fell Tuesday, the All England Club confirmed that another will remain: Men will be paid more than women.

Players have been required to bow or curtsy to the royal family when walking onto or leaving Centre Court. From now on they will have to do so only if Queen Elizabeth II or Prince Charles, her eldest son and heir to the throne, is in the box.

The decision to scrap the tradition was made at the request of the Duke of Kent, who has been the All England Club's president since 1969. He and his wife, the Duchess of Kent, attend frequently each year and present the winners' trophies.

"It's been part of a discussion that's been going on for some time," All England chief executive Christopher Gorringe said. "It's sad, but we have to move on. We know there is very little bowing or curtsying done in royal circles now."

Players will now only have to bow or curtsy if Queen Elizabeth II or Prince Charles, her eldest son and heir to the throne, is in the box.

The queen hasn't attended Wimbledon since 1977 when she presented the women's trophy to Virginia Wade. Prince Charles made his only appearance in 1970.

British royalty has been associated with Wimbledon since 1907 when the Prince of Wales and Princess Mary watched from a temporary Royal Box.

Before leaving the ground, the prince accepted an offer to become president of the All England Club and remained so until he became King George V in 1910. Subsequent monarchs, including the current queen, have since all held the position of Patron of the Club.

"To lose what is not a waste land is the very condition of being in a waste land."-Lyndall Gordon (on T.S. Eliot)

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YOU'RE WELCOME TO COME, BUT PLAY BY THE RULES

Legal Immigrants Can Be Held Without Bail, Court Says (DAVID STOUT, April 29, 2003, NY Times)

The Supreme Court ruled today, in a case with significant impact on the rights of noncitizens, that the federal government can detain legal immigrants without bail during their deportation proceedings.

The court upheld, 5 to 4, the strict rules of the 1996 immigration law, which mandates detention of immigrants who have committed certain crimes even as those immigrants challenge their deportation.

"Congress regularly makes rules that would be unacceptable if applied to citizens,'' the court said in a summary attached to the opinion by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.

The case decided today, Demore v. Kim, No. 01-1491, has been closely followed by immigrants' rights groups and lawyers who follow immigration issues. Today's decision made it clear that immigrants - even those in the United States legally - may have far more to lose than American citizens if they are convicted of crimes, and not necessarily heinous ones.

"We hold that Congress, justifiably concerned that deportable criminal aliens who are not detained continue to engage in crime and fail to appear for their removal hearings in large numbers, may require that persons such as respondent be detained for the brief period necessary for their removal proceedings,'' Justice Rehnquist wrote.

The "respondent'' is Hyung Joon Kim, who came to the United States in 1984 at age 6. While still a child, he became a lawful permanent resident. In 1996, when he was a teenager, he was convicted of burglary and the next year was found guilty of petty theft.

He completed his sentence in California state prison and, the day after his release, was detained by immigration officials without bail to await deportation.

The very first words of the Constitution are, of course: "We the people of the United States..." If you aren't one of "the people" yet, perhaps it would be better to abide by the laws of those who are.

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KICK OUT THE JAMS!

Consumer Confidence Rises From 61 to 81 (ANNE D'INNOCENZIO, 4/29/03, AP)

Consumer confidence, which had declined for four consecutive months,improved sharply in April, helped by a swift outcome in the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

The Consumer Confidence Index rose to 81.0 from a revised 61.4 in March, the New York-based Conference Board said Tuesday. That was far better than the reading of 70 that analysts had been expecting. [...]

This post-war surge differs from the one after the Persian Gulf War in 1991 in that both components of the index - the expectations index and the present situation index - posted gains.

The Expectations Index rose to 84.8 from 61.4. The Present Situation Index improved to 75.3 from 61.4.

"The increase in the Present Situation Index, especially in labor market conditions, may very well signal a turnaround in confidence and a more favorable outlook for consumer spending," Franco said.

Mark Vitner, an economist at Wachovia Securities in Charlotte, N.C., said he was surprised by the magnitude of the increase and that consumers believed that economic conditions had already improved.

Given that the only problem with the economy is one of confidence, this pretty much ends any suspense about the 2004 election, with the possible exception of whether John Kerry will carry MA or go 0-fer (we don't count DC).

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WHAT? NO JEWS?

Sharpton Files (?Dotty Lynch, Douglas Kiker, Steve Chaggaris and Joanna Schubert, 4/29/03, The CBS News)

After some criticism for not filing earlier, Al Sharpton's presidential campaign submitted the required financial reports to the Federal Election Committee yesterday. The reports show he's raised money from some interesting people.

Between January and March, Sharpton has raised $114,456 and has spent $54,456. According to the Daily News, he can thank radio host Tom Joyner, media tycoon Percy Sutton and Newark Mayor Sharpe James for $1,000 contributions. Abner Louima, who won an $8.75 million settlement when Sharpton represented him in a New York City Police torture case in 1997, also contributed $1,000. Louis Carr, president of ad sales for Black Entertainment Television, and Detroit "TV news anchor" Carolyn Clifford each donated $2,000.

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LIFE IMITATES ART

Man dies after drilling head (BBC, 4/28/03)

A man has died after attempting to drill a hole in his head with a power tool.

The 42-year-old was found unconscious in a locked room by police who were called on Sunday to his home in Conway Street, Torquay.

Somebody's been taking the great film Pi a tad too seriously.

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REVERSE EMPIRE BUILDING

Iraqi Lawyer Who Helped Save Jessica Lynch Granted Asylum (Fox News, April 29, 2003)

The Iraqi lawyer who led U.S. forces to missing soldier?Jessica Lynch (search)?has been granted asylum by the United States.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced Tuesday that Mohammed Odeh Al Rehaief, 33, who helped U.S. special operations teams track down Pfc. Jessica Lynch, is now living in the United States with his wife and 5-year-old child.

Al Rehaief was granted?asylum?Monday in Arlington, Virginia, which allows him to work in this country. He can stay in the U.S. indefinitely and can eventually apply for U.S. citizenship.

Prior to Tuesday, he was referred to as only as "Mohammed" in order to protect the safety of himself and his family while they were?still in Iraq.

The Al Rehaief family arrived in the United States earlier this month after the Department of Homeland Security granted them "humanitarian parole." On Monday, the family was granted asylum by the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services.

With all due respect to Barry, Ali, Steve Martinovich, & the like, you have to feel almost sorry for other countries because we tend to skim off their cream. We welcome Mr. Al Rehaief and his family: there's no one we're prouder to share a nation with.

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LET'S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN

Hillary Clinton keynote speaker at Democrat dinner (Associated Press, April 28, 2003)

In a fiery speech Monday night, U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton accused the Bush administration of having the worst economic policies since Herbert Hoover, with no real plan to end the nation's fiscal troubles.

So, you pick up today's paper and see the headline: Clinton Sez, "Bush economy worst in fifty years!"--what should you conclude from this?:

(a) You've come loose in time
(b) The economy is as bad as during the Great Depression (never mind the 70s)
(c) Hillary is running for President
(d) all of the above

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AN URBAN TRUTH!

4-foot alligator found walking in Queens park (AP, April 28, 2003)

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THE DEMS GO ABLOGGIN'

The Notepad: Direct from the Candidates (ABCNews, 4/29/2003)

Dick Gephardt:

Question:

What is the one thing Jonathan Alter, Karen Tumulty and Jules Witcover can all agree on?...

Joe Lieberman:

Welcome back folks.

It's day two of Notepad LINK . Now that we've all had a chance to review what the "other guy" LINK submitted, expect to see more uniformity in today's postings as all the campaigns LINK crib best practices off of one another - namely linking LINK schedule sharing and obscure music referencing LINK

So in that spirit, let's talk shop. Lieberman was in New Jersey yesterday doing stuff.

That said, let's turn our attention to what really seems to be going on pre-debate, namely pre-debate positioning everywhere else but apparently here....

Finally, in the hopes of getting others to spill some debate aspirations, here are some Lieberland debate goals: Come Saturday, Lieberman won't pile on the make-up nor will he sigh. Much.

Howard Dean:

News Flash!!! Yesterday we were attacked by the Anointed One!

And we're not even talking about Chris Lehane.

We want to clear something up. There seems to be some confusion between the official Dean campaign blog and the unofficial blog.

Here's the official blog's response to the clubbing-from-on-high. LINK

Here's the unofficial response. LINK.

We think it's mostly a matter of tone....

John Edwards:

This genteel southern gal does not know how to react to being "truncated." How ugly.

I will be sure to keep it brief today less I raise the ire of "the editors" or Joe Trippi....

So here is a "bumper sticker anecdote" that encapsulates the strength of our Senator....

Don't misunderstimate the Breck Girl.

Dennis Kucinich:

If the 12th Commandment holds that Democrats shalt not criticize each other, than we have two candidates (I won't mention their names) who've been irreverent lately, even blasphemous in their spat over the U.S. military. Candidate Kucinich (it's my job to mention his name a lot) joined the fray by proclaiming: "They're both wrong."...

Our campaign didn't take sides in such silliness.

John Kerry:

Southern Tour, Day 2

Here is the lead from Little Rock: Painful memories of three North Vietnamese ambushes became a matter of joyous pride for Fred Short as he was reunited with the Navy patrol boat commander who he said saved the whole crew by charging into the teeth of the enemy attack....

Bob Graham:

DES MOINES — Good day!

Senator Graham arrived in Iowa today with the FL four in tow - Crowley, Adair, Bridges and Silva.... Graham talked about his life growing up on his family's dairy farm, his grandchildren, his beloved home state and his vision for a better America.

Along the way, he chatted with regular Iowans....

While waiting for his dinner companions to arrive, he saw a member of his staff dining with a staffer from another presidential campaign.

(From Jamal: Don't tell Jordan, Trippi, Nick, or Craig … shhh!)

Graham sits down. They all chat....

Only in Iowa!

Al Sharpton:

The Sharpton Campaign congratulates Congressman Dick Gephardt for presenting a bold and practical plan to insure that every American is covered with health insurance. I believe the plan is a big step in the right direction.

ABC's new candidate blog gives conclusive proof that Al Sharpton is the only serious Democratic candidate.

Go get 'em, Al!

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HOW DID BEINGS THIS STUPID END UP RUNNING THE WORLD?

Storms and lightning much deadlier for men (Mary Vallis, April 29, 2003, National Post)

Men are more than twice as likely as women to die during thunderstorms, mainly because they do not come in from the rain, new research suggests.

A new study of more than 1,400 thunderstorm-related deaths in the United States found 70% of the victims were male. The gender disparity was particularly pronounced among deaths caused by lightning strikes and flash floods.

Close to 80% of the lightning victims were men, said Dr. Thomas Songer of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Injury Research. [...]

Dr. Songer speculated men may be at greater risk of dying during thunderstorms because of their exposure to the elements and their behaviour. Men seem more likely to take risks during storms.

"I would say they make poor decisions," he said. "I've read several reports surrounding the deaths, and there's quite a few situations where people drive around barricades and go through flooded roads, and their car gets picked up and floated down, and they drown."

The gender trend for lightning deaths goes back at least a century in medical literature, said Dr. Mary Ann Cooper, director of the Lightning Injury Research Program at the University of Illinois, who was not involved in the new research.

"Men tend to be optimists. They all think that their team's going to win the pennant and they're never going to be hit by lightning."

That last reminds us of one of the more sublime moments in the history of man:

"They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist..." -- Last words of General John Sedgwick (1813-1864)

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GOD BLESS YOU, MR. GUNTER

565 Million Acres, Riv Vu: It is useful to see the Louisiana Purchase as a real estate deal that signified a new kind of society where land could be owned by anyone. (Andro Linklater, 4/28/03, NY Times)

By 1803 Napoleon wanted to raise money for war with Britain, and Jefferson was prepared to pay for control of France's territory around the mouth of the Mississippi in order to guarantee free use of the river.

The American minister in Paris, Robert Livingston, had already approached the French about such a limited purchase. (Livingston, who owned some 130,000 acres in upstate New York, was himself very familiar with the American real estate market.) But a critical shift occurred on April 11, 1803, when he went to meet Talleyrand in his offices in the Rue du Bac.

Writing James Madison that evening, Livingston reported that Talleyrand had suddenly asked whether "we wished to have the whole of Louisiana." Surprised and playing for time, Livingston at first denied any interest, but Talleyrand persisted, "What would you give for the whole?" Livingston came back with an opening bid of about $3.75 million, which Talleyrand dismissed as too low. But both men knew the game being played.

Talleyrand told Livingston to consider the proposition and return with a better price, and as the maneuvering continued over the days ahead, Livingston recorded Talleyrand's promise to "give me a certificate that I was the most importunate [negotiator] he had yet met with."

With the participation of James Monroe, who arrived in Paris the next day as the American "envoy extraordinary," and the French treasury minister, Francois Barbi-Marbois, agreement was reached just 18 days later for the sale of France's possessions in North America--some 565 million acres--for about $15 million, or less than 3 cents an acre. [...]

Looking at the Louisiana Purchase as a property transaction rather than a work of diplomacy helps to explain another anomaly. Many Americans feared the new land would make the nation too big to govern and, given the prevailing view that government was authority exercised from above over an unruly populace, they had good reason for their fears. But Louisiana was to witness the development of a new kind of society.

Under Spain and France, the province had been a near-feudal domain, ruled by appointees from Europe, with the land sold only to those approved by the governor. In the United States, however, land could be owned by whoever could afford it. Since 1785, all federal land west of the Appalachians had, at Jefferson's urging, been measured out in one-mile-square sections for sale as real estate, and this grid of squares now extended into the Louisiana Purchase.

For the first time in history, land, the primary source of wealth production, could be owned by anyone: speculators, settlers, even squatters. "Power," said John Adams, with ice-cold accuracy, "always follows property." In the Old World property was distributed in a hierarchical manner with the powerful few owning most; but as America spread westward, more than one billion acres of public land, including most of the Louisiana Purchase, would pass into private hands. Power still followed property, but now it was spread democratically, and the nation it created possessed innate stability, because each property-owning citizen had a vested interest in a law-abiding society.

In his marvelous recent book, Measuring America: How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy, Mr. Linklater not only expounds upon the ideas he raises here, but two others that seem quite profound. The first, and it's really the main focus of the book, is how the seemingly simple act of measuring American territory into regular-sized lots created an impetus for ownership and an ease of transaction that dramatically affected the development and character of the nation. (continued here)

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WHO?

The Trials of Pinochet: a review of Pinochet: La Biografia (Pinochet: The Biography) By Gonzalo Vial Correa (Patricio Navia , Foreign Policy)

Nearly 30 years after Gen. Augusto Pinochet deposed the democratically elected President Salvador Allende in a bloody military coup, Chile continues to live with the dictator's controversial dual legacy-a strong, vibrant economy and painful memories of horrific human rights abuses.

Gonzalo Vial Correa's recent two-volume biography of the dictator exemplifies the dilemma of many Chileans who seek to make peace with thepast. Indeed, the book's appearance in late 2002 followed four years of public debate (in Chile and abroad) over the proper fate of the dictator. In March 2000, after 16 months of house arrest in London on charges of human rights violations, Pinochet was released by the British government and allowed to return to his homeland. And following a prolonged legal, political, and public relations battle between those seeking to prosecute Pinochet and those attempting to protect him, Chileans were ready to move on. So was Ricardo Lagos, the new president-the first socialist elected since Allende-who took office just nine days after Pinochet returned to Chile. Facing human rights charges in domestic courts, the aging Pinochet was excused from trial for medical reasons but had to renounce his lifetime senate seat. Neither side felt victorious when he finally retired from public life, and many Chileans began acting as if the dictator had ceased to exist. Even Vial's Pinochet: The Biography treats the general almost as a late leader-all that can change now is history's judgment of his legacy. [...]

[T]he final chapter of the second volume includes a superb essay describing Pinochet's ambiguous legacy in unambiguous terms. Tacitly acknowledging that Pinochet's dismal human rights record inevitably taints his record of audacious neoliberal economic reforms, Vial reproaches the dictator for not curtailing the power of his notorious secret police. But the author is less forthright when speculating on whether Pinochet's advisors could have persuaded the general to take human rights more seriously. "It is also true that those who surrounded him, for a short or a long period of time-ministers, generals, close advisors-did not have the pertinacity that we should have had to press him to overcome that character trait," writes Vial,
with predictable understatement.

It's all well and good to be honest about the failings of the men who ceded us our freedoms, as Americans have learned to be honest about the way in which the slaveholdings of men like Washington and Jefferson make their legacy more complicated than we would prefer. But to obssess so completely over the shortcomings that you can't recognize the good they did, or even to try to forget them completely, is a sign of immaturity. Chile is of course an immature democracy though, so presumably the next generation and the ones after will be able to think about Pinochet more clearly.

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THE BAD WITH THE GOOD

Iraqis Take Sinful Delight in Newfound Freedoms (Niko Price, April 29, 2003, The Associated Press)

When the Atlas Cinema last showed "Blue Chill," people screamed: "Yes! Yes!" every time the actors began kissing, only to see the scratched reel jump to the next scene. On Monday, they sat in awed silence as naked couples writhed on screen.

"The movie is much more beautiful now, because there's sex," said a beaming Mohammed Taher, 18. Since Saturday, when the theater reopened with a freshly uncensored version of the low-budget Italian flick, he has seen "Blue Chill" three times.

Baghdad has gone through a revolution in the past three weeks, casting off decades of censorship and state control. Banned books, satellite dishes and videos are now sold on the street -- as are alcohol and women.

Horrified by the changes, some Iraqis blame America for what they call a cultural degradation. If it continues for long, they promise to rise up in a holy war against the U.S. forces occupying their country.

"Everything against Islam, everything we hate, has been imported by the Americans like a disease," said Abbas Hamid, a 60-year-old merchant. "We'll fight them. We're tired now, but we'll rest up and use our guns to drive the Americans out."

For now, Hamid appears to be in the minority as Iraqis excitedly discover worlds of vice -- and virtue too -- long forbidden by the repressive regime of Saddam Hussein:

* Teenagers gape at Christina Aguilera's navel via formerly illegal satellite dishes.

* Prostitutes walk the streets in some neighborhoods, beckoning passing motorists.

This kind of garbage will do far more damage to their culture than the theft of a few antiquities did.

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A SLIPPERY SLOPE WE SHOULD BE ON

Crack Down on Spam (NY Times, April 29, 2003)

No one with an e-mail account needs to be told that unwanted commercial messages, better known as spam, are a bad problem that is getting worse. America Online reports that 70 percent of the e-mail its users receive is now junk, and that the quantity has doubled just since the beginning of this year. Much of the increase is being fueled by Internet marketing companies, which charge as little as $500 to send out a million e-mail messages. Internet service providers have taken steps to clamp down on spam, but the tools at their disposal are limited. Congress needs to help. [...]

A bill introduced by Senators Conrad Burns, a Montana Republican, and Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, would require that unsolicited marketing e-mail have valid return e-mail addresses, making it easier for recipients to remove themselves from mass e-mail lists or for Internet service providers and states to sue spammers. Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, is introducing a bill that would require the Federal Trade Commission to maintain a no-spam list, like the no-call lists for telemarketing phone calls, and impose stiff penalties on marketers who repeatedly sent spam to people who had opted out.

If these bills were put up for a popular vote, they would be passed handily. But the direct marketing industry has been lobbying hard for its right to keep sending spam. People should tell their Congressional representatives how strongly they feel about fighting spam--one e-mail note per person, please.

There's an interesting question implicated here, though the Timesmen predictably dodge it: if it's okay to disregard the Free Speech claims of spammers because it is merely commercial and we find their speech annoying and possibly destructive of an important social institution (the Internet), then why not disregard similarly absolutist claims by other merely commercial speakers, whose speech serves none of the purposes for which the Constitution was framed, for instance, pornographers?

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THE ORPHANHOOD OF DEFEAT

No takers as 'old Europe' goes ahead with summit (Philip Delves Broughton, 29/04/2003, Daily Telegraph)

The four European countries most hostile to the war in Iraq meet in Brussels today to rekindle plans for a European defence force to rival Nato and show America that "old Europe" is down but not out.

France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg, dubbed old Europe by Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, invited other European Union countries to attend, but found no takers.

Critics say the summit bears no relation to the realities of an expanding Europe in which several new members put far more trust in Nato, which helped free them from the Soviet Union, than a still undefined Franco-German scheme.

If power is an aphrodisiac, this meeting gives off the scent of saltpeter.

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LEGGO MY EGO

We went to war just to boost the white male ego: With their dominance in sport, at work and at home eroded, Bush thought white American men needed to know they were still good at something. That's where Iraq came in... (Norman Mailer, April 29, 2003, Times of London)

The key question remains - why did we go to war? It is not yet answered. In the end, it is likely that a host of responses will produce a cognitive stew, which does, at least, open the way to offering one's own notion. We went to war, I could say, because we very much needed a war. The US economy was sinking, the market was gloomy and down, and some classic bastions of the erstwhile American faith (corporate integrity, the FBI, and the Catholic Church, to cite but three) had each suffered a separate and grievous loss of face. Since our Administration was probably not ready to solve any one of the serious problems before it, it was natural to feel the impulse to move into larger ventures, thrusts into the empyrean-war!

Be it said that the Administration knew something a good many of us did not - it knew that we had a very good, perhaps even an extraordinarily good, if essentially untested, group of Armed Forces, a skilled, disciplined, well-motivated military, career-focused and run by a field-rank and general staff who were intelligent, articulate, and considerably less corrupt than any other power group in America.

In such a pass, how could the White House not use them? They could prove quintessential as morale-builders to one group in US life, perhaps the key group: the white American male. If once this aggregate came near to 50 per cent of the population, it was down to . . . was it now 30 per cent? Still, it remained key to the President's political footing. And it had taken a real beating. As a matter of collective ego, the good white American male had had very little to nourish his morale since the job market had gone bad, unless he happened to be in the Armed Forces.

As one who agrees that America is both the pinnacle of Western Civilization, which is itself the pinnacle of human culture, and the product of white, Christian, racist, sexist, homophobic males, I have trouble getting too worked up about the notion that the war was meant to demonstrate to us and our foes that we remain the dominant cadre of the species. One is chastened though by the multiracial, bi-gendered, religiously diverse and, let's assume, variously-sexually-oriented, make up of the armed forces, administration, and citizenry that prosecuted the war. Why, it's enough to make one think that it's what you think, not who you are, that makes you an American...and even a hawk. Of course, the patriarchal crackers thought up the ideas...

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GONE NATIVE

Banfield Lashes Out at Own Network (Andrew Grossman, Apr 28, 2003, Hollywood Reporter)

NBC News correspondent Ashleigh Banfield has ripped television news networks, including her own, for their "glorious" coverage of the Iraqi war and a lack of focus on international news overall.

In a speech Thursday at Kansas State University, she also attacked NBC News for hiring right-wing radio talk-show host Michael Savage to do a show on MSNBC. Savage recently called Banfield a "slut" after her reports portraying the radical Arab point of view. [...]

Banfield, who hosted an unsuccessful talk show on MSNBC last year and is now reporting for both MSNBC and NBC News, criticized the networks for showing a bloodless war that gave a skewed picture which glossed over the horrors of battle. She did not report from Iraq during the war, but has been stationed overseas in the past.

"It was a glorious and wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news," she said at the college's annual Landon Lecture in Manhattan. "But it wasn't journalism because I'm not so sure we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war ... because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successfully terrific endeavor."

What was wrong with the coverage?

"You did not see where those bullets landed. You didn't see what happened when the mortars landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me," Banfield said.

She ripped NBC for putting Savage on the air saying, "He was so taken aback by my daring to speak to martyrs ... for being prepared to sacrifice themselves, he chose to label me a slut on the air, and that's not all, as a porn star and an accessory to the murder of Jewish children. These are the ramifications for simply bringing the message in the Arab world."

Martyrs?

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WHAT A REVOLTIN' DEVELOPMENT

Ranking the Rich: In a groundbreaking new ranking, FOREIGN POLICY teamed up with Center for Global Development to create the first annual CGD/FP Commitment to Development Index, which grades 21 rich nations on whether their aid, trade, migration, investment, peacekeeping, and environmental policies help or hurt poor nations. Find out why the Netherlands ranks first and why the world's two largest aid givers-the United States and Japan-finish last. (FOREIGN POLICY Magazine and the Center for Global Development , May/June 2003)

The first annual CGD/FP Commitment to Development Index (CDI), created by the Center for Global Development and FOREIGN POLICY magazine, ranks some of the world's richest nations according to how much their policies help or hinder the economic and social development of poor countries. The CDI looks beyond mere foreign aid flows to encompass trade, environmental, investment, migration, and peacekeeping policies. In this inaugural edition of the index, the CDI ranks 21 nations: Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, the United States, and most of Western Europe.

In ranking these countries' commitment to development, the CDI rewards generous aid giving, hospitable immigration policies, sizable contributions to peacekeeping operations, and hefty foreign direct investment in developing countries. The index penalizes financial assistance to corrupt regime, obstruction of imports from developing countries, and policies that harm shared environmental resources. Although the governments and leaders of poor nations are themselves ultimately responsible for responding to the many challenges of development, rich countries can and should change their policies to spur economic growth and social development in poorer nations. The CDI highlights and ranks the rich countries' policies themselves, not their final impact. This approach emphasizes what each rich country-regardless of size and reach-can do to improve opportunities for development throughout the world.

The results of the first annual CDI cast traditional assumptions about the most development-friendly countries in a new, unexpected light. For example, the two countries providing the highest absolute amounts of foreign aid to the developing world-Japan and the United States-bring up the rear in the index. Japan ranks last overall, with low marks in migration and aid. The United States ranks high in trade policy but finishes second to last overall due to particularly poor performances in environmental policy and contributions to peacekeeping. By contrast, the Netherlands emerges as the top-ranked nation in the index, thanks to its strong performance in aid, trade, investment, and environmental policies. Two other small countries, Denmark and Portugal, follow in second and third place, respectively. Norway, which is usually regarded as a model global citizen and a force for peace worldwide, comes in a disappointing 10th, mainly due to its poor trade performance. And though New Zealand is not noted for its particularly generous aid giving, that country finishes fourth overall thanks to a strong showing in migration and peacekeeping policies.

The ridicularities here are too numerous to mention them all, so, how about just the most obvious one: peacekeeping. This one's hilarious--the U.S. and Britain will receive no credit here for actually liberating Afghanistan and Iraq, but once peacekeeping forces go in whoever sends them is considered to be better at aiding development there than those of us who made it possible at all?

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THAT HORSE IS LONG SINCE DEAD

Deciphering the Democrats' Debacle: Why the Republican majority (probably) won't last. (Ruy Teixeira, May 2003, Washington Monthly)

Last year, John Judis and I published a book entitled The Emerging Democratic Majority, which argued that a series of economic, demographic, and ideological changes was laying the basis for a new Democratic majority that would materialize by decade's end--not certainly, we argued, but very probably as long as the Democratic Party put forth decent political leadership to challenge the dominant, but dwindling, current Republican majority.

Our book arrived in stores last September. Two months later, in the midterm elections, the Republicans surprised nearly everyone by winning control of the Senate and further solidifying their majority in the House, unifying Republican control of the federal government for only the second time in half a century. Needless to say, this wasn't my ideal outcome. In the annals of publishing, this wasn't quite so unfortunate as, say, James Glassman's prediction of a 36,000 point Dow just before the 2000 stock market crash, but it still evoked a fair amount of understandable ribbing and forced me to think hard about our thesis. So after the election, I pored over survey data, county-by-county voting returns, and a great deal of underlying demographic data and thought long and hard about what the data showed. And as a result, I've decided that ... we're still right!

We, on the other hand, have decided they're still wrong!

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OUR FATHERS' CHILDREN

Once upon a time in America: In 1815, a group of Boston singers, sick of dreary hymns, formed the Handel & Haydn Society - and classical music was born in the United States. But it would not have an easy ride. (Jan Swafford, April 25, 2003, The Guardian)

Western Massachusetts, 1800: much of this territory across the state from Boston is isolated homesteads, and the daily symphony is hooting owls and barking foxes. There is music, of course, here and there; wherever you find humanity, you find music.

But in the newly minted US, music is mainly a matter of a jig or a reel from a fiddler at a dance - and, above all, of hymns in church. By 1900, those same areas of Massachusetts will be dotted with farms and villages, and not far away will reside a symphony orchestra.

The saga of American music in the 19th century is a tale of outsized personalities, showdowns and rampant can-doism. The American myth has much to do with raising yourself by your own bootstraps, and that is what American music did in the 19th century: beginning with mostly amateur fiddlers, fifers and bawling congregations, ending with some of the best orchestras and opera houses anywhere.

It was founding father John Adams who put the matter with his usual farsightedness: "My duty is to study the science of government that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and science... to give their children a right to study philosophy, painting, poetry, music, architecture, sculpture." That is, on the whole, what happened - and on Adams's timetable, too.

Which makes this downright poetic.

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RICK SANTORUM--A WELLSTONE REPUBLICAN

Sex and Civility (Dotty Lynch, Douglas Kiker, and Joanna Schubert, April, 28, 2003, The CBS News)

Last week's calls for the ouster of Republican Sen. Rick Santorum from the GOP leadership after his remarks linking homosexual acts to polygamy, bigamy and incest seem to have fallen on deaf ears. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist defended Santorum, and, on Friday, Ari Fleischer said President Bush thought Santorum was an "inclusive man." Conservatives have started alleging a political motive behind the story. Late last week, Robert Novak reported that the AP reporter who interviewed Santorum, Laura Jakes Jordan, is married to Jim Jordan, campaign manager for Sen. John Kerry's Democratic presidential campaign.

"Jordan herself is pretty suspect," said Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga. Howie Kurtz in the Washington Post reports that "Jim Jordan says he didn't know 'with any specificity' what Santorum had told his wife and (said) that Kerry was one of several Democrats who issued statements at the request of the Hotline political digest. "Even by the usual standards of the right-wing attack machine," Jim Jordan said, "this is just stupid, vicious and sexist."

Democratic candidates, meanwhile, were generally hitting home runs on the gay-rights groups scorecards. Howard Dean, who signed legislation legalizing civil unions for same sex couples in Vermont, has been working the gay and lesbian activist network heavily during the early phases of the campaign. Six of the nine Democratic presidential candidates - Gephardt, Kerry, Braun, Kucinich, Sharpton and Dean - support civil unions.

While the other three Democratic candidates - Lieberman, Edwards and Graham - "stopped short of endorsing them," none has opposed them. Lieberman and Edwards say this should be left up to individual states, and Graham said that the issue "needs more study."

All nine Democrats support benefits for domestic partners, while President Bush opposes them. Civil unions are controversial among the public, with Democrats generally supportive and Republicans opposed. Republican pollster Whit Ayres told the Boston Globe that favoring civil unions could hurt a Democratic candidate in the general election. "The dividing line between the blue states and the red states was primarily a cultural dividing line rather than an economic one. The whole issue of civil unions reinforces the differences between the parties. It seals the deal in the South" for the Republicans, Ayres said

It's a simple truth of American politics that there is no price to be paid for opposing gay "rights". To the contrary, as the vote on the Defense of Marriage Act demonstrated, you can oppose them and still be an icon even on the Left.

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A PROOF TOO FAR

Religion versus science might be all in the mind (Chris McGillion April 29 2003, Sydney Morning Herald)

For years now, one small branch of science has been chipping away at the foundations of religious belief by proposing that "otherworldly" experiences are nothing more than the inner workings of the human brain. Many neuroscientists claim they can locate and explain brain functions that produce everything from religious visions to sensations of bliss, timelessness or union with a higher power.

These claims have been strengthened by the work of the Canadian neuropsychologist Dr Michael Persinger. By stimulating the cerebral region presumed to control notions of self, Persinger has been able to induce in hundreds of subjects a "sensed presence" only the subjects themselves are aware of. This presence, Persinger suggests, may be described as Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Muhammad or the Sky Spirit - depending on the name the subject's culture has trained him or her to use.

"Neurotheology", as this line of inquiry has been dubbed, has its critics. Some say it fails to distinguish between experiences that contain a moral or spiritual dimension (such as visions of God) from those that don't (such as ghostly perceptions). Others point out that none of this research can ever establish whether our brains have been designed to apprehend religious experiences or whether these are simply the by-product of bad wiring. [...]

The jury is still out on whether such religious experiences are mere delusions and whether God might be nothing more than a hallucination. But the argument for both has just become a lot more interesting.

The problem with kind of reductionism is even more fundamental than the ones mentioned in the article: logically there must of course also be brain centers that produce belief in science, which is ultimately just as much a product of socialization as any religion, and even belief in reality and the self. Therefore, we are returned to the primordial problem that we have no way of ever proving our own existence. What's interesting, for our purposes, is the failure of the author even to contemplate such matters, because each of us assumes our own beliefs "true" and those of others mere "beliefs".

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PEACE, WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT

Abu Mazen tells Europeans will declare end to armed struggle (Arnon Regular, 4/28/03, Ha'aretz)

Palestinian Prime Minister designate Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has told European diplomats he will use his inaugural speech to declare an end to the use of arms to achieve Palestinian national aspirations.

Abu Mazen will be inaugurated after the PLC (Palestinian Legislative Council) approves his government. He told the Europeans, after he reached agreement on the composition of his cabinet last week with Chairman Yasser Arafat, that he would say ending the armed struggle and improving the living conditions of Palestinians are an inseparable part of the road map that would form the basic guidelines of his government. Lifting checkpoints and improving the Palestinian economic situation are essential elements in this, he said.

Abu Mazen told the Europeans all future inputs of money to the PA, whether from donors, Europeans, or Arab countries would go to the PA treasury and would be overseen by Finance Minister Salam Fayyad.

That would meet long-standing European demands made to an unresponsive Arafat for financial transparency in the use of money sent to the PA. It essentially makes the process of donor money usage subject to the same transparency rules Israel laid down for handing over tax money it collects on behalf of the PA.

Events are in the saddle and they're riding the American hawks. In very short order the neocons will be left arguing that the Palestinians, despite having the most free and democratic state in the Arab world, should not be recognized as such, but should continue to be lorded over by Israel. This will place them in the schizophrenic position of demanding and denying democratic reforms at one and the same time and of opposing Ariel Sharon for being too accomodationist.

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SEMIOTICS

Baghdad crowd honors donkey, not Saddam, on strongman's birthday> (AFP, 4/28/03)

Joyous crowds in Baghdad celebrated Saddam Hussein's birthday in a brand new way, pasting photos of the former strongman on a donkey as they heaped scorn on his brutal 24-year reign.
?
"For the first time in my life, I won't be forced to attend Saddam's birthday ceremonies. He was a dictator, he was nothing but a donkey ruling over Iraq," said Ali, 24.

The young man, speaking in the Sadr city neighborhood formerly known as Saddam city and home to about two million Shiite Muslims, said most Iraqis had been "faking joy on Saddam's birthday each year because we were plain afraid."

"We'll bring the donkey flowers and a cake this afternoon," said Hassan al-Hussein, 27, who helped organize the ceremony here Monday.

Crowds of young boys were clapping their hands in appreciation as a man planted a banner and a colorful plastic tree by the donkey.

"April 28, it's your birthday you loser!" read the sign. Saddam turned 66 on Monday although his whereabouts, if he is even still alive, are unknown.

One notes with interest that they chose a Donkey and not an Elephant as the symbol of the oppressor.

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60-40 VISION FILES

Shaping the Next Senate (The Prowler, 4/28/2003, American Prowler)

"We may still prevail with [HUD Secretary Mel] Martinez," says a hopeful RNC staffer. "There is still some time. We'd prefer someone who can excite voters, and McCollum underwhelms. We know that. There are also some concerns about Foley's experience and ability to run a statewide campaign." Foley, though, has been raising money at a decent clip, and has been lining up support across the state.

The Republicans are pressing for a strong candidate because they expect that Bob Graham will not seek re-election, instead focusing his money and time on a presidential bid. Harris, who ran for the House after being recruited by the White House, would be an attractive candidate and, with statewide office experience, would have the name recognition and money connections to make a race of things.

"She was tabbed a star the first day she arrived in Washington in January, and she hasn't done anything to change anyone's mind," says the RNC staffer. House leadership is said to be impressed with Harris's abilities and plans to put her out to represent the party during the economic stimulus package fight to see how she handles the press attention.

Harris has not indicated she would run for the Senate, although if the White House asked, she probably wouldn't turn the offer down.

BURR CAROLINA

North Carolina Rep. Richard Burr pulled in more than $700,000 at a fundraiser last week attended by Karl Rove. According to Burr insiders, he expects to have more than $10 million in the bank for the general election in 2004, whether it is against sitting Sen. John Edwards or another Democratic challenger.

Burr has surprised Democrats down south with his fundraising momentum, and even Edwards appears to have noticed. He remains unsure about whether he should empty his Senate campaign account, which has more than $2 million in it. "He still may run for his seat. He hasn't said he won't," says an Edwards Senate staffer. "We're proceeding as though he will be elected to a second term."

The GOP can win NC whether Edwards runs or not, but probably needs Mr. Graham to give up his seat if they're to have a shot.

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PAYING THE RANSOM DEMANDS

American Power Moves Beyond the Mere Super (GREGG EASTERBROOK, April 27, 2003, NY Times)

Stealth drones, G.P.S.-guided smart munitions that hit precisely where aimed; antitank bombs that guide themselves; space-relayed data links that allow individual squad leaders to know exactly where American and opposition forces are during battle--the United States military rolled out all this advanced technology, and more, in its lightning conquest of Iraq. No other military is even close to the United States. The American military is now the strongest the world has ever known, both in absolute terms and relative to other nations; stronger than the Wehrmacht in 1940, stronger than the legions at the height of Roman power. For years to come, no other nation is likely even to try to rival American might.

Which means: the global arms race is over, with the United States the undisputed heavyweight champion. Other nations are not even trying to match American armed force, because they are so far behind they have no chance of catching up. The great-powers arms race, in progress for centuries, has ended with the rest of the world conceding triumph to the United States.

Now only a nuclear state, like, perhaps, North Korea, has any military leverage against the winner.

Paradoxically, the runaway American victory in the conventional arms race might inspire a new round of proliferation of atomic weapons. With no hope of matching the United States plane for plane, more countries may seek atomic weapons to gain deterrence.

North Korea might have been moved last week to declare that it has an atomic bomb by the knowledge that it has no hope of resisting American conventional power. If it becomes generally believed that possession of even a few nuclear munitions is enough to render North Korea immune from American military force, other nations--Iran is an obvious next candidate--may place renewed emphasis on building them. [...]

The American edge does not render its forces invincible: the expensive Apache attack helicopter, for example, fared poorly against routine small-arms fire in Iraq. More important, overwhelming power hardly insures that the United States will get its way in world affairs. Force is just one aspect of international relations, while experience has shown that military power can solve only military problems, not political ones.

North Korea now stares into the barrel of the strongest military ever assembled, and yet may be able to defy the United States, owing to nuclear deterrence. As the global arms race ends with the United States so far ahead no other nation even tries to be America's rival, the result may be a world in which Washington has historically unparalleled power, but often cannot use it.

Bunk. We have to use it just to prevent this possibility. Obtaining nuclear weapons must be seen to be a trigger for war, not a shield from it.

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THE WETS ARE RIGHT

Grassley aims for larger tax cuts (Joyce Howard Price, 4/28/03, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley says it "might not be difficult" to get the Senate to approve a $450 billion tax cut but that it will be hard to get the full $550 billion tax cut President Bush is seeking.

Mr. Grassley, Iowa Republican, who earlier pushed a $350 billion tax-cut compromise through the Senate after failing to get more than 48 votes for the president's higher proposal, said yesterday on "Fox News Sunday" that there "will be some attempt" to go above the $350 billion figure by closing corporate tax loopholes and cutting spending.

"I think [it will be] a little bit above, hopefully, quite a bit above [$350 billion], but I can't tell you what that will be right now," Mr. Grassley said.

"I can say flat out it's going to be difficult to get to $550 [billion]. It might not be difficult to get to $425 billion or $450 billion, but, remember, it's got to be dollar-for-dollar" offsets, he said, speaking of a Senate agreement that tax cuts of more than $350 billion be matched by spending reductions.

But Sen. George V. Voinovich, Ohio Republican, who voted for the budget resolution only after the president's tax cut was reduced to $350 billion, says he believes that $350 billion is the "responsible" amount.

Mr. Voinovich, interviewed on NBC's "Meet the Press," called the president's request for a $550 billion tax cut "fiscally irresponsible, with the deficits we're confronting" and uncertainty about the cost of the war in Iraq.

"We need a shot in the arm of the economy, but we don't need to shoot ourselves in the foot by increasing the deficit," he said.
?
Mr. Voinovich and Sen. Olympia J. Snowe, Maine Republican, both voted to reduce the Bush tax cut to $350 billion. They initially said they would support efforts to increase the tax cut only if they were accompanied by spending offsets.

Mr. Voinovich and Ms Snowe are absolutely right. The President should spend the political capital he has right now to get at least $200 billion in permanent spending cuts to offset further tax cuts. He could demonstrate the good faith of this effort by proposing to eliminate the Commerce Department, a notorious Republican boondoggle, and by adopting the package of business tax loophole closures that John McCain is always championing. If Congress still proves reluctant to cut taxes further, the solution is easy enough: just propose cutting the payroll tax and even Democrats will support it. Sure, it's fiscally irresponsible, but no more so than taxing the American people for the cost of a $2.2 Trillion budget.

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<~text text="Patrick Henry (1736-1799): "The War Inevitable" speech to the Virginia Convention, March 23, 1775">

It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings. ... Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things, which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it. Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves. ... Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

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NONE SO BLIND

Since when was it a sin to be the best school in town? (Stephen Pollard, April 28, 2003, Times of London)

Imagine a school where 98 per cent of pupils, not one of whom has been selected by academic ability, gained five or more A to C passes at GCSE. With the average school managing to achieve these grades with only 52 per cent of pupils, you?d think the school must be doing something right and it would be worth replicating. There is such a school, in Gateshead. And there are plans to open a sister school in Middlesbrough, as well as the hope of others in Doncaster, Leeds, Newcastle, Sunderland and Hull.

Wonderful news. The people behind it--and the man who has made it possible by donating millions of pounds of his own money to help children once condemned to some of the worst schools in the country--should be lauded as heroes.

Except that to many in the liberal education establishment, they are not heroes but villains. The man who funds the school is blind, as are some of the teachers. To some in the local education authority, in neighbouring schools and in the media it?s simply beyond the pale having blind people involved in the education of children. They might, you see, somehow pass on their blindness.

It?s foul, isn?t it--and quite astonishingly stupid--that there should be such prejudice? Like most prejudice, it?s not only baseless, it?s self-defeating. The way the blind people run the school brings only positive benefits to the pupils, but that counts for nothing in the face of bigotry.

Oh, sorry. Did I say they were blind? Scrub that. I meant they are Christian. The school with a 98 per cent pass rate is Emmanuel College in Gateshead, and the man who has given millions to it, and wants to repeat his munificence elsewhere, is Sir Peter Vardy, who is--ugh, how revolting--an evangelical Christian, as are--excuse me while I hold my nose--some of the teachers.

Because they are Christians who believe in creationism, and the literal truth of the Bible, they are, it seems, unfit to teach children, lest they infect them with their foul ideas.

Thus does secularism lead, quite literally, to ignorance.

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THE LADDIE'S NOT FOR TURNING

Blair warns Chirac on the future of Europe (Philip Stephens and Cathy Newman, April 28, 2003, The Financial Times)

Tony Blair has issued a direct challenge to France's Jacques Chirac over the future of the transatlantic relationship by warning that the French president's vision of Europe as a rival to the US is dangerously destabilising.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Financial Times, the prime minister foreshadows a continuing Anglo-French struggle about Europe's relationship with Washington. Mr Blair seeks to keep alive the prospect of British entry to the euro but he disavows any personal ambition to become president of the European Union.

Though his personal relationship with Mr Chirac has improved since the bitter row over France's veto of a second United Nations resolution, Mr Blair is clear that the strategic divide that opened over Iraq has not been bridged.

Meanwhile a new MORI poll for the FT reveals that 55 per cent of Britons regard France as the UK's least reliable ally, while 73 per cent view the US as the country's most reliable.

Welfare state reform battleground (Cathy Newman and Philip Stephens, April 27 2003, Financial Times)

Tony Blair has vowed to defy a groundswell of opposition from his party and the unions in order to "redraw" the welfare state with his radical programme of public service reform.

The prime minister told the Financial Times that the government had "got to opt for the radical, not the quiet life".

Insisting that he is "not going to depart from the path of reform", he says: "What we have got to do is fundamentally to redraw the way the 1945 welfare state settlement is implemented, and we have got to do it for health, for education, for the employment and labour markets, and actually in the longer term for pensions too."

Mr Blair makes clear that victory in Iraq has emboldened him to take on leftwing critics of his plans to give the best hospitals, schools and universities more money and freedom from state control.

Despite the unprecedented revolt of 139 Labour MPs opposed to military action in Iraq, Mr Blair is to risk a renewed clash with the left by ruling out any concessions on public service reform and pledging to "continue opening up" the NHS by "injecting into it the spirit of enterprise and initiative and innovation".

"I will do what is necessary to carry through the programme, yes . . . If the Labour party were to back away from public service reform, we would deal a heavy blow to public services," he said.

More than 100 Labour backbenchers could vote next month against foundation hospitals, which are to be freed from Whitehall control and allowed to borrow more money.

Mr Blair also opens a fresh front in the war of words with trade unions, dismissing threatened teachers' strikes as "NUT nonsense". Faced with a continuing pay dispute between the government and the firefighters, he insists: "We will not give in in any shape or form to any resurgent trade union militancy."

Confronting the French and Labor; what's not to like?

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JUSTICE, LAND, AND A CAR

200 freed Iraqi prisoners of war leave desert camp singing and cheering for President Bush (DIANA ELIAS, April 27, 2003, Associated Press)

Chanting "Saddam no, Bush yes," some 200 Iraqi prisoners of war were let go Sunday at the coalition's main internment camp in the desert near the southern port of Umm Qasr.

The men, many of them barefooted, shook hands with the American soldiers guarding the camp before boarding buses and trucks to be driven to nearby Basra, southern Iraq's largest city.

Their departure brought to 700 the number of POWs released since Friday, said Maj. Stacy Garrity of the U.S. Army's 800th Military Police Brigade, which runs the camp. Around 5,800 more prisoners, including some from Jordan and Syria, await screening and possible release, she said.

"Probably half of the camp will be gone in the next week and a half," said Garrity, who is from Athens, Pa.

Wearing a towel on his head as protection from the scorching heat and blowing sand, one smiling POW, Mahdi Saleh, told The Associated Press: "My mother will die when she sees me."

It may take a while. Once in Basra, the penniless Saleh will have to find transportation home to Mosul, a city some 500 miles away in northern Iraq.

Saleh, a junior Iraqi army officer who is the father of four, said he was taken prisoner at the Qadisiya Dam at the beginning of the war that toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein.

"I gave orders to my five men not to fight and we surrendered," he said, his eyes red from the sand. "Americans were coming for our own good. ... What has Saddam done for us? I'm 30 and I haven't enjoyed life -- no justice, no piece of land, no car."

Tell us again why war wasn't the "answer"?

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BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS

Something has happened to Ariel Sharon (Ari Shavit, 4/24/03, Ha'aretz)

A few days before Pesach, Israel's prime minister gave the country's citizens the finest of holiday gifts: hope. Predictably, some local commentators - who tend to become excited at every new statement by every Arab despot who rearticulates his call for Israel's annihilation - were quick to dismiss what the prime minister of Israel said. Predictably, some local commentators - who are ready to adopt and embrace every deceptive formula adduced by the Palestinians - were quick to reach the conclusion that Ariel Sharon is once again being deceptive. However, the majority of Israel's citizens, in common with the majority of the world's observers, read the prime minister's remarks as they should be read: cautiously but with interest; suspiciously but with hope.

Ariel Sharon has earned the suspicious attitude people have toward him honestly. On countless occasions during the 50 years in which he has taken an active part in forging Israel's fate, he has behaved with a cleverness that borders on craftiness. His ability to equivocate has led him to the greatest of achievements and the harshest of debacles. However, even people who did not see the expression on the face of the old fighter when he said what he did about Beit El and Shiloh could discern that this was no hollow statement. Even those who did not hear the tone of voice of the master of the settlement project when he took leave of the terraced valleys of the land of the tribe of Benjamin could understand that this was not just another stratagem. Something has happened to Ariel Sharon. The guile is the same guile but the discourse is new.

No, Sharon has not moved to the left. But he has internalized a large part of the left's arguments about the futility of the occupation. No, Sharon has not become Yitzhak Rabin. But he feels the same weighty generational responsibility that Rabin felt in the early 1990s. No, Sharon does not accept the map put forward by Ehud Barak - to him, it was and remains a suicide map - but he is well aware of the historical and strategic context within which Barak acted.

Bye-bye, Yasser: Analysis (Khaled Abu Toameh, Jerusalem Post)

"This is a silent coup," a top Palestinian Authority official in Ramallah said shortly after an agreement was reached between PA Chairman Yasser Arafat and Prime Minister-designate Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) over the composition of a new cabinet.

Efforts to replace Arafat or sideline him started shortly after Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield last spring. Abbas and a handful of PA officials seized the opportunity provided by Arafat's being under siege in his Ramallah compound and held a series of closed-door meetings to discuss the new situation resulting from the IDF's reoccupation of the West Bank.

Arafat aides described the gathering as a coup d' tat. One of the alleged conspirators, former cabinet minister Nabil Amr, was the target of a shooting attack on his home. Abbas, who understood the message, hastily left the West Bank.

Almost a year later, Abbas has made a comeback that in effect turns him into the new leader of the Palestinian people.

The consensus in Ramallah Wednesday was that the biggest loser in the cabinet crisis was Arafat, who was forced to relinquish his grip over the dozen
or so security forces that he helped establish since the Olso process began.

Last year Arafat, also under immense pressure from the US and EU, reluctantly agreed to cede control exclusive control over the PA's finances by naming Salaam Fayad as finance minister.

Fayad has since gone a long way in reorganizing the PA's finances. He has even set aside a modest budget for the president's office, depriving Arafat of control over the millions of dollars donated by the US and EU.

Last month, international pressure forced Arafat to end his 40-year autocratic rule and to accept the idea of sharing power with a prime minister.

As different as chalk and cheese (Danny Rubinstein, 4/27/03, Ha'aretz)

The power struggle between Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) can be regarded as another stage in the democratization of Palestinian political life. There was no violence between the two competing for positions of power. There were elements of typical leadership struggles in which a senior leader (Arafat) doesn't want to cede power.

In neighboring Arab countries, one practically doesn't see relatively restrained, publicly reported power struggles for the leadership as took place in the Palestinian Authority in the last two weeks. Some of those states are kingdoms but even among the republics a new form of government, "a republican kingdom," has evolved, meaning a republic that is ruled by heirs, as in a monarchy.

The best known example is Syria, where Hafez Assad left the regime to his son Bashar. The same system was supposed to take place in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and the political gossip in the Arab world speculates that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is grooming his son for the presidency. Political scientists have even come up with an Arabic word for it, "Jamalochia," combining jamariya (republic) with monarchy. Quite a few Palestinians say that if Arafat had a son, he would have been the candidate to replace him.

Despite the publicity given to the power struggle between Arafat and Abu Mazen, most of the struggle actually took place in secret. Most of the reports about what has going on in the various meetings were quite limited in scope, and there was limited coverage of the events in the Arab and international press, while the Palestinian press practically ignored it and published very few and mostly partial items about it. The Palestinian political culture prefers to keep such matters modest. The rival camps also made, relatively speaking, very little use of the media.

There are major differences between the two men. There was the senior leader, Arafat, the "founding father" of Palestinian nationalism, known popularly by a host of adoring names. More than anything, he is a symbol of the struggle, embodying and personifying the national aspirations. When he arrived in Gaza in 1994 to build the PA, there were those who wrote in the Palestinian press, "The sun of Arafat is shining down on the homeland." Arafat is the man without a private life, who lives in his office, surrounded by his loyalists and without a normal family life. Everything is for the Palestinian cause.

On the other side is Abu Mazen, the complete opposite. Introverted, without a band of loyalists, rarely consults, a man of no glamour and nearly without any of the ambitions that usually turns someone into Number 1. He has private business affairs and a solid family life, though most of the family is overseas.

A man in his prime (Yossi Klein, Ha'aretz)

It's not easy to draw a portrait of a refugee, because by definition, a refugee changes according to where he is. Mahmoud Abbas, a.k.a. Abu Mazen, who is about to become the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, is first of all a refugee and then a pragmatist. Abu Mazen--whose first-born son, Mazen, an engineer, died a year ago at the age of 42 in Qatar of a heart ailment - has gone through many places in the course of his 68 years. Like every refugee, Abu Mazen also carries his birthplace, Safed, in his memory. As a pragmatist, though, he knows where to draw the line that separates nostalgia, which attracts him to the city, and reality, which prevents him from even visiting it.

The status of refugee is an important biographical detail in the life history of a Palestinian politician, but pragmatism can define him as a Palestinian leader. Like every refugee, Abu Mazen has many stations in his life: Damascus, where he fled with his family, studied at the university (law) and taught in elementary school; Moscow, where he submitted his doctoral thesis, which dealt with the Holocaust, and more specifically with the connection between Nazism and Zionism; Tunis, where he resided as one of the leaders of Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization; Qatar, where his family ran its business; and Abu Dhabi, where his daughter-in-law and his grandson live today.

Abu Mazen continues to travel between Gaza and Ramallah, in both of which he has homes, as befits the divided character of the state he is going to administer, and in addition, he has a house in Morocco, for the sake of the security that a refugee searches for all his life

Dahlan: Setting an ex-terrorist to stop terrorists (Erik Schechter, Jerusalem Post)

In an ideal world, the former Gazan chief of the Preventive Security Service would be sitting (once again) in an Israeli prison. But Israelis hope that Muhammad Dahlan's designation as the state minister for security affairs will help stem Palestinian terrorism.

Prime Minister-designate Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) had originally sought to install Dahlan as his interior minister to take charge of the PA security forces and rein in Palestinian violence. However, Dahlan's newly crafted position is said to give him similar powers.

"After the series of bombings in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in 1996, Dahlan was very effective in fighting Hamas and its infrastructure," said Uri Savir,
former Foreign Ministry director-general and current head of the Peres Center for Peace.

"I am quite sure that Abu Mazen has an interest in ending terrorism and violence and the interior minister was a key post for doing that," Savir told The Jerusalem Post. "I believe that Dahlan and Abu Mazen have a shared understanding on security."

Dahlan resigned as head of the Gaza PSS in July 2002 with the hopes of becoming interior minister a move which instead landed him a job as Arafat's national security adviser. Last October, he quit that post as well, taking the opportunity to criticize the use of arms by Palestinians during the so-called Aksa intifada.

The London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat reported Dahlan saying that, after September 11, "we should have turned it into a popular intifada and stopped the armed activity, but we didn't, because we don't have the courage, as a leadership, to do so."

Dahlan also criticized the "extremism" of the Palestinian political position, noting by contrast that prime minister David Ben-Gurion had accepted UN Resolution 181 in 1947, even though it did not include the Old City of Jerusalem within the boundaries of the Jewish state.

Analysis: `The Americans won' (Danny Rubinstein, 4/24/03, Ha'aretz)

An East Jerusalem journalist, asked last night who won, replied: "Neither Arafat nor Abu Mazen. The Americans won."

It's very possible that answer is an accurate reflection of Palestinian public opinion, which did not seem bothered by the struggle of the titans, Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), at the top over the past few weeks.

The Palestinian street witnessed powerful international forces, led by the United States, using enormous pressure to see Abu Mazen made prime minister, with Mohammed Dahlan in charge of security. The Americans brought in the Europeans and their loyalists in the Arab world for the purpose, headed by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who has a lot of influence over Arafat and his people, and they managed to dictate the composition of the government to the Palestinians.

Abbas's burden of proof (Caroline Glick, Jerusalem Post)

There was a distinct feeling of deja vu from 1994 in the air this week. Back then, Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak saved the international community from embarrassment by physically forcing Yasser Arafat to sign the Gaza-Jericho agreement on live television. This week, Mubarak sent the commander of his intelligence service to repeat the performance. General Omar Sulieman came to Ramallah on Tuesday and literally forced Arafat to meet with his deputy, Dr. Mahmoud Abbas, and accept Abbas's cabinet.

As in 1994, the US and Europe heaved a collective sigh of relief at Egypt's manhandling of Arafat. The question is whether Arafat's seeming capitulation now will prove as fraudulent as his behavior then.

When last June US President George W. Bush called on the Palestinian people to reject the regime of PLO chief Arafat and to elect leaders "not compromised by terror," he underscored the necessity of a complete overhaul of the way the Palestinians perceive their national identity. No longer could the Palestinians conceive of their nationalism as something that must necessarily supplant Jewish nationalism in order to reach fruition. Rather, a new group of leaders was called on to rise up who would understand that the realization of Palestinian aspirations can come about only after the Palestinians accept Israel's right to exist as the Jewish state.

Today, responding to British pressure, the Bush administration stands poised to preside over new talks between the Israeli government and the PLO under the nascent leadership of Abbas, Arafat's deputy of four decades. The announced aim of these talks is the speedy establishment of a Palestinian state.

But before any such talks begin it is vital that all concerned parties, but especially Israel, pause a moment and consider the reason for Oslo's abject failure.

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FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA

GOP plans to make New York Bush country (AP, April 27, 2003)

County, state and national Republican leaders this weekend sought to secure wins for the next GOP candidates for president, U.S. Senate and governor in part by reaching out to women candidates and minority voters.

Along the way, some of New York's rising Republican stars often named among contenders for statewide office in the Democrat-dominated state networked with county party leaders, a critical step for party endorsement. The closed-door Republican conference in Cooperstown Saturday and Sunday was also a strategy session on how to give New York's important 29 electoral votes usually a slam dunk for Democrats to Republican President Bush in his likely re-election campaign next year.

``I know that President Bush is going to win our state next year,'' state Republican Chairman Alexander Treadwell said Sunday. ``He'll be the first Republican presidential candidate to carry New York since Ronald Reagan did it twice.''

Treadwell introduced the Republican rising stars invited to the conference: state Sen. Michael Balboni of Long Island, state Secretary of State Randy Daniels, Erie County Executive Joel Giambra, state Sen. Raymond Meier of Oneida County, and U.S. Rep. John Sweeney. They met with county leaders during a reception at the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown.

Last week the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute found Bush's approval rating among New Yorkers rising to 58 percent from 50 percent in February before the war in Iraq. About 91 percent of Republicans polled approved of Bush, along with 38 percent of the Democrats. At the same time, however, Republican Gov. George Pataki's approval ratings sunk to the lowest in seven years, dragged down by another late state budget.

The party plans to stump for Bush in part from two substantial bully pulpits: the governor's office and the New York City mayor's office, each held for the last three terms by Republicans.

Just keep NY and CA in play and they'll suck down all of John Kerry's resources, even if he runs on his wife's dime.

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IS IT MORNING IN THE MIDDLE EAST?

Democracy in Iraq will benefit the entire region: analyst (Islamic Republic News Agency, April 27, 2003)

"The present circumstances in Iraq creates a historic opportunity for bilateral Iran-Iraq legal ties to be reviewed and reiterated upon," said As'ad Ardalan, an expert in international law who spoke here concerning the legal aspects of the war in Iraq.

In an exclusive interview with `Iran News' published Sunday, Ardalan said: "We should do our utmost to receive the just compensation our country is owed by Iraq as a result of the brutal aggression suffered by this nation in the hands of Saddam Hussein."

Now that the war is over, he said Iran can play an important role in Iraq's reconstruction. Iran would clearly benefit from a democratic, peaceful and secure neighbor such as Iraq, he added.

"Iraq will forever be our neighbor and should try to develop amicable relations with that country," he said.

He maintained that a long-term military administration of Iraq by the US is highly unlikely, adding that the aim of General Jay Garner's administration is to increase pressure on Iraqi forces opposed to Saddam to quickly form a new government that is in line with American interests.

Ardalan further said that the immediate objectives of any US-installed interim administration in Iraq would be the deBaathification of Iraq, the arrest of Saddam's henchmen, signing of lucrative reconstruction and oil contracts with powerful US firms without resort to international tenders and, last but not least, trying to frighten Iraq's neighbors by flexing the American military towards the neighborhood.

On the anti-American protests in Iraq over the past few days, the jurist said: "I doubt very much that these protests will result in a crisis between the Iraqi nation and the US. Moreover, the Bush administration is weary of confrontation with the people of that country since such a development would give ammunition to certain groups and organizations to take advantage of the situation. If such incidents persist, Iraq is sure to become an unstable and insecure place for the Americans."

This could all be coincidence, but it does seem like there's more sensible commentary coming from the Middle East the past couple weeks.

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NOW COMES THE HARD PART

Better a Jew: For the growing minority of non-Jews living in Israel, a sense of belonging can be impossible to achieve. (Nicky Blackburn, 4/21/03, Ha'aretz)

[I]srael must face facts. Today there is a growing minority of non-Jews who live within the Israeli community. We are full members of this society and yet we are still denied some very basic human rights. My two sons, for instance, can serve in the army, they can pay taxes, but they cannot marry here, nor can they be buried alongside Jewish friends or partners. Like me, they will spend their lives listening to constant sniping remarks by politicians and officials who feel they are second class citizens, the dirty water that slipped in on a wave of immigration. They too may have to listen to jokes about goys, sarcastic comments about their parental heritage, and have doubts raised about their Israeli identity.

This, however, is a mistake. Today there are 50,000 Russian immigrants living in Israel who identify themselves as Christian, and another 270,000 who are not Jewish according to halakha. While some of them have given up and left Israel, in a few cases even seeking asylum in England on the grounds of religious persecution, the rest are here to stay. Israel must make a decision. Does it want yet another alienated minority, or does it want full citizens who feel a real bond to their country?

In the wake of all this, it is hard to understand why the Orthodox community is so determined to make conversion such an unpleasant process. Every year thousands apply to convert, but only a small number make it through. Assimilation today is a major problem for diaspora Jews. Experts are beginning to realize that it is also a growing problem within Israel. At a recent conference, Dr. Asher Cohen, of Bar-Ilan University's Institute for the Study of Assimilation, reported that the present rate of intermarriage in Israel stands at 10 percent, and is rising. Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, head of the Kibbutz Hadati Yeshiva, also told participants that rabbis who ease the conversion process and promote mass conversion, are actually preserving Judaism.

Instead of welcoming new converts, however, Judaism shows them its worst face. Potential converts are too often met with narrow-mindedness, corruption, and distrust. While some people undertake conversion with a full heart, many others view it as a game in which you cheat and lie to win.

Had I been met with understanding, then perhaps I would be Jewish now, and so would my two children. For Israel, it was a missed opportunity. Instead of teaching me to respect the religion, I learned instead to despise its protagonists. My children are growing up as Israelis. Their overwhelming identification is as Jews. But they also celebrate Christmas and Easter. If they ever decide they want to convert, I will support them, but there's no doubt my experiences will shape what I tell them about the Orthodox religion.

Today, I have no real idea of what it will mean to bring up two non-Jewish children in Israel. Perhaps as they get older they will be bullied by classmates, perhaps they will be accepted unquestioningly, perhaps they will feel they do not belong. Much depends on where we live and where they go to school. Much also depends on how Israel develops once the war with the Palestinians is finally concluded.

In the last few years, I have noticed a change in Israel's character, a growing maturity and tolerance within the secular population. Israelis today are more willing to accept people who are different. Certainly things for me have changed. I now have a warm relationship with my parents-in-law, whom I love dearly, and people rarely ask if I'm Jewish.

Despite that, however, I still feel like an outsider. At Christmas I bring out my tree and decorate the house, but inside I feel it's almost an act of defiance. A few years ago, a co-worker arrived in the office fuming because hotels in Jerusalem had put up Christmas trees. I told her that I put up a tree every year. "Well I hope you shut your curtains," she said bitterly. "It's not right that people in your neighborhood should have to see it. When you live here you should respect our beliefs." I was deeply distressed by her prejudice, but the awful truth is that I really have begun to feel that my religion should be hidden away behind curtains.

Just a few weeks ago I had another reminder. I was writing an article on Tekes, a new alternative Israeli organization set up to provide secular ceremonies for Jews who cannot, or do not want to, undergo an Orthodox ceremony. I suggested to the founder that I might also write up the article for a newspaper here. He hesitated for a few moments, and then said: "No offense, but I think it would be better if a Jew wrote the story."

It's been common in recent months to talk about how defeating Saddam is the easy part, building a healthy civil society in Iraq the hard part. This, as we've mentioned, seems idiotic to us: the years of Saddam's repression and the killing we've wreaked and sustained in twelve years of war in Iraq have been more difficult for all than even the messiest peace will be.

So our headline above is not meant seriously, obviously the bloody years of war and terror that precede Israel achieving some kind of modus vivendi with its Arab neighbors and most particularly the Palestinians have been harder than what will follow. Yet, we'd do well not to underestimate just how hard Israel's immediate future, after the peace, will be. To some significant extent it has not mattered up until now exactly what the relation of Judaism was to the state of Israel. Israelis were being blown up because they were Jews and citizens of the "Jewish state". Like all societies under attack, Israel experienced an artificial cohesion as people banded together to resist the violence being directed at them. The phenomenon of unity governments, combining Right and Left in one cabinet, is just one example of how contradictory forces ended up tethered to one another.

Mostly deferred, or at least minimized, have been questions like: what is the purpose of Israel? who is an Israeli? who is a Jew? etc. Now though, as external threats become less frightening, the internal threats will come to the fore. And they are far greater threats to Israel's existence in the long term than terrorism and war ever were, though thankfully less violent. They include: a declining birth rate that raises the specter of Judaism disappearing because Jews themselves will have all but ceased to exist; along with this decline in the real numbers of Jews comes the problem of whether a state where Jews are outnumbered can be said to be a Jewish state and whether the non-Jewish majority will be willing to preserve a special role for Judaism in the life of the nation; the rise of the secularist Shinui Party, ethnically Jews, if not necessarily faithful, and opposed to any official role for Judaism in the state; and a whole series of similar intractable issues. If demographics is destiny and secularization an inevitable function of modern democracy, the state of Israel as we've come to know and love it may well be doomed, regardless of any peace deal.

---

KNOWING WHICH SIDE YOUR BREAD IS BUTTERED ON

Nervous Arab allies 'secretly backed American war effort' (David Rennie, 28/04/2003, Daily Telegraph)

Some of America's prickliest Arab allies, notably Saudi Arabia, gave much more support for the war in Iraq than was admitted in public, it was disclosed yesterday.

Officially Saudi rulers merely permitted the US air force to use a command and control centre at Prince Sultan air base and allowed American aircraft
to enforce the "no-fly" zone over southern Iraq. In reality, official sources told the Washington Post, at least 10,000 US troops passed through Saudi Arabia.

US special forces, ostensibly on standby for search-and-rescue operations, were allowed to cross from northern Saudi Arabia into western Iraq, where they seized airfields and prevented any Iraqi missile attacks on Israel.

Planes officially enforcing the no-fly zones carried out extensive attacks on air defence systems and Riyadh allowed overflights by fighter planes and cruise missiles from warships in the Gulf and Red Sea.

Which is why the Bushes tend not to get to worked up when everyone is screaming about the Sa'uds. Whatever else may be true about them--and Wahabbism is obviously a major problem--they've been a better ally than France or Germany. Recall that France denied us overflight rights when we bombed Libya in the '80s.

MORE:
French helped Iraq to stifle dissent (Alex Spillius and Andrew Sparrow, 28/04/2003, Daily Telegraph)

France colluded with the Iraqi secret service to undermine a Paris conference held by the prominent human rights group Indict, according to documents found in the foreign ministry in Baghdad.

Various documents state that the Iraqis believed the French were doing their utmost to prevent the meeting from going ahead.

Ann Clwyd, the Labour MP who chairs Indict, said last night that she would be demanding an apology from the French government for its behaviour, which she described as "atrocious".

The files, retrieved from the looted and burned foreign ministry by The Telegraph last week, detail the warmth and strength of Iraqi-French ties.

---

TURN OUT THE LIGHTS, THE PARTY'S OVER

Bush's Leadership Pinnacle (David S. Broder, April 27, 2003, Washington Post)

At a midweek news briefing, Sen. Ted Kennedy was doing what he does so well -- laying out the Democratic case on domestic policy, preparing the ground for the debates that will resume now that Congress is back from its Easter recess.

His staff had positioned a chart highlighting the economic problems that Kennedy says have piled up during President Bush's tenure: "2.5 million fewer private-sector jobs; long-term unemployment up by 184 percent; over 2 million more Americans without health insurance . . . retirement savings eroded . . . consumer confidence down . . . a projected $5.6 trillion federal surplus turned into a $4 trillion deficit."

It looked like a script for a TV ad in the 2004 campaign -- good, red-meat stuff, hitting Bush on the economy -- the same kind of attack that sank the president's father in 1992.

In the subsequent question-and-answer session, Kennedy -- who strenuously opposed the United States' taking military action against Iraq -- was asked what he thought now that Saddam Hussein's regime had been routed. "I commend the president on his leadership," he said, "and the men and women of the armed forces."

In that moment, I thought I saw the problem the Democrats face in trying to defeat this President Bush. No one, not even the most partisan of politicians, thinks it prudent to challenge Bush on his strong suit -- leadership.

The reason is obvious. A mid-April poll by Public Opinion Strategies, a respected Republican firm, gave Bush a 68 percent approval score -- 9 points higher than he enjoyed last October, on the eve of the Republicans' midterm election victory. Particularly notable, pollster Bill McInturff told me, were the reasons people gave for their support.

Only 4 percent of those approving said it was because of Bush's economic policies. Only 13 percent said it was because he had prevented additional attacks. Even though the poll was taken days after the fall of Baghdad, only 23 percent said it was because of his direction of the war. Fully 52 percent said they approved because of "his general personal strength and sense of leadership."

McInturff told me that he was not surprised. For 18 months, "when you ask people why they support him, they go right past specific policies and focus on those leadership qualities."

It is not just partisan Republicans who make this point. In an early April Gallup-CNN-USA Today poll, 80 percent of those surveyed said they agreed with the statement that Bush "is a strong and decisive leader" -- an all-time high in that survey's measure of this trait.

The normally dispassionate and relatively non-partisan Mr. Broder has been fairly critical of President Bush in his column, so it's all the more surprising to see him in this essay not only compare Mr. Bush to Ronald Reagan but essentially declare the 2004 campaign to be unwinnable for the Democrats.

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CUBA, THEN CHINA, NOW THIS...

Leading Iraqi Scientist Says He Lied to U.N. Inspectors (JUDITH MILLER, 4/27/03, NY Times)

Nissar Hindawi, a leading figure in Iraq's biological warfare program in the 1980's, says the stories and explanations he and other scientists told the United Nations about the extent of Iraq's efforts to produce poisons and germ weapons "were all lies."

Dr. Hindawi, imprisoned during the final weeks of Saddam Hussein's rule, is now free to talk about his experiences in the program, in which he says he was forced to work from 1986 to 1989 and again sporadically until the mid-1990's. [...]

Dr. Hindawi, 61, is now in the protective custody of the Iraqi opposition leader Ahmad Chalabi. [...]

Some inspectors remain skeptical about whether Dr. Hindawi was really an unwilling participant in the program.

He returned to the program in a different capacity in 1992, when international inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission, or Unscom, were arriving to ensure that Iraqi officials were complying with their country's pledge to give up chemical, germ and nuclear weapons. He said military officials had asked him to tell inspectors that he was the head of a single-cell protein facility. The plant, in fact, had made botulinum toxin and anthrax.

He said he had had no choice but to lie, just as he had no choice but to work in the program. "It was that or else," he said.

What a couple weeks for the Left: first, Iraqis turn out not to want Saddam Hussein running their lives; then, Castro turns out to be a brutal dictator; then China covers up a global health crisis; now it turns out Saddam lied to the blessed UN.... What next: Gorbachev acknowledges he was trying to save, not shed, communism?; Arthur Schlessinger acknowledges the New Deal was a failure?; a posthumous book by Stephen Jay Gould admitting his profession was all part of an elaborate hoax?; Bill Clinton reveals he may have inhaled after all? How much, dear Lord, can one group of people be expected to take without breaking?

---

ISN'T THAT STRANGE? (via <~text text="H. D. Miller">

-QUESTIONS: Tom Wolfe: Following his participation in the TimesTalks series on March 8, the author answered NYTimes.com readers' questions. (NY Times, April 24, 2003)

Q. Sir, what do you think about the war in Iraq? Is it a justified war?

A. I have trusted all American presidents in my lifetime (starting with Roosevelt) not to send men into battle for cynical or meretricious reasons. Whether this war is justified or not will be, in my mind, a matter of its practical results.

Perhaps it's just a function of the excessive patriotism of conservatives, but, even though some of the most loathsome men ever to be president (JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Clinton) have served in the past forty years, I'd have to agree with Mr. Wolfe.

---

THE NEVER-ENDING CAMPAIGN

Bush May Be a Write-In On More Than One State Ballot (Brian Faler, April 27, 2003, Washington Post)

First came the news that officials in Alabama may have to put President Bush on the ballot as a write-in candidate. It turns out Alabama isn't the only state scrambling to figure out what it needs to do to ensure that the president's name will appear on the state ballot next year.

The GOP's unusually late nominating convention -- it does not begin until Aug. 30 -- is the problem. Bush is not scheduled to accept his party's nomination until Sept. 2, 2004. That falls after the deadline for certifying presidential candidates not only in Alabama, but also in California, the District of Columbia and West Virginia. There are bills in the Alabama legislature to move its deadline from Aug. 31 to Sept. 5. But if, for some reason, they don't pass, the president would be forced to run there as a write-in candidate.

In other states, along with the District, the situation is a bit more murky. The D.C. City Council will need to change its Sept. 1 deadline to accommodate the convention, said Alice Miller, executive director of the Board of Elections and Ethics. She declined to speculate on what might happen if that deadline isn't changed. Cindy Smith, an elections official in West Virginia, can probably sympathize. Her state requires candidates to file by Aug. 31. Smith said she does not know of any effort to move that deadline -- and is unsure of what might happen if the president misses it.

But the biggest question may be in California, where election officials plan to begin printing about 15 million ballots almost immediately after its Aug. 26 deadline -- and begin mailing its absentee ballots Sept. 3. A spokeswoman for the secretary of state said she did not know of any effort to move the deadline or how the state might accommodate the Republicans. "It's not clear at this point," Terri Carbaugh said. "It certainly poses a dilemma."

Given the sorry state of the Democratic Party, you have to figure they'll fight to keep the President off the ballot, especially in places like WV and CA, where that might make the difference.

---

BOOKNOTES

Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman (C-SPAN, April 27, 2003, 8 & 11 pm)

MORE:
-REVIEW: of Khrushchev, The Man and the Era. William Taubman (Strobe Talbott, LA Times)
-REVIEW: of Khrushchev (CHRIS PATSILELIS, Houston Chronicle)
-REVIEW: of Khrushchev (Robin Buss, Financial Times)
-REVIEW: of Khrushchev (Richard Overy, Daily Telegraph)

---

LEAVE THE POOR KIDS ALONE

Kids who play by themselves learn to think for themselves: 'Privacy may play key role' (Anne Marie Owens, April 26, 2003, National Post)

Parents anxiously arranging play dates for their children and schools intent on building social skills might be better off leaving kids more time to play alone, according to new research.

Children develop critical thinking skills when they play on their own, says a study by a Nova Scotia researcher who specializes in what she calls "the forgotten play."

"Play in general is not valued enough, and there is a real stigma to solitary play," says Bronwen Lloyd, whose findings on the cognitive merits of solitary play have just been published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly.

"Parents are bombarded with so much information about what it takes to stimulate their children: They have a play date here, a ballet lesson there, and so on ... In today's fast-paced world, young children also need a time and a place for independent play and solitary endeavours."

Ms. Lloyd observed the play habits of 4- and 5-year-olds in organized child care programs in Halifax and found that functional play, such as climbing and running, and constructive play, such as painting and puzzle-making, were both strongly associated with cognitive thinking skills.

The findings run counter to the traditional notion that active solitary play in particular detracts from cognitive processing and contributes to anti-social behaviour.

We're all familiar with those miserable kids who get rushed from one structured activity to the next, just so their parents can imagine that they've filled the day with stimulating activity. Meanwhile, their children have all the spontaneity of house plants and can never be more than six feet from an adult. You wonder what they think kids did before there were soccer leagues.

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IF IT WAS A PRIZE FIGHT, THEY'D STOP IT

He's Out With the In Crowd (MAUREEN DOWD, April 27, 2003, NY Times)

Washington has a history of nasty rivalries, with competing camps. There were Aaron Burr people and Alexander Hamilton people; Lincoln people and McClellan people; Bobby people and Lyndon people.

Now, since Newt Gingrich aimed the MOAB of screeds at an already circumscribed Mr. Powell, the capital has been convulsed by the face-off between Defense and State.

There are Rummy people: Mr. Cheney, Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Feith, Bill Kristol, William Safire, Ariel Sharon, Fox News, National Review, The Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the fedayeen of the Defense Policy Board - Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Mr. Gingrich, Ken Adelman - and the fifth column at State, John Bolton and Liz Cheney.

And there are Powell people: Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, Bush 41, Ken Duberstein, Richard Armitage, Richard Haass, the Foreign Service, Joe Biden, Bob Woodward, the wet media elite, the planet.

Setting aside for the moment the hawkishness of Mr. Powell and Mr. Armitage themselves, one needn't be a hawk to recognize that these sides are awfully unevenly matched in intellectual terms. It is, in effect, a battle of the bright (with the exception of Mr. Gingrich) vs. the bureaucrats. That's not necessarily a good thing for the Right or for the nation--intellectuals are a dangerous bunch, regardless of their political orientation--but it is conspicuous.

---

WALLY WORLD

To Worship Freely, Americans Need a Little Elbow Room: Most religious organizations recognize that religious freedom depends entirely on maintaining the constitutional separation between church and state. (Brent Staples, 4/27/03, NY Times)

The Bush administration encountered a backlash earlier this month when Secretary of Education Rod Paige was quoted in The Baptist Press news service as saying that he would prefer to have a child in a Christian school, partly because the value system was set. Mr. Paige said that there were too many different values in the public schools to easily arrive at a value consensus.

Mr. Paige was criticized for seeming to diminish the public schools that he is charged with improving. But the problem is that his remarks seemed to attribute moral superiority to Christian schools in a religiously diverse society that includes millions of non-Christians.

Religious chauvinism is clearly driving policies at the Department of Education, which has seemed fixated on religion under Mr. Paige's tenure and seems to believe that the schools would be fine if only students were exposed to more religion and more prayer.

Even more troubling is the Bush administration's battle to create "faith-based" initiatives, which could potentially open a direct line of funding to church-related social programs--while allowing those organizations to proselytize with federal dollars. Congress, particularly the Senate, seems worried about how all this could violate the First Amendment. But the president's indifference to the church-state barrier is especially perplexing at a time when this country faces grave peril from religious fundamentalists abroad who aspire to theocracy.

We're agnostic on the question of whether folks like Mr. Staples do this intentionally, but certain that his statements here advocate a dangerous and a destructive version of tolerance. Genuine tolerance does not require that we engage in the absurd practice of pretending that public schools, which are for good reason barred from teaching any religion, provide an education that is morally equivalent to private schools that offer instruction in Judeo-Christian morality. Nor need we kid ourselves that entirely secular government programs are as effective in dealing with social problems--particularly those like addiction--as are faith-based programs. This kind of "tolerance", which supposes that religion must be entirely banned from the state, lest someone take offense, and which cloaks itself in due regard for all religions, does not in fact reflect any respect for religion at all. Instead it displaces the centrality of religion and morality in the life of the nation and then fills the gaps with more and more of the State. It is nothing more, in practice, than a bid for power, and, as we've seen over the last seventy years, quite a successful one at that.

Authentic tolerance is much different. It allows us to state the obvious: that, as moral education (in our society) requires a grounding in Judeo-Christianity and as religious faith has proved an important component of dealing with various social pathologies, we will endeavor to provide these things to those who are open to them, but, to those who are not we will not deny social services or an education and we will listen and learn from their differing views. This form of toleration allows us to vindicate and preserve our culture without disrespecting the culture of others. In so doing, it treats religious ideas with the seriousness they deserve and recognizes that religion is not a threat to freedom, but one of its foundations, a check and balance to the State.

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REVERSE IMPERIALISM

The Empire Slinks Back (NIALL FERGUSON, April 27, 2003, NY Times Magazine)

The imperial impulse arose from a complex of emotions: racial superiority, yes, but also evangelical zeal; profit, perhaps, but also a sincere belief that spreading ''commerce, Christianity and civilization'' was not just in Britain's interest but in the interests of her colonial subjects too.

The contrast with today's ''wannabe'' imperialists in the United States -- call them ''nation-builders'' if you prefer euphemism -- could scarcely be more stark. Five points stand out.

First, not only do the overwhelming majority of Americans have no desire to leave the United States; millions of non-Americans are also eager to join them here. Unlike the United Kingdom a century ago, the United States is an importer of people, with a net immigration rate of 3.5 per 1,000 and a total foreign-born population of 32.5 million (more than 1 in 10 residents of the United States).

Second, when Americans do opt to reside abroad, they tend to stick to the developed world. As of 1999, there were an estimated 3.8 million Americans living abroad. That sounds like a lot. But it is a little more than a tenth the number of the foreign-born population in the United States. And of these expat Americans, almost three-quarters were living in the two other Nafta countries (more than one million in Mexico, 687,700 in Canada) or in Europe (just over a million). Of the 294,000 living in the Middle East, nearly two-thirds were in Israel. A mere 37,500 were in Africa.

Third, whereas British imperial forces were mostly based abroad, most of the American military is normally stationed at home. Even the B-2 Stealth bombers that pounded Serbia into quitting Kosovo in 1999 were flying out of Knob Noster, Mo. And it's worth remembering that 40 percent of American overseas military personnel are located in Western Europe, no fewer than 71,000 of them in Germany. Thus, whereas the British delighted in building barracks in hostile territories precisely in order to subjugate them, Americans today locate a quarter of their overseas troops in what is arguably the world's most pacifist country.

Fourth, when Americans do live abroad they generally don't stay long and don't integrate much, preferring to inhabit Mini Me versions of America, ranging from military bases to five-star ''international'' (read: American) hotels. When I visited Lakenheath air base last year, one minute I was in the middle of rural Cambridgeshire, flat and ineffably English, the next minute, as I passed through the main gate, everything -- right down to the absurdly large soft-drink dispensers -- was unmistakably American.

The fifth and final contrast with the British experience is perhaps the most telling. It is the fact that the products of America's elite educational institutions are the people least likely to head overseas, other than on flying visits and holidays. The Americans who serve the longest tours of duty are the volunteer soldiers, a substantial proportion of whom are African-Americans (12.9 per cent of the population, 25.4 per cent of the Army Reserve). It's just possible that African-Americans will turn out to be the Celts of the American empire, driven overseas by the comparatively poor opportunities at home.

Indeed, if the occupation of Iraq is to be run by the military, then it can hardly fail to create career opportunities for the growing number of African-American officers in the Army. The military's most effective press spokesman during the war, Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, exemplifies the type.

The British, however, were always wary about giving the military too much power in their imperial administration. Their parliamentarians had read enough Roman history to want to keep generals subordinate to civilian governors. The ''brass hats'' were there to inflict the Victorian equivalent of ''shock and awe'' whenever the ''natives'' grew restive. Otherwise, colonial government was a matter for Oxbridge-educated, frock-coated mandarins.

Now, ask yourself in light of this: how many members of Harvard's or Yale's class of 2003 are seriously considering a career in the postwar administration of Iraq? The number is unlikely to be very high. In 1998/99 there were 47,689 undergraduate course registrations at Yale, of which just 335 (less than 1 percent) were for courses in Near Eastern languages and civilizations. There was just one, lone undergraduate senior majoring in the subject (compared with 17 doing film studies). If Samuel Huntington is right and we are witnessing a ''clash of civilizations,'' America's brightest students show remarkably little interest in the civilization of the other side.

We're as much Anglo-philes and fans of the British Empire as anyone, but Mr. Ferguson embarrasses himself here by ignoring the most obvious point: the best and brightest left Britain to colonize elsewhere because there were few opportunities for them in their tiny, class-bound homeland, while America is effectively a reverse Empire, not only keeping its own but attracting the best and brightest of the very nations that Britain once governed and, in large part, of Britain itself (like Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens). Four hundred years ago, if you were a younger son or a Dissenter or what have you, living in Britain, and you wished to make your way in the world, you came to America. But, if you are an American, regardless of your birth status or your ideas, where would you go today to find greater opportunity and freedom than America?

No, America will not don the mantle of Empire, because there is nothing out there for us.

---

PITY WE LOST EUROPE

How the West Can Be One (TIMOTHY GARTON ASH, April 27, 2003, NY Times Magazine)

Americans and Europeans have an overwhelming common interest in seeing democracy, peace and prosperity spread through the Middle East -- not least, so that Israel is one day physically connected to the West by a patchwork of Islamic or post-Islamic democracies. This means handing back Iraq as soon as possible to the Iraqis and supporting their federal or confederal democracy. Then, and urgently, it means trying to make progress toward secure, viable states of both Israel and Palestine. One unintended consequence of the war on Iraq is that this can no longer wait. The Palestinian question is now, for the Arab and Muslim world -- and for many Europeans -- the litmus test of whether the Bush administration means what it says about liberating and democratizing the Middle East rather than occupying and colonizing it. [...]

At the moment, Europeans and Americans don't even see the threat the same way. During the cold war, Berlin always felt itself to be more directly threatened than New York; now it's the other way round. I have no doubt that the collapse of the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, was the true beginning of the 21st century. The combination of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, whether by rogue states or rogue groups, is one of the greatest new dangers to all free countries. Americans have woken up -- been woken up -- to this in a way that most Europeans have not. Europe has not yet had its 9/11. There is both hypocrisy and an ostrichlike head-in-the-sand quality about much European discussion, or nondiscussion, of these issues. Tony Blair is the exception who proves the rule. Criticizing America, Europeans sometimes are, as Kipling famously put it, ''makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep.''

However, it is not simply that Europeans feel less threatened by Islamic extremism; in other ways, we feel more so. There are now at least 10 million Muslim immigrants living in the European Union, not to mention the more than 5 million who have lived elsewhere in Europe for centuries in places like Bosnia, Albania and Kosovo. European fears that this Muslim population could be radicalized by events in the Middle East are neither unfounded nor ignoble. Over the next decade, Europe will probably take in another 10 million Muslims, plus at least another 60 million if the E.U. delivers on its promise to include Turkey, which the United States has been urging us to do. As the native European population ages, we could soon find that 1 in every 10 Europeans is a Muslim. It is our elemental concern that peaceful, law-abiding Muslims should feel at home in Europe, and in the West more broadly.

Please remember that the democratic politics of Europe have been rocked over the last few years by populist parties that won a large share of the vote essentially on one issue: hostility to immigration. In Europe today that means, especially, Muslim immigration: Moroccans in Spain, Algerians in France, Turks in Germany, Pakistanis in Britain. (I have just bought my newspaper from a Muslim news agent, picked up my cleaning from a Muslim cleaner and collected my prescription from a Muslim pharmacist, all in leafy North Oxford.)

America is much better than Europe at making immigrants of all creeds and colors feel at home. Obviously, it helps that almost everyone in the U.S. is an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants. America also has a capacious, civic national identity, whereas Europe has a patchwork of exclusive, ethnic national identities. Have you ever met anyone who identified himself or herself as a ''Muslim European''? It actually seems easier for religious Muslims to integrate into a religious but pluralist society like the United States than it is for them to integrate into the very secular societies of Europe. So here we can learn from you. [...]

Europeans also tend to have a different analysis of the threat, one that pays more attention to the political causes of Islamist terror and, in particular, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Palestine is the great symbolic cause of the Arab-Muslim world, repeatedly embraced by Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the whole Arab League and the ''Arab street'' -- hypocritically, perhaps, but nonetheless effectively. Many Europeans feel that giving the Palestinians a viable state could be a bigger contribution to winning the war against terrorism than deposing Saddam Hussein. In this respect, Tony Blair is very much a European. He has extracted from Washington a commitment to revive the ''road map'' for the peace process between Israel and Palestine. I was deeply depressed the other day to hear from a well-placed American political insider, a Democrat, that no real progress on the issue can be expected until after the November 2004 presidential elections. The Bush administration now has to prove him wrong. Perhaps if Bush had not started the war against Iraq, Palestine might just have waited that long; but he did, and so it can't.

At this point, I should mention a charge made by some conservative commentators in the United States. This is that European support for a viable Palestinian state reflects hostility to a viable Israeli state, which in turn reflects Europe's ancestral, almost genetic anti-Semitism. Vicious attacks on synagogues and individual Jews in European cities are rolled into one poisonous European ball with reasoned criticism of both the Sharon government and the Bush administration's outspoken support for it. For a European to criticize Sharon is for him or her to be an anti-Semite. ''What we are seeing,'' wrote Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post last April, ''is pent-up anti-Semitism, the release -- with Israel as the trigger -- of a millennium-old urge that powerfully infected and shaped European history.'' He continued, ''What so offends Europeans is the armed Jew, the Jew who refuses to sustain seven suicide bombings in the seven days of Passover and strikes back.'' It's ''those people'' again, the Europeans.

I have no doubt that there is still anti-Semitism in Europe today. Broadly speaking, it's of three kinds. There's the virulent anti-Semitism of some Arabs living in Europe, a minority within that minority; there's the very nasty anti-Semitism of the old and new far right in some European countries; and there's the residual, mainly verbal anti-Semitism of parts of the wider population. Yet there are also many, many Europeans who are pro-Palestinian without being anti-Israeli, let alone anti-Semitic. Some of them take a grimly realistic view of Yasir Arafat and his weak, corrupt Palestinian Authority.

To tar such reasoned European critics of the policies of Ariel Sharon with blanket charges of anti-Semitism is offensive -- especially to those of us, Jewish or not, for whom the Holocaust remains central to our whole understanding of liberal politics. In particular, many of us understand the whole European project embodied in the European Union as being, at its deepest core, about the post-Holocaust ''never again.'' [...]

A more united Europe and a less arrogant United States should work together with all the peoples of the Middle East to do for them what we did with and for the peoples of Middle Europe during the cold war. This can be our trans-Atlantic project for the next generation. Here's how we put the West together again.

Shall we talk about it?

As a threshold matter, it seems odd that the only group devoid of anti-Semitism in Mr. Garton Ash's formulation, is the Left, which, as any even casual reading will tell you, is the most virulently anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian segment of European-American intellectual opinion. Anti-Zionism may not make you anti-Semitic, but the difference is not unlike saying that being pro-Jim Crow, for cultural reasons, doesn't make you a racist personally. If the effects of your politics are to fan flames of hatred, you have to take some responsibility for that fires that break out, don't you?

But, on the broader issues raised, isn't the question really whether Europe itself will remain democratic and (relatively) prosperous? As he himself notes, either explicitly or implicitly, Europe faces the following problems: declining population; the post-Christian cultural morass; increasing Islamification; hatred of Muslims (and Jews) by "Europeans"; inadequate military spending; etc. Never mind the Middle East, for now, unless we've all given up on the future of Europe (which I have but others seem not have, as yet) isn't this generation's most important Trans-Atlantic project to save Europe itself?

This "project", by the way, is as daunting as the one that faces us in the Middle East and is just as uncertain as to outcome. Consider what will have to done if Europe is to be restored to health: religious/moral revival; boosting of fertility rates, including severe limitations on abortion; privatization of the massive Social Welfare States; abandonment of the EU as a governing structure and its reduction to a trade coalition, similar to and integrated with NAFTA; integration and Westernization of internal Muslim communities; and so forth. Until this process is well underway, it seems a little precipitous for Europeans to be worrying about their relations with the U.S. or the problems of Palestine.

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NOW REPLACING MARTHA BURK--THE LOOTING MEME

And Now: 'Operation Iraqi Looting': It's hard to know the extent of the looting of Iraq's art and antiquities, but it's easy to see how little America's leaders cared. (Frank Rich, 4/27/03, NY Times)

There is much we don't know about what happened this month at the Baghdad museum, at its National Library and archives, at the Mosul museum and the rest of that country's gutted cultural institutions. Is it merely the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years, as Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, put it? Or should we listen to Eleanor Robson, of All Souls College, Oxford, who said, "You'd have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale"? Nor do we know who did it. Was this a final act of national rape by Saddam loyalists? Was it what Philippe de Montebello, of the Metropolitan Museum, calls the "pure Hollywood" scenario--a clever scheme commissioned in advance by shadowy international art thieves? Was it simple opportunism by an unhinged mob? Or some combination thereof?

Whatever the answers to those questions, none of them can mitigate the pieces of the damning jigsaw puzzle that have emerged with absolute certainty. The Pentagon was repeatedly warned of the possibility of this catastrophe in advance of the war, and some of its officials were on the case. But at the highest levels at the White House, the Pentagon and central command--where the real clout is--no one cared. Just how little they cared was given away by our leaders' own self-incriminating statements after disaster struck. Rather than immediately admit to error or concede the gravity of what had happened on their watch, they all tried to trivialize the significance of the looting. Once that gambit failed, they tried to shirk any responsibility for it.

"What you are seeing is a reaction to oppression," said Ari Fleischer on April 11, arguing that looting, however deplorable, is a way station to "liberty and freedom." If only the Johnson administration had thought of this moral syllogism, it could have rationalized the urban riots that swept America after the assassination of Martin Luther King. "Stuff happens!" said Donald Rumsfeld, who likened the looting to the aftermath of soccer games and joked to the press that the scale of the crime was a trompe l'oeil effect foisted by a TV loop showing "over and over and over . . . the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase." As Jane Waldbaum, president of the Archaeological Institute of America, summed up the defense secretary's response to the tragedy, he "basically shrugged and said, `Boys will be boys.' "

Yes, Mr. Rich, the disappearance of a few museum pieces while liberating a nation is a far greater cultural disaster than was the systematic extermination of shtetl Jewry...

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A WAR THAT ENDED BEFORE IT STARTED

Aziz admits Saddam may be dead (TOM CURTIS, 4/27/03, Scotland on Sunday)

FORMER Iraqi prime minister Tariq Aziz has told American intelligence officials that he has not seen Saddam Hussein since the first night of the war, it was claimed last night.

Aziz, who surrendered to US forces last week, has fuelled speculation that the Iraqi dictator was killed or seriously injured when the bunker in which he was hiding with his sons has hit by cruise missiles.

According to US intelligence sources, the 67-year-old has said he does not know whether Saddam is alive or dead.

However, he has told his captors he presumes the former Iraqi leader was incapacitated as he played no role in coordinating the defence of Baghdad.

The director of the CIA, George Tenet, has reportedly been saying he believes Saddam is dead after being briefed on Aziz?s testimony.

This has always seemed the most likely scenario.

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VERBICIDAL TENDENCIES

Writing in Schools Is Found Both Dismal and Neglected (TAMAR LEWIN, April 26, 2003, NY Times)

Most fourth graders spend less than three hours a week writing, which is about 15 percent of the time they spend watching television. Seventy-five percent of high school seniors never get a writing assignment from their history or social studies teachers.

And in most high schools, the extended research paper, once a senior-year rite of passage, has been abandoned because teachers do not have time to grade it anymore.

Those are among the findings of a report issued yesterday by the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, an 18-member panel of educators organized by the College Board.

The commission's report asserts that writing is among the most important skills students can learn, that it is the mechanism through which they learn to connect the dots in their knowledge--and that it is now woefully ignored in most American schools.

"Writing, always time-consuming for student and teacher, is today hard-pressed in the American classroom," the report said. "Of the three R's, writing is clearly the most neglected." [...]

The panel found that only about half of the nation's 12th graders report being regularly assigned papers of three or more pages in English class; about 4 in 10 say they never, or hardly ever, get such assignments. Part of the problem is that many high school teachers have 120 to 200 students, and so reading and grading even a weekly one-page paper per student would be a substantial task.

On the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam, only about one in four students in Grades 4, 8 or 12 scored at the proficient level in writing in 1998, the most recent such results available. And only one in a hundred was graded "advanced."

Further, a 2002 study of California college students found that most freshmen could not analyze arguments, synthesize information or write papers that were reasonably free of language errors.

Sure, public education is mass producing ignorant students, but, on the bright side: the schools are religion-free and we're protecting sweetheart jobs for the NEA and ATF. And, at the end of the day, what matters more the future of the kids or the ideology of the Left?

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COMING SOON ON E-BAY

Animal Rights Leader Wants to Be Barbecued (Francois Murphy, Apr 25, 2003, Reuters)

The leader of a prominent U.S.-based animal rights group said she had drawn up a will directing that her flesh be barbecued and her skin used to make leather products in protest at man's ill-treatment of animals.

Ingrid Newkirk, 53, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), said on Thursday she had chosen to donate her body to her organization for use in a variety of startling protests.

Newkirk also suggested her feet be removed and made into umbrella stands similar to those made from elephant feet that she had seen as a child.

"I want to find ways to have my work live on when I'm gone and this has been my first idea. I will make a stir when I am long in the ground," Newkirk told Reuters.

One problem with being a fanatic is that, believing your insane views to be common sensical, sooner or later you slip up and say what you mean. Here we see, accidentally displayed, the truth that PETA has nothing to do with love of animals, but is instead premised on a hatred of humanity generally, and most especially of oneself. Sadly for Ms Newkirk (a new church indeed), her desire to debase herself down to animal status will not actually make her an animal. On the other hand, she could hardly be more anti-human, so perhaps she's accomplished something in her own twisted mind.

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LONGING FOR TOJO

Freedom, American-Style (The inherent clash between a democratic Iraq and U.S. policy begins to take shape (Roger Morris, April 23, 2003, LA Times)

Washington has rarely been adept, or candid, in fostering authentic democracy. Almost nowhere in half a century--from 1950s' CIA coups in Iran, Guatemala and Congo, among other places, to expeditions into the Caribbean, Africa and elsewhere in the 1980s and 1990s--has regime change left a nation freer. Not even Germany and Japan.

Ah yes, the Third Reich was far freer than West Germany.

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EURODISNEY

Thanks, Mr President: Bush's actions are helping Europe to fashion a new sense of identity (Jeremy Rifkin, April 26, 2003, The Guardian)

Love him or hate him, but at least acknowledge the fact that President Bush has a knack for bringing the most unlikely people together. Could anyone have imagined that Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims - historic foes for centuries - would unite in a Baghdad mosque to oppose US occupation of their land and vow to work hand in hand to remove the infidels from their ancestral ground? Equally impressive, President Bush's Iraq policy has helped millions of Europeans, who often find themselves at odds with each other on the most banal considerations of life, to find their common identity in opposition to the war. [...]

What we are witnessing is historic. Europeans are finding their identity. That is not to say that the millions of people who are beginning to speak as one suddenly identify with the European Union. I doubt whether a single protester sees himself or herself, first and foremost, as a citizen of the EU. While Brussels is far from most people's minds, what unites Europeans is their repudiation of the geopolitics of the 20th century and their eagerness to embrace a new "biosphere politics" in the 21st century.

The telltale signs of the nascent identity are everywhere. Europeans are concerned over global warming and other environmental issues. They support the international criminal court to ensure universal human rights. They favour generous development assistance to the poor in the third world and they back the United Nations as the appropriate forum to settle disputes among nations.

A growing of number of Europeans see the US government openly opposing these things they so ardently care about. And even on what they regard as the most basic questions of morality, such as opposition to capital punishment, they feel that a chasm is growing between their views and the views across the Atlantic. The US refusal to sign the Kyoto accords, the biodiversity treaty and the amended biological weapons convention, its withdrawal from the anti-ballistic-missile treaty and now the US decision to bypass the UN security council and act virtually unilaterally in Iraq have convinced many Europeans that the US is hopelessly locked into a Hobbesian view of the world. Europeans, on the other hand, have had their fill of wars and centuries of conflict. They are in search of Immanuel Kant's vision of universal and perpetual peace, and increasingly they see US policies and objectives as an anathema to the forging of a truly global consciousness.

It is this kind of fundamental difference in perception that has led so many Europeans to conclude that their interests, hopes and vision for the future are diverging from their old friends in America in ways that may be irreparable by diplomacy alone.

Of course, while Europeans, especially the young, are pacifists and champion dialogue over confrontation, the fact is that were it not for the US willingness to maintain and employ military power around the world to keep the peace, warfare between feuding ethnic and political groups and sovereign states might long ago have turned the whole world into the perpetual Hobbesian nightmare so many Europeans loathe.

Mr. Rifkin manages not just to undercut but to totally eviscerate his entire column with the last paragraph quoted above. Just as any vacation comes to an end, so too the European vacation from reality seems unlikely to endure. Given that America's natural stance is isolationism and that we're fast approaching the day when our Welfare State will render us unable (unwilling) to defend ourselves, never mind Europe, they're in for a rude awakening in the not too distant future.

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CLOSE, BUT NO CIGAR

When Blair stood on the brink (Patrick Wintour, April 26, 2003,The Guardian)

Senior cabinet ministers at the centre of Tony Blair's war strategy were braced to quit along with the prime minister in the run-up to the Commons vote on Iraq, the Guardian can reveal.

Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, told the Guardian that he intended to resign if the vote went against the government. The home secretary, David Blunkett, also said that cabinet ministers close to Mr Blair would "go down with him". The prime minister revealed last week that he had told his family he might be forced to quit over Iraq.

In an interview with the Guardian as part of a special investigation into the build-up to war, Mr Blunkett recalled: "Everyone believed, in the run-up to that vote, that Tony had put his premiership on the line and those who are very close to him would go down with him. I thought it would be a hit on the government as a whole."

Mr Straw said: "The projected voting figures were very serious ... I knew there would be a point at which Tony would resign and I would resign as well. I told my wife I might well have to go over this. I think Tony assumed that I would go."

The revelations show how perilous the government's position became during the build-up to war. At one point, Labour whips told Mr Blair that up to 200 Labour MPs would vote against the government, and frantic last-minute efforts were made to persuade rebels back on side.

According to one cabinet source, the entire cabinet could technically have been forced to tender their resignation. "If the prime minister resigns, the whole government resigns. Everybody's portfolios and talents would be put into the hands of the new leader."

In the last desperate 24 hours before the vote, the government essentially ground to a halt as the energies of Mr Blair and other leading cabinet figures were devoted to winning over potential rebels.

Mr Straw recalled: "We used every argument, including telling them that this is no longer about what you say to your local paper, this is about whether you want to keep this government in business."

The defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, warned his US counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld, about the possible consequences of the vote. He told the Guardian: "I had a long conversation with him, warning him that if the vote went wrong we might not be able to be there. I did not want him or anyone on the US side not to understand the significance of where we were on the importance of the parliamentary vote. The US came to understand it was about us gambling just about everything in getting this right."

He added: "If we had lost that vote, that would have been it."

Since for five years now we've been predicting that Tony Blair would intentionally break the Labour Party to establish a genuine third way in Britain, we find it damned annoying that the rest of the Party realized they're nothing without him. Oh well, maybe next war.

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PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKE

With His Tax Cuts, Bush Pre-empts The Future (Jonathan Rauch, April 25, 2003, National Journal)

Pre-emption is the name of the Bush administration's game, not just abroad but at home. President Bush understands better than any president since Ronald Reagan that the chief executive's chief power is to set the agenda. Bush also understands that this power cannot be banked. Use it or lose it. So he uses it -- and how. Abroad, he launches a pre-emptive invasion. At home, he launches a pre-emptive tax cut.

With the invasion, Bush seeks to pre-empt Saddam Hussein's development of weapons of mass destruction. With the tax cut, he seeks to pre-empt -- well, there is a question. What, exactly, does the tax cut pre-empt? [...]

Congress is scaling back Bush's tax cut to perhaps half of his request. But Bush will almost certainly get a tax cut; the question is only how large. So completely has he dominated the agenda that he wins even if he loses. Maybe the agenda is what he really set out to pre-empt. If so, he has done as well in Washington as in Baghdad.

Bush's bold initiative in Iraq looks irresponsible to his critics because it takes great risks for uncertain benefits. His tax-cutting fits the same mold. There is, however, an important difference. The most destabilizing problem in the geopolitical world right now is the lack of democracy in the Arab world; liberating Iraq will almost by definition be a step in the right direction. The most destabilizing problem in the fiscal world is the high cost of paying pension and health care costs for Baby Boom retirees; cutting taxes, however, is almost by definition a step in the wrong direction. [...]

The first President Bush agreed to a tax increase that did more than any other single action to break the back of the federal deficit. But look what happened to him. His son, having learned that lesson, is a Time Bandit, encouraging rather than taming politicians' natural tendency to embezzle from the future.

This year's tax cut, assuming one passes, will be moderate in size, and considerably smaller than its 2001 predecessor. Its significance lies less in its scale than in its confirmation of Bush's determination to chart a new course for fiscal policy, one that would reduce federal taxes to pre-Clinton levels. Bush the gambler is betting that he will come out looking like President Reagan, whose deficits bought economic reforms and a stronger national defense.

Mr. Rauch's understanding of recent economic history is minimal--the entire cut in the deficit and the projected surplus was almost exclusively a function of the peace dividend, which saw Defense spending fall from 6% to 3% of GDP, a savings so huge that it made up for the deletirious effects of both the Bush I and Clinton tax bills--but his political sense is relatively astute. What George W. Bush actually did was to prevent what would otherwise have been a call for tax increases this year. He thereby avoided the fate of the last three presidents--yes, including Ronald Reagan, who made the horrible mistake of signing on to several tax hikes, as a result of his zeal for balanced budgets--all of whom suffered electoral defeats after hiking taxes. As Mr. Rauch correctly (almost) points out, the significance of this year's tax cut, regardless of its size, is that it is going to happen at all. This is a historic reversal in a time of growing deficits and an astonishing achievement for Mr. Bush.

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COUNT US AMONG THE SNIVELERS

Abortion: still a dirty word (Julie Burchill, May 25, 2002, The Guardian)

"I love babies," I said, surprised at the simplicity of my statement. And then immediately, perfectly naturally, "I'm so glad I had all those abortions."

Now, I know this is an unusual statement to make. Even EastEnders, which is ceaselessly condemned by the Daily Mail as being irretrievably "PC", has an amazingly censorious attitude to abortion. Think of key scenes featuring Carol, Bianca, Natalie, not to mention Dot's life sentence of sorrow. Yet I remember, as a child in the early 1970s, hearing Diane, the waitress heroine of the decidedly reactionary soap Crossroads, saying matter-of-factly to a miserably pregnant woman, "Abortion's not a dirty word, you know!"

Where did the recent creeping foetus fetishism come from? And how do we - excuse the phrase - get rid of it? Some of it must be blamed on Tony Blair's bowing of the knee to Rome. Cherie Blair can call herself a feminist all she likes, but any feminist worth her salt would have made a point of having a termination - on the NHS, naturally - when she got knocked up the last time. Wantonly giving birth to a fourth child on a planet buckling under the strain of overpopulation certainly isn't any sort of example to set for gymslip mums, who can at least plead ignorance and rampant fertility.

Me-Ism - psychiatry, psychoanalysis, any sort of navel-gazing - has to take part of the blame for the demonisation of abortion. The idea that everything we do or have done to us stays with us for ever is a reactionary and self-defeating reading of modern life. No doubt if you're the sort of lumbering, self-obsessed poltroon who believes that seeing Mommy kissing Santa Claus 30 years ago irrevocably marked your life, you wouldn't get over an abortion, as you wouldn't get over stubbing your toe without professional help. But you choose to be that way, because you are weak and vain, and you think your pain is important. Whereas the rest of us know not only that our pain is not important, but that it probably isn't even pain - just too much time on our hands. [...]

In a recent Mori poll for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, only 7% of those asked about abortion declared themselves totally opposed to it, yet it remains the last taboo. Famous women would rather admit to having been sexually abused as children than to having had a termination - Cybill Shepherd and Barbara Windsor are the only ones I can think of who refer to theirs with good-humoured straightforwardness. "No woman takes abortion lightly," even the valiant pro-choice spokeswomen have taken to saying, not realising that they are adding to the illusion that abortion is a serious, murderous, life-changing act. It isn't - unless your life is so sadly lacking in incident and interest that you make it so.

Myself, I'd as soon weep over my taken tonsils or my absent appendix as snivel over those abortions. I had a choice, and I chose life--mine.

Only Orwell will answer:

I'd stopped listening to the actual lecture. But there are more ways than one of listening. I shut my eyes for a moment.? The effect was curious. I seemed to see the fellow much better when I could only hear his voice.

It was a voice that sounded as if it could go on for a fortnight without stopping. It's a ghastly thing, really, to have a sort of human barrel-organ shooting propaganda at you by the hour. The same thing over and over again.? Hate, hate, hate.? Let's all get together and have a good hate. Over and over.? It gives you the feeling that something has got inside your skull and is hammering down on your brain. But for a moment, with my eyes shut, I managed to turn the tables on him. I got inside his skull. It was a peculiar sensation. For about a second I was inside him, you might almost say I was him. At any rate, I felt what he was feeling.

I saw the vision that he was seeing. And it wasn't at all the kind of vision that can be talked about. What he's saying is merely that Hitler's after us and we must all get together and have a good hate. Doesn't go into details. Leaves it all respectable. But what he's seeing is something quite different.? It's a picture of himself smashing people's faces in with a spanner. Fascist faces, of course. I know that's what he was seeing. It was what I saw myself for the second or two that I was inside him.? Smash! Right in the middle!? The bones cave in like an eggshell and what was a face a minute ago is just a great big blob of strawberry jam. Smash! There goes another! That's what's in his mind, waking and sleeping, and the more he thinks of it the more he likes it. And it's all O.K. because the smashed faces belong to Fascists. You could hear all that in the tone of his voice.

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PROGRESS, BAH

Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings (Ralph Adams Cram, 1932)

Why do we not behave like human beings? for by and large we certainly do not. Regard dispassionately the history of what we call "civilization." So far as we know, which is not far, it was not so bad in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Crete, but as history becomes clearer so does the evidence of a pretty invincible beastliness. It is a farrago of cruelty, slaughter and injustice. I have no intention of rehearsing old records. Nero and Ghengis Khan and the gangs they led may rest in their unquiet graves for all me, but come down to what are, comparatively, our own times and call to mind the barbarian invasions of Italy, of northern France and of England; the wars of religion with the slaughters of Catholics and Protestants; the Inquisition with its auto da fe; the Thirty Years' War and the Hundred Years' War; the witchcraft insanity; the beastliness of the "Peasants' War" in Germany and of the French Revolution; the horrors of the so-called "Reformation" in England and on the Continent; the African slave trade; the debauching of the Negro tribes; the Spanish record in Mexico, Central and South America, with the blasting of Maya and Inca and Aztec civilization; the piracy and brigandage of the seventeenth century; our own treatment of the Indians; the gross evils accomplished in the South Seas by traders, adventurers and evangelical missionaries; the ruthless barbarity of the new industrialism in England from 1780 on for fifty years; the record of the Turks in Macedonia and Armenia; the Russian Revolution; gas warfare; and the blind selfishness of advancing technological and capitalist civilization.

These are only a few salient headings in one category of human activity, a few amongst the many that continue without pause or break for some three thousand years. I might match and rival this record were I to dilate on the follies and miscarriages of justice and the evidences of invincible ignorance and superstition that follow man in what was once termed his "evolutionary" progress. But this is unnecessary. We have but to regard our present estate when, at the summit of our Darwinian advance, natural selection and the survival of the fittest and the development of species have resulted in a condition where, with all the resources of a century and a half of unparalleled scientific and mechanical development, we confront a situation so irrational and apparently hopeless of solution, that there is not a scientist, a politician, an industrialist, a financier, a philosopher or a parson who has the faintest idea how we got that way or how we are to get out of it.

Yes, but there is another side to the question. However repulsive and degrading the general condition of any period in the past, there never has been a time when out of the darkness did not flame into light bright figures of men and women who in character and capacity were a glory to the human race. Nor were they only those whose names we know and whose fame is immortal. We know from the evidences that there were more whose identity is not determined, men and women lost in the great mass of the underlying mob, who in purity and honour and charity were co-equal with the great figures of history. Between them and the basic mass there was a difference greater than that which separates, shall we say, the obscene mob of the November Revolution in Russia, and the anthropoid apes. They fall into two absolutely different categories, the which is precisely the point I wish to make.

We do not behave like human beings because most of us do not fall within that classification as we have determined it for ourselves, since we do not measure up to standard. And thus:

With our invincible?and most honourable but perilous?optimism we gauge humanity by the best it has to show. From the bloody riot of cruelty, greed and lust we cull the bright figures of real men and women. Pharaoh Akhenaten, King David, Pericles and Plato, Buddha and Confucius and Lao Tse, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and Virgil, Abder-Rahman of Cordoba, Charlemagne and Roland; St. Benedict, St. Francis, St. Louis; Godfrey de Bouillon, Saladin, Richard Coeur de Lion; Dante, Leonardo, St. Thomas Aquinas, Ste. Jeanne d'Arc, Sta. Teresa, Frederick II, Otto the Great, St. Ferdinand of Spain, Chaucer and Shakespeare, Strafford and Montrose and Mary of Scotland, Washington, Adams and Lee. These are but a few key names; fill out the splendid list for yourselves. By them we unconsciously establish our standard of human beings.

Now to class with them and the unrecorded multitude of their compeers, the savage and ignorant mob beneath, or its leaders and mouthpieces, is both unjust and unscientific. What kinship is there between St. Francis and John Calvin; the Earl of Strafford and Thomas Crumwell; Robert E. Lee and Trotsky; Edison and Capone? None except their human form. They of the great list behave like our ideal of the human being; they of the ignominious sub-stratum do not?because they are not. In other words, the just line of demarcation should be drawn, not between Neolithic Man and the anthropoid ape, but between the glorified and triumphant human being and the Neolithic mass which was, is now and ever shall be.

What I mean is this, and I will give you this as a simile. Some years ago I was on the Island of Hawaii and in the great crater of Kilauea on the edge of the flaming pit of Halemaumau. For once the pit was level full of molten lava that at one end of this pit, at the iron edge of old lava, rose swiftly from the lowest depths, then slid silently, a viscous field of lambent cherry colour, along the length of the great pit, to plunge and disappear as silently, only to return and rise again, when all was to happen once more. Indeterminate, homogeneous, it was an undifferentiated flood, except for one thing. As it slid silkily onward it "fountained" incessantly. That is to say, from all over its surface leaped high in the air slim jets of golden lava that caught the sun and opened into delicate fireworks of falling jewels, beautiful beyond imagination.

Such I conceive to be the pattern of human life. Millennium after millennium this endless flood of basic raw material sweeps on. It is the everlasting Neolithic Man, the same that it was five or ten thousand years B.C. It is the matrix of the human being, the stuff of which he is made. It arises from the unknown and it disappears in the unknown, to return again and again on itself. And always it "fountains" in fine personalities, eminent and of historic record, or obscure yet of equal nobility, and these are the "human beings" on whose personality, character and achievements we establish our standard.

The basic mass, the raw material out of which great and fine personalities are made, is the same today as it was before King Zoser of Egypt and the first architect, Imhotep, set the first pyramid stones that marked the beginning of our era of human culture. Neolithic it was and is, and there has been no essential change in ten thousand years, for it is no finished product, but raw material and because of its potential, of absolute value. We do not realize this, for it is not obvious to the eye since all that greatness has achieved in that period is as free for the use of contemporary Neolithic Man as it is for those who have emerged into the full stature of humanity. Free and compulsory education, democratic government and universal suffrage, and the unlimited opportunities of industrial civilization have clothed him with the deceptive garments of equality, but underneath he is forever the same. It is not until we are confronted in our own time with a thing like the original Bolshevik reign of terror, the futility of popular government, not only national but as we see it close at home in the sort of men that we choose to govern us in our cities, our state legislatures, the national Congress; in the bluntness of intellect and lack of vision in big business and finance, or when we read Mr. Mencken's "Americana" or consider the monkey-shines of popular evangelists, "comic strips", dance- and bicycle- and Bible-reading marathons, that we are awakened to a realization of the fact that there is something wrong with our categories.

Those that live in these things that they have made are not behaving like the human beings we have chosen for ourselves out of history as determinants of that entity, and this for the reason that they still are the veritable men of the Neolithic age that no camouflage of civilization can change.

Perhaps we have set our standard too high. Perhaps we should, in accordance with the alleged principles of Mr. Jefferson, count the mob-man as the standard human being; but since the gulf that separates him from the ideal we have made for ourselves is too vast to be bridged by any social, political or biological formula, this would force us back on the Nietzschean doctrine of the Superman which, personally, I reject. It seems to me much more fitting to accept our proved ideal as the true type of human being, counting all else as the potent material of creation.

I cannot blind myself to the fact that if what I have said is taken seriously it will probably seem revolting, if not grotesque and even impious. I do not mean it to be any of these things, nor does it seem so to me. Put into few words, and as inoffensively as possible, all I mean is that the process of creation is continuous. That as the "first man" was said to have been created out of the dust of the earth, so this creation goes on today as it ever has. As this same "dust of the earth" may have been Neolithic or more probably Paleolithic sub-man, so today the formative material is of identical nature and potency?but it is still, as then, the unformed, unquickened, primitive or Neolithic matter. Within its own particular sphere it is invaluable, indispensable, but we treat it unfairly when, through our vaporous theorizing we are led to pitchfork it into an alien sphere where it cannot function properly, and where it is untrue to itself, and by its sheer weight of numbers and deficiency of certain salutary inhibitions, is bound to negative the constructive power of the men of light and leading, while reducing the normal average to the point of ultimate disaster.

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THAR'S GOLD IN THEM THAR HILLS

Bush's Popularity, Davis' Woes Loosen Party's Tight Grip on State (Beth Fouhy, Apr 26, 2003, Associated Press)

Call it the land of latte liberals or the "left coast." No matter what the nickname, the fact is that for more than a decade Democratic strategists have relied on a formula for winning the White House that begins and ends with California.

The Golden State has been a rich source of campaign cash for presidential hopefuls, and since 1992, as Republicans have surged in the South and the West, California's mother lode of 54 electoral votes has been essential for the Democratic nominee pursuing the magic 270 needed to capture the nation's top job.

In any strategy to unseat President Bush in 2004, winning California is imperative. But more than a year out, the political landscape is proving a bit rocky for Democrats. The state faces a staggering $35 billion budget deficit, and the blame is falling largely on Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, who captured a second term last year in a race that reflected widespread ambivalence.

Since then, Davis has faced a grass-roots recall effort and his approval ratings have plummeted to an all-time low of 27 percent, according to a recent Field Poll. The same survey showed President Bush, who lost California to Al Gore by 12 percentage points in 2000, beating a generic Democratic nominee 45 percent to 40 percent.

And none of the nine Democratic candidates fighting for the party's nod have managed to make much of an impression in the state.

So long as the Democrats can win CA without even trying, they always have a chance to win the presidency and the House in any given election (though the Senate is gone for the forseeable future). Break their hold on CA and make them pump major resources into the state and you open up at least the possibility, though not the likelihood, of reducing Democrats to their pre-Depression status as a permanent minority party. At that point, reform of Social Security and other entitlements and genuine reductions in government become possible. That's too inviting a prospect not to at least give it a shot.

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DON'T LOOK AT US, WE'RE STILL RACIST, SEXIST, AND HOMOPHOBIC

-REVIEW ESSAY: Animal Liberation at 30 (Peter Singer, May 15, 2003, The New York Review of Books)

The phrase "Animal Liberation" appeared in the press for the first time on the April 5, 1973, cover of The New York Review of Books. Under that heading, I discussed Animals, Men and Morals, a collection of essays on our treatment of animals, which was edited by Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch and John Harris. The article began with these words:

"We are familiar with Black Liberation, Gay Liberation, and a variety of other movements. With Women's Liberation some thought we had come to the end of the road. Discrimination on the basis of sex, it has been said, is the last form of discrimination that is universally accepted and practiced without pretense, even in those liberal circles which have long prided themselves on their freedom from racial discrimination. But one should always be wary of talking of 'the last remaining form of discrimination.' "

In the text that followed, I urged that despite obvious differences between humans and nonhuman animals, we share with them a capacity to suffer, and this means that they, like us, have interests. If we ignore or discount their interests, simply on the grounds that they are not members of our species, the logic of our position is similar to that of the most blatant racists or sexists who think that those who belong to their race or sex have superior moral status, simply in virtue of their race or sex, and irrespective of other characteristics or qualities. Although most humans may be superior in reasoning or in other intellectual capacities to nonhuman animals, that is not enough to justify the line we draw between humans and animals. Some humans--infants and those with severe intellectual disabilities--have intellectual capacities inferior to some animals, but we would, rightly, be shocked by anyone who proposed that we inflict slow, painful deaths on these intellectually inferior humans in order to test the safety of household products. Nor, of course, would we tolerate confining them in small cages and then slaughtering them in order to eat them. The fact that we are prepared to do these things to nonhuman animals is therefore a sign of "speciesism"--a prejudice that survives because it is convenient for the dominant group--in this case not whites or males, but all humans.

Speaking of slippery slopes, it can hardly be surprising that Mr. Singer got the best of both worlds: not only are we increasingly solicitous of the "suffering" of mere animals, we also disregard the dignity of fellow human beings. Lab animals now have more rights than human fetuses. Such is progress.

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INSTAURATION NOW!

IRANIAN REGIME WORRIED BY PEOPLE’S PRO-AMERICANISM (Afsane Bassir Pour, 25 Apr, 2003, IPS)

As President George W. Bush has also warned the Islamic republic to stop meddling in Iraqi affairs, an influential French daily says Iranian officials are worried by the "obvious pro-Americanism sentiments" of " the Iranian people".

Iranian officials are worried. Worried of the American presence next to their doors, on the East as well as to the West, worried of the invasion of Iraq "with so little popular resistance", worried of the fast fall of the Baghdad regime, worried of the sidelining of the UN, worried of the total disillusion of the Iranian people that, since the beginning of the Iraqi crisis, has resulted in a fierce pro-Americanism of the population... but, especially, worried of the vox populi, that asks for "a change of the regime with the help of the American marines", the daily "Le Monde" wrote. [...]

For Behzad Nabavi, one of the "credible voices" of the reformers, the relations with Washington has become a "national security issue".

In a rare interview, Mr. Nabavi, a close adviser to President Khatami, told "Le Monde" that the American strategy for the region "doesn't stop to the doors of Baghdad". According to Mr. Nabavi, it exists in Washington, "an Iran project" that is in the process of being implemented", a project that is "not necessarily a military one." In his office situated at the old Marble Palace, in the south of Tehran, that also includes the Majles, of which he assures the vice-presidency, Mr. Nabavi speaks of his concern facing the Americans.

"Evidently, I am afraid!" he exclaims. "How would I not be afraid of an America armed to the teeth and who demonstrated in Iraq its total disdain of respect for the sovereignty of the States? Yes, I am afraid. The Americans are apparently able do whatever they like; no matter the United Nations or even the Western public opinion". "The only and somewhat acceptable argument to the eyes of the western intellectuals justifying a hostile action against a country is the instauration of democracy", Mr. Nabavi said. It is for it, according to him, "that the best defense of Iran against the Americans would be to reinforce its democracy in order to deprive them of their arguments".

Interrogated on the voices calling for "the American interference", Mr. Nabavi declares: "It is obvious that it is the result of our mistake. The fact that people prefer a foreign invasion to living in the Islamic Republic is only the sign of our failure. We have not been able to fulfill the people's democratic aspirations and it is normal that they are disappointed". If one admits that the Iraqis are delighted with Saddam Hoseyn's end, one must also think about the possibility that maybe, the Iranians would celebrate at the end of the Islamic Republic as well".

If the wanton exercise of America power were ever to lead to general acceptance of this idea, "the best defense...against the Americans would be to reinforce...democracy in order to deprive them of their arguments", we'd have won.

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UNSPURRED

The Latest Theory Is That Theory Doesn't Matter (EMILY EAKIN, April 19, 2003, NY Times)

These are uncertain times for literary scholars. The era of big theory is over. The grand paradigms that swept through humanities departments in the 20th century — psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction, post-colonialism — have lost favor or been abandoned. Money is tight. And the leftist politics with which literary theorists have traditionally been associated have taken a beating.

In the latest sign of mounting crisis, on April 11 the editors of Critical Inquiry, academe's most prestigious theory journal, convened the scholarly equivalent of an Afghan-style loya jirga. They invited more than two dozen of America's professorial elite, including Henry Louis Gates Jr., Homi Bhabha, Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson, to the University of Chicago for what they called "an unprecedented meeting of the minds," an unusual two-hour public symposium on the future of theory. [...]

A student in the audience spoke up. What good is criticism and theory, he asked, if "we concede in fact how much more important the actions of Noam Chomsky are in the world than all the writings of critical theorists combined?"

After all, he said, Mr. Fish had recently published an essay in Critical Inquiry arguing that philosophy didn't matter at all.

Behind a table at the front of the room, Mr. Fish shook his head. "I think I'll let someone else answer the question," he said.

So Sander L. Gilman, a professor of liberal arts and sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, replied instead. "I would make the argument that most criticism — and I would include Noam Chomsky in this — is a poison pill," he said. "I think one must be careful in assuming that intellectuals have some kind of insight. In fact, if the track record of intellectuals is any indication, not only have intellectuals been wrong almost all of the time, but they have been wrong in corrosive and destructive ways."

If only Richard Hofstadter had lived to see this moment, we'd do the Icky Shuffle right in front of him.

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NO THANKS NECESSARY

A Good Deed (David Ignatius, April 25, 2003, The Washington Post)

Personally, I don't much care if the U.S. reports about weapons of mass destruction prove to be imaginary. Toppling Hussein's regime was still right.

But no good deed goes unpunished, as the old saying goes. And it seems possible that the United States will gain little in terms of its own security from its decision to liberate Iraq. We may have created a new Iran here -- an Iraqi democracy that will be dominated by a Shiite majority among which pro-Iranian clerics seem, at this point, to be the best-organized political force.

Or Iraq may become another Lebanon -- a lawless nation ruled by car bombs and warlords. Avoiding these disasters depends on whether the United States can quickly fill the existing power vacuum with a stable Iraqi government, help it get started and then leave, pronto.

American actions over the next few weeks will determine whether Iraq loves its liberators or becomes a seething pit of anti-American anger.

Mr. Ignatius makes this last assertion in the midst of an otherwise sensible essay, and it's a common enough sentiment, but a dangerous delusion. It grows from the comforting but erroneous, almost colonialist, belief that we ourselves determine other peoples lives for them, that Arabs, for instance, are some kind of tabla erasa upon which we can etch a personality of our choosing. In fact, we could do everything "right" in Iraq--minimize casualties, respect the liberated, feed the hungry, cede power quickly, etc., etc., etc., and the Iraqis may still hate us. So what?

The quality of our actions is not determined by their reactions. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein and the Ba'athists was a good thing. We should keep trying to do good things for the Iraqis over the next couple months, until we give them back their country entirely. If they appreciate that, great. If not, that's really their problem, not ours, and they'll hardly be alone in being ungrateful--just ask the French.

MORE:
The future is now (David Warren, April 12, 2003, Ottawa Citizen )

The reaction to the American and British victory in Iraq, in Iraq itself, was as predictable as the victory, to anyone with genuine knowledge of the situation there. The gratitude to President Bush and the allies is, momentarily, intense and euphoric. It is a comet-like condition that lasts about two days, but has a tail six months long -- the time in which the hard stuff has to be attempted, of creating a constitutional order for Iraq, out of almost nothing.

After that, Iraq is likely to settle back into a mood fairly unlike gratitude, as Kuwait did by the end of 1991, and, in different ways, as the countries liberated from Communism in central and eastern Europe did: the blame for problems will be increasingly assigned to the people who are trying to fix them, and removed from the people who caused them, who are no longer there. This is human nature, which is essentially incurable; but it will take
various peculiarly Arabic and Islamic cultural forms -- sometimes better, sometimes worse than their Western equivalents. (So much of human nature is a freak show.)

The U.S. soldiers will gradually be re-categorized from "liberators" to "foreigners". As we know from France and Germany, as well as the Gulf States, there is no such thing as lasting gratitude, except among the saints. There will nevertheless remain an institutional memory, should new Iraqi institutions survive, that the Americans and British are allies. And this, with any luck, will last for at least a generation to come.

This much is perfectly predictable, and I think it has been taken into account in Pentagon (if not State Department) plans for the Iraqi apres-guerre. My impression is that thanks to the personal shock and awe of Donald Rumsfeld, the attitudes and work habits of the Pentagon have been transformed. But thanks to the protective instincts of Colin Powell, the State Department bureaucracy continues to work within intellectual categories that should have been declared defunct on Sept. 12th, 2001.

There will be clashes between them in the weeks and months ahead, as the Pentagon tries to do things that are new, and difficult, while State tries to sabotage with the help of the old "Arabist" hands in the CIA, the academy, and the media -- the people who still have their jobs after being proved wrong about everything. It would be politically impossible for any President of the United States to simply sack the lot of them; and from that fact a lot of diplomatic "friendly fire" can be anticipated on the road ahead.

Advantage, however, to the people who've won the war, and been proved right about everything that was at issue -- for at least the immediate future. This is no time to be glum.

What is more interesting than the predictable mood on the ground in Iraq, is the mood of the onlooking world. Something very dramatic happened this week, on live television before a vast audience. For the Arab world especially, it was an event like 9/11, but upside down and inside out.

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WHY NOT HAITI?

States mulled for 'Free State' (NICHOLAS K. GERANIOS, 4/24/03, Associated Press)

Limited-government advocates have their eyes on Idaho. Or Montana. Or New Hampshire.

All are among 10 lightly populated states known for small-government politics that could end up being a Libertarian utopia.

A movement called the Free State Project has registered some 3,100 people who would help choose a "candidate" state and move there in hopes of canceling laws against drugs, prostitution, guns and other individual liberties, while privatizing current state functions such as schools.

"Rather than change the whole nation it makes sense for all of us to gather in one place," said Elizabeth McKinstry, 33, of Hillsdale, Mich., the project's vice president. [...]

Which state is a favorite? Project officials say a major downside for Idaho is its Mormon population, which isn't likely to support legalizing prostitution and drugs or drop taxes on booze and tobacco. [...]

Mark Snider, spokesman for Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, said he was sorry to learn that Idaho was on the list. He warned the Free Staters not to confuse Idahoans' love for small government with a desire for nearly no government.

"The majority of Idahoans want safe streets, and not to be under the threat of drunk drivers, drug addicts or criminals," Snider said.

You'd think it might dawn on them that those states which are most free are also the most conservative morally, not the most permissive.

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BECOMING?

A Path to Arab Democracy (MARWAN MUASHER, April 26, 2003, NY Times)

It is becoming clear that the Arab world needs to take the initiative in making its political and economic systems more democratic. The frustrations Arabs feel today--prompted by the slow pace of democratic reform, stagnant economies and political instability: all threaten the region's future. The moment has come for the Arab world to engage in a homegrown, evolutionary and orderly process of democratization--one that will respect Arab culture while at the same time giving citizens the power to be part of the political process.

It's important to remember, though, that expecting the seeds of democracy to blossom overnight is a simplistic assumption at best, and a dangerous one at worst. Force-feeding democracy will lead not to reform but to radicalization. A wiser approach would be to respect the ability of Arab countries to take matters into their own hands.

The Arab world is ready to do this. The United Nations Arab Human Development Report, written by Arabs and released last year, is a frank assessment of some of the main challenges confronting us. It discusses the expansion of political freedoms, the role of women and the knowledge gap as key issues Arab nations need to face. This report must be taken seriously, not defensively, by the region. This is what we have done in Jordan, where both King Abdullah II and Queen Rania have endorsed it as a blueprint for development.

The Arab world also needs to assume a more active role in mediating the Arab-Israeli conflict. Arab leaders must finally take a public stand against suicide bombings. The truth needs to be clearly stated: suicide bombings have only hurt the Palestinian cause.

Such statements are welcome, however late in the process they come, but one wonders if this running in the Jordanian press (Mr. Muasher is the Jordanian Foreign Minister) today also, or if it's just for Western consumption. Jordan could make itself a model by devolving greater power to some kind of representative institutions and a an independent judiciary, with the King retaining certain prerogatives--including the right to dismiss a government and call election, to veto legislation, and to overturn Court decisions--thereby offering a system that would allow Arabs to govern themselves but with a final brake on the most radical and destructive possibilities of "democracy". Such reforms, coupled with a retention of Islamic moral teachings at the heart of society, might, in rather short order, see nations of the Middle East with healthier polities than those in Old Europe.

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THOSE WON'T SAVE YOU

Disconnect in Beijing (Marc Erikson, Asia Times)

"See, they're back to the old blackmail game," US President George W Bush told NBC-TV anchor Tom Brokaw late Thursday. That's pretty close to, "I told you so," and reveals - if revelation were necessary - that major factions in the Bush administration never thought much of talking to North Korea about its nuclear programs in the first place. Even allegedly dovish Secretary of State Colin Powell weighed in with some quite heavy artillery, saying: "The North Koreans should not leave the meetings in Beijing, now that they have come to a conclusion ... with the slightest impression that the United States and its partners will be intimidated by bellicose statements or by threats." He added that the US was looking for ways to "eliminate" the threat posed by any North Korean nuclear weapons program and had "not taken any options off the table" - diplomatese for not ruling out military action.

Of course, the North Koreans, on their part, will not exactly have pleased their Chinese hosts, who had worked long and hard to bring about US-North Korea-China talks, by telling US chief negotiator James Kelly that they were in fact in possession of atomic bombs, were ready to test and even sell them, and had already reprocessed 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods to extract weapons-grade plutonium (enough for six to eight nukes).

Where the Korean nuclear standoff goes from here is anyone's guess. Understandably, "honest broker" China wants to put the best possible face on the outcome of the discussions at Beijing's Diaoyutai State Guest House, their early conclusion (to avoid the term "breakdown") notwithstanding. Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing said the meeting "signifies a good beginning", and his ministry said in a later statement that all sides "agreed to maintain contacts through diplomatic channels regarding continuing the process of talks".

But the course the talks took between Wednesday and Friday morning was hardly encouraging. In opening remarks, the United States reiterated that it wants to see immediate and verifiable dismantling of North Korea's nuclear programs before talking about anything else; Pyongyang chief negotiator Li Gun repeated the Iraq war had proved that nations need a strong deterrent to protect their sovereignty; China urged compromise. And that, pretty much, was already the end of three-way discussions.

If they have nukes, it's all the more important that we attack them, to demonstrate that such weapons--far from being a deterrent--are a guarantee of regime change.

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RANDOM REPRISALS

Reason for War?: White House Officials Say Privately the Sept. 11 Attacks Changed Everything (John Cochran, April 25, 2003, ABC News)

To build its case for war with Iraq, the Bush administration argued that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but some officials now privately acknowledge the White House had another reason for war ? a global show of American power and democracy.

Officials inside government and advisers outside told ABCNEWS the administration emphasized the danger of Saddam's weapons to gain the legal justification for war from the United Nations and to stress the danger at home to Americans.

"We were not lying," said one official. "But it was just a matter of emphasis." [...]

[T]he Bush administration decided it must flex muscle to show it would fight terrorism, not just here at home and not just in Afghanistan against the Taliban, but in the Middle East, where it was thriving.

Officials deny that Bush was captured by the aggressive views of neo-conservatives. But Bush did agree with some of their thinking.

"We made it very public that we thought that one consequence the president should draw from 9/11 is that it was unacceptable to sit back and let either terrorist groups or dictators developing weapons of mass destruction strike first at us," conservative commentator Bill Kristol said on ABCNEWS' Nightline in March.

The Bush administration wanted to make a statement about its determination to fight terrorism. And officials acknowledge that Saddam had all the requirements to make him, from their standpoint, the perfect target. [...]

The Bush administration could probably have lived with the threat of Saddam and might have gone after him eventually if, for example, the Iraqi leader had become more aggressive in pursuing a nuclear program or in sponsoring terrorism.

But again, Sept. 11 changed all that.

Listen closely, officials said, to what Bush was really saying to the American people before the war.

"I hope they understand the lesson of September the 11th," Bush said on March 6. "The lesson is, is that we're vulnerable to attack, wherever it may occur, and we must take threats which gather overseas very seriously. We don't have to deal with them all militarily, but we have to deal with them."

With this Administration, any time you suggest a good idea, they're already doing it. Forget whether there is an al Qaeda connection--we took out Saddam because of 9-11 and after the next 9-11 we'll take out Syria, Libya, etc., whether they're involved or not.

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THE <~text text="POST">

Lay Off Chalabi: Iraq could do much worse (Christopher Hitchens, Slate, April 24, 2003).

Maureen Dowd writes, displaying either an immense insider knowledge of day-to-day Baghdad or else no knowledge at all, that the American forces assigned to protect Chalabi would have been enough on their own to prevent the desecration of the National Museum. Since Chalabi was in Nasiriyah, far to the south, when the looting occurred, and since up until now he has provided his own security detail (I'd want my own bodyguards, too, if I'd been on Saddam's assassination list for a decade), and since we don't know by whom the actual plunder of the museum was actually planned or executed (or at least I don't), Dowd might wish either to reconsider or to offer her expertise to Gen. Garner.

Nobody does disdain like Hitchens.

But, really, what is the Times' position on truth on the op-ed page? Op-ed's are not news, by definition, but are (merely?) opinion. Maureen Dowd is the toast of Manhattan. Still, shouldn't the New York Times expend some effort in keeping her just this side of the divide between right and wrong, at least where the facts can be easily checked?

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PANIC, PANIC, PANIC.

Death Rate for Global Outbreak Rising (Shankar Vedantam and Rob Stein, Washington Post, April 25, 2003).

The death rate for the worldwide outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, which has fluctuated for months, has recently begun what looks like an ominous rise. . . .

[T]he rising numbers are cause for concern for three reasons. First, the current -- higher -- death rate is statistically more reliable than the previous -- lower -- estimates.

Second, as hospitals learn to cope with the outbreak and doctors find ways to treat or stabilize patients, the death rate ought to head down, not up.

Finally, large numbers of cases so far, especially in places such as Hong Kong and Singapore, have involved hospital workers, who tend to be younger and healthier. As the SARS virus has spread to the general population in some places, it may strike more vulnerable elderly people and increase in lethality.

You might think, though you would be wrong, that it would be worth a mention in this story from the Washington Post that, to date, no one in the United States has died of SARS, nor has it appeared particularly infectious. Canada, on the other hand, has a relatively high mortality rate and the WHO is advising against traveling to Toronto.

If I were a cynical man, I might think that the Post is reluctant to publicize any news that would undercut the idea that the actual delivery of medical care in the US (as opposed to the system for paying for it) is absolutely the worst in the world, and in particular not a shadow of that healthy utopia, Canada. But as I don't have a cynical bone in my body, I guess I'll just have to believe that the Post has some lousy reporters and editors.

MORE (PAJ): The system infected us (Mark Steyn, National Post, 4/24/2003)

February 28th: Kwan Sui-Chu, having recently returned from Hong Kong, goes to her doctor in Scarborough complaining of fever, coughing, muscle tenderness, all the symptoms of the by now several ProMed alerts. As is traditional in Canada, the patient is prescribed an antibiotic and sent home.

March 5th: Having apparently never returned for further medical treatment and slipped into a coma at home, Kwan Sui-Chu is found dead in her bed. The coroner, Dr. Mark Shaffer, lists cause of death as "heart attack." Later that day, Kwan's son, Tse Chi Kwai, visits the doctor, complaining of fever, coughing, etc. He too is prescribed an antibiotic and sent home. Later still, the son takes his wife to the doctor. Likewise.

March 7th: Tse Chi Kwai goes to Scarborough Grace, and is left on a gurney in Emergency for 12 hours exposed to hundreds of people.

March 9th: Scarborough Grace discovers Tse's mother has recently died after returning from Hong Kong. But Dr. Sandy Finkelstein concludes, if Tse is infectious, it's TB.

A good example of the personal care and attention patients can expect from socialized medicine.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, IRONSIDES

Oliver Cromwell was born on this day in 1599, in Hutingdonshire, England. Here Macauley on the great man:

And now a new and alarming class of symptoms began to appear in the distempered body politic. There had been, from the first, in the parliamentary party, some men whose minds were set on objects from which the majority of that party would have shrunk with horror. These men were, in religion, Independents. They conceived that every Christian congregation had, under Christ, supreme jurisdiction in things spiritual; that appeals to provincial and national synods were scarcely less unscriptural than appeals to the Court of Arches, or to the Vatican: and that Popery, Prelacy, and Presbyterianism were merely three forins of one great apostasy. In politics they were, to use the phrase of their time, root and branch men, or, to use the kindred phrase of our own time, radicals. Not content with limiting the power of the monarch, they were desirous to erect a commonwealth on the ruins of the old English polity. At first they had been inconsiderable, both in numbers and in weight; but, before the war had lasted two years, they became, not indeed the largest, but the most powerful faction in the country. Some of the old parliamentary leaders had been removed by death; and others had forfeited the public confidence. Pym had been borne, with princely honors, to a grave among the Plantagenets. Hampden had fallen, as became him, while vainly endeavoring, by his heroic example, to inspire his followers with courage to face the fiery cavalry of Rupert. Bedford had been untrue to the cause. Northumberland was known to be lukewarm. Essex and his lieutenants had shown little vigor and ability in the conduct of military operations. At such a conjuncture it was that the Independent party, ardent, resolute, and uncompromising, began to raise its head, both in the camp and in the parliament.

The soul of that party was Oliver Cromwell. Bred to peaceful occupations, he had, at more than forty years of age, accepted a commission in the parliamentary army. No sooner had he become a soldier, than he discerned, with the keen glance of genius, what Essex and men like Essex, with all their experience, were unable to perceive. He saw precisely where the strength of the royalists lay, and by what means alone that strength could be overpowered. He saw that it was necessary to reconstruct the army of the parliament. He saw, also, that there were abundant and excellent materials for the purpose; materials less showy, indeed, but more solid, than those of which the gallant squadrons of the king were composed. It was necessary to look for recruits who were not mere mercenaries, - for recruits of
decent station and grave character, fearing God and zealous for public liberty. With such men he filled his own regiment, and, while he subjected them to a discipline more rigid than had ever before been known in England, he administered to their intellectual and moral nature stimulants of fearful potency.

The events of the year 1644 fully proved the superiority of his abilities. In the south, where Essex held the command, the parliamentary forces underwent a succession of shameful disasters; but in the north the victory of Marston Moor fully compensated for all that had been lost elsewhere. That victory was not a more serious blow to the royalists than to the party which had hitherto been dominant at Westminster; for it was notorious that the day, disgracefully lost by the Presbyterians, had been retrieved by the energy of Cromwell, and by the steady valor of the warriors whom he had trained.

These events produced the self-denying ordinance and the new model of the army. Under decorous pretexts, and with every mark of respect, Essex and most of those who had held high posts under him were removed; and the conduct of the war was intrusted to very different hands. Fairfax, a brave soldier, but of mean understanding and irresolute temper, was the nominal lord-general of the forces; but Cromwell was their real head.

Cromwell made haste to organize the whole army on the same principles on which he had organized his own regiment. As soon as this process was complete, the event of the war was decided. The Cavaliers had now to encounter natural courage equal to their own, enthusiasm stronger than their own, and discipline such as was utterly wanting to them. It soon became a proverb that the soldiers of Fairfax and Cromwell were men of a different breed from the soldiers of Essex. At Naseby took place the first great encounter between the royalists and the remodelled army of the Houses. The victory of the Roundheads was complete and decisive. It was followed by other triumphs in rapid succession. In a few months, the authority of the parliament was fully established over the whole kingdom. Charles fled to the Scots, and was by them, in a manner which did not much exalt their national character, delivered up to his English subjects.

While the event of the war was still doubtful, the Houses had put the primate to death, had interdicted, within the sphere of their authority, the use of the liturgy, and had required all men to subscribe that renowned instrument, known by the name of the Solemn League and Covenant. When the struggle was over, the work of innovation and revenge was pushed on with still greater ardor. The ecclesiastical polity of the kingdom was remodelled. Most of the old clergy were ejected from their benefices. Fines, often of ruinous amount, were laid on the royalists, already impoverished by large aids furnished to the king. Many estates were confiscated. Many proscribed Cavaliers found it expedient to purchase, at an enormous cost, the protection of eminent members of the victorious party. Large domains belonging to the crown, to the bishops, and to the chapters, were seized, and either granted away or put up to auction. In consequence of these spoliations,a great part of the soil of England was at once offered for sale. As money was scarce, as the market was glutted, as the title was insecure, and as the awe inspired by powerful bidders prevented free competition, the prices were often merely nominal. Thus many old and honorable families disappeared and were heard of no more; and many new men rose rapidly to affluence.

But, while the Houses were employing their authority thus, it suddenly passed out of their hands. It had been obtained by calling into existence a power which could not be controlled. In the summer of 1647, about twelve months after the last fortress of the Cavaliers had submitted to the parliament, the parliament was compelled to submit to its own soldiers.

Thirteen years followed, during which England was, under various names and forms, really governed by the sword. Never, before that time, or since that time, was the civil power in our country subjected to military dictation.

The army which now became supreme in the state was an army very different from any that has since been seen among us. At present, the pay of the common soldier is not such as can seduce any but the humblest class of English laborers from their calling. A barrier almost impassable separates him from the commissioned officer. The great majority of those who rise high in the service rise by purchase. So numerous and extensive are the remote dependencies of England, that every man who enlists in the line must expect to pass many years in exile, and some years in climates unfavorable to the health and vigor of the European race. The army of the Long Parliament was raised for home service. The pay of the private soldier was much above the wages earned by the great body of the people; and, if he distinguished himself by intelligence and courage, he might hope to attain high commands. The ranks were accordingly composed of persons superior in station and education to the multitude. These persons, sober, moral, diligent, and accustomed to reflect, had been induced to take up arms, not by the pressure of want, not by the love of novelty and license, not by the arts of recruiting officers, but by religious and political zeal, mingled with the desire of distinction and promotion. The boast of the soldiers, as we find it recorded in their solemn resolutions, was, that they had not been forced into the service, nor had enlisted chiefly for the sake of lucre; that they were no janizaries, but free-born Englishmen, who had, of their own accord, put their lives in jeopardy for the liberties and religion of England, and whose right and duty it was to watch over the welfare of the nation which they had saved.

A force thus composed that, without injury to its efficiency, be indulged in some liberties which, if allowed to any other troops, would have proved subversive of alldiscipline. In general, soldiers who should form themselves into political clubs, elect delegates. and pass resolutions on high questions of state, would soon break loose from all control, would come to form an army, and would become the worst and most dangerous of mobs. Nor would it be safe, in our time, to tolerate in any regiment religious meetings, at which a corporal versed in Scripture should lead the devotions of his less gifted colonel, and admonish a backsliding major. But such was the intelligence, the gravity, and the self-command of the warriors whom Cromwell had trained, that in their camp a political organization and a religious organization could exist without destroying military organization. The same men, who, off-duty, were noted as demagogues and field-preachers, were distinguished by steadiness, by the spirit of order, and by prompt obedience on watch, on drill, and on the field of battle.

In war this strange force was irresistible. The stubborn courage characteristic of the English people was, by the system of Cromwell, at once regulated and stimulated. Other leaders have maintained order as strict. Other leaders have inspired their followers with a zeal as ardent. But in his camp alone the most rigid discipline was found in company with the fiercest enthusiasm. His troops moved to victory with the precision of machines, while burning with the wildest fanaticism of crusaders. From the time when the army was remodelled to the time when it was disbanded, it never found, either in the British Islands, or on the Continent, an enemy who could stand its onset. In England, Scotland, Ireland, Flanders, the Puritan warriors, often surrounded by difficulties, sometimes contending against threefold odds, not only never failed to conquer, but never failed to destroy and break in pieces whatever force was opposed to them. They at length came to regard the day of battle as a day of certain triumph and march against the most renowned battalions of Europe with disdainful confidence. Turenne was startled by the shout of stern exultation with which his English allies advanced to the combat, and expressed the delight of a true soldier when he learned that it was ever the fashion of Cromwell's pikemen to rejoice greatly when they beheld the enemy; and the banished Cavaliers felt an emotion of national pride, when they saw a brigade of their countrymen, outnumbered by foes and abandoned by allies, dive before it in headlong rout the finest infantry of Spain, and force a passage into a countersearp which had just been pronounced impregnable by the ablest of the marshals of France.

But that which chiefly distinguished the army of Cromwell from other armies was the austere morality and the fear of God which pervaded all ranks. It is acknowledged by the most zealous royalists that, in that singular camp, no oath was heard, no drunkenness or gambling was seen, and that, during the long dominion of the soldiery, the property of the peaceable citizen and the honor of woman were held sacred. If outrages were committed, they were outrages of a very different kind from those of which a victorious army is generally guilty. No servant girl complained of the rough gallantry of the redcoats. Not an ounce of plate was taken from the shops of the goldsmiths. But a Pelagian sermon, or a window on which the Virgin and Child were painted, produced in the Puritan ranks an excitement which it required the utmost exertions of the officers to quell. One of Cromwell's chief difficulties was to restrain he pikemen and dragoons from invading by main force the pulpits of ministers whose discourses, to use the language of that time, were not savory; and too many of our cathedrals still bear the marks of the hatred with which those stern spirits regarded every vestige of Popery.

It's pretty much been downhill ever since. Though this best of all possible revolutions, like the American Revolution that followed, pretty conclusively demonstrated that establishing the perfect Kingdom is beyond Man's capacity and that any revolution, no matter how well-intentioned, ultimately disposes of too much that is worth keeping.

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THE SADDAM/SANTORUM LINK

Saddam has two wives--much to son's dismay (ANDREW HERRMANN, April 25, 2003, AP)

Q. If Saddam Hussein is the Ace of Spades on the "Most Wanted'' playing cards, is his wife the Queen of Hearts?

A. No. The Queen of Hearts is Barzan al-Ghafur Sulayman Majid, commander of the Special Republican Guard.

Saddam has at least two wives. Neither is depicted on the cards.

He married Sajida Khairallah Talfah, a cousin, in 1963. She is the mother of sons Udai (Ace of Hearts) and Qusai (Ace of Clubs) and three daughters. Sajida has reportedly left Iraq and could be in Syria, the Associated Press reported, citing U.S. defense sources.

Saddam is also married to Samira Shahbandar, a former Iraqi Airlines flight attendant whom he wed in the late 1980s. She is the mother of his other son, Ali Saddam Hussein. Her whereabouts are unknown.

Reportedly, Udai was upset with his father taking a second wife. Udai is said to have clubbed to death Saddam's valet and food taster because he helped arrange liaisons for his father with Samira.

See what happens when you start messing around with marriage?

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ZIMBABWE NEXT

Fighting Africa's Saddam (Nancy Palus, April 24, 2003, Slate)

Zimbabwe's newspapers depicted this week's massive strike as a potentially decisive standoff between the government and an increasingly strident opposition. The strike, endorsed by the country's main opposition party, is seen as more than an airing of workers' grievances; it is yet another sign that the Zimbabwean people are losing patience with a government that has thrown the former jewel of Africa into economic free-fall. Britain's Guardian called the strike and a similar walkout last month "a stinging vote of no-confidence by the workers in President Robert Mugabe's economic policies." Zimbabwe, once one of Africa's most prosperous and promising nations, is in economic ruin. Food shortages have left more than half the country's 11.3 million people hungry and dependent on outside aid. Inflation stands at 228 percent; unemployment at more than 60 percent.

The three-day work stoppage, called by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, is a response to the government's recently imposed 200 percent fuel-price hike. The ZCTU is closely linked to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, which led a nationwide walkout last month. The MDC's endorsement of this week's strike fueled political tension in the country, since Mugabe accuses the MDC of manipulating the public into staging such protests.

An op-ed in the opposition Daily News compared Mugabe's rule to the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. Titled, "Violent regimes leave no option but war," the commentary said the coalition invasion of Iraq was "desperately needed ... for the good of the people" in order to remove "a heinous regime." It continued, "That is certainly the case I would put for removing the present regime in Zimbabwe." Britain's Independent reported that there is a new catchphrase among Zimbabwe's unemployed youth: "Mr. Bush, when are you coming to liberate us?"

To paraphrase the neocons, a conservative is a liberal who wants to regime change Mugabe.

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LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES

G.O.P. Hypocrisy: Unlike Republican appeals to racist voters, Republican appeals to homophobic voters are overt. (Dan Savage, 4/25/03, NY Times)

[G]ays and lesbians are more than just sons and daughters. We're moms and dads, too. My boyfriend and I adopted a son five years ago, and we plan to adopt again. As more same-sex couples start families, it's going to be harder for Republicans like Mr. Santorum to say we are somehow a threat to the American family.

As much as it may dismay Mr. Santorum and his defenders, there really is no word other than "family" to describe the three people who live in my house. When it comes to marriage rights, gays and lesbians are willing to play semantic games. We will use awkward phrases like "civil union" and "domestic partnership" so long as we can get what our families really need: the rights, responsibilities and safeguards of legal marriage. But two adults who love each other and are raising children together? What are we if not a family? What other word is there for us?

In our culture, homosexuality is discussed only when it presents a problem--for the armed forces, for closeted gay students in high school, for those who imagine gays are undermining society. Rarely is homosexuality credited with the creation of something positive and lasting. Desire brought my boyfriend and me together. And it's simple desire that brings most couples, gay or straight, together. Responsibly acted on, this desire is a good thing in and of itself, and it can often lead to other good things. Like strong, healthy families.

Mr. Savage is right about one thing; in our society today homosexuality is discussed only in its most peripheral sense. This is because if addressed at its core, it would repel the public, So instead we get drivel like this, with Mr. Savagr presenting himself as a modern day Mr. Cleaver. If you've a sufficiently strong stomach--and we warn you this is unpleasant--check out instead his little discourse on something called "snowballing" and then see if you think these are healthy relationships--that people who would do such things actually do love each other--or are in fact based on mutual degradation.

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THE PREGNANT MOMENT

Mideast Next for Bush (JAMES BENNET, 4/25/03, NY Times)

Having removed a historic threat to Israel's existence, deployed about a quarter million troops a few hundred miles from Jerusalem and coaxed forth an emerging Palestinian leadership, President Bush appears in a strong position to pursue peace in the Middle East, perhaps the strongest of any American president since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

European and Arab officials and analysts of many nationalities say he also has a powerful motive to try: progress in Middle East talks could ease a major source of Arab anti-Americanism, which may be inflamed by the presence of American troops in Iraq.

Mr. Bush has suggested that he sees a link, albeit a tenuous one, between Iraq and the search for a Middle East peace. As he sought support for the war in February, he said, "Success in Iraq could also begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace, and set in motion progress towards a truly democratic Palestinian state."

Palestinian and Israeli leaders have also drawn the connection, saying that the war may give them a new chance for peace. But today a suicide bomber connected to the Fatah movement of Yasir Arafat and the new prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, killed himself and a security guard outside an Israeli
train station. The bombing fanned doubts once again about the Palestinian leadership's capacity and willingness to confront terrorism.

On the Israeli side, Mr. Sharon so dominates political life that he may have the capacity to achieve a deal. But his willingness to make what he calls "painful concessions" is untested. Mr. Sharon's worldview was shaped by decades of fighting first for Israel's creation and then its survival, and he is not inclined to gamble for a peace deal with what he considers matters of security, despite the defeat of the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein.

Once, his advisers pointed to the proximity of Iraq's tanks to argue for Israel's need for "strategic depth"--the thickening of its borders achieved by West Bank settlements. Now they say that there is no telling whether Iraq may eventually revert to its old ways.

Mr. Sharon wants significant changes in a new peace plan, known as the road map, which foresees recognition of Israel throughout the region and an independent state of Palestine in 2005. His advisers predict that Mr. Bush will not put serious pressure on him to abide by its terms, including immediate removal of settlement outposts built in the last two years.

So long as the settlers are willing to be citizens of the new Palestine, they're welcome to stay behind.

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THE VATICAN'S ANTI-WESTERN BIAS

The Word From Rome (John Allen, National Catholic Reporter, April 25, 2003)

[O]ne of the most interesting figures on the ecclesiastical scene in Rome is ... a professor of political science at the University of Perugia and an editorial writer for Italy’s most respected daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera, named Ernesto Galli della Loggia....

Galli della Loggia noted that in John Paul’s United Nations speeches on peace, the pope had always placed his message in the context of human rights. Yet the pope has not used human rights language much during the Iraq crisis. Galli della Loggia suggested this may be because references to human rights would invite awkward questions about the brutal character of the Saddam Hussein government.

If this is true, then the Vatican would seem to be more attached to its anti-war stance than to preaching the gospel message against murder and oppression.

How does Galli della Loggia explain the Vatican tilt against the American position?

First, there are historic reservations some have always felt about the United States. Despite the fact that Pius XII was known as the “chaplain of NATO,” many Europeans in the Vatican have long harbored doubts about an Atlantic alliance dominated by the Americans. Such a system, they felt, would signal the victory of Protestant America over Catholic Europe.

Second, Galli della Loggia says that despite Bush’s sincere religious belief, and despite an alignment of interests between Washington and the Vatican on issues such as abortion and cloning, the cluster of Protestant “radicals” such as John Ashcroft in the Bush administration is troubling to some in the Holy See.

Finally, there is the desire of the Vatican, and especially John Paul II, to deliver a message of solidarity to the Islamic world, in order to avoid a long-feared “clash of civilizations” between Christianity and Islam.

On this third score, Galli della Loggia sees a subtle realpolitik calculation by the Vatican.

“They probably think that no matter what the pope says, American Catholics will be okay and the American administration will still see the Vatican as a great global institution. In that sense, there’s nothing to lose by coming out against the Americans, and everything to gain by siding with Islam,” he said.

None of these three reasons have any roots in Christian ethics. If these are, in fact, the grounds of Vatican policy, then they suggest a victory of human prejudices (European chauvinism, anti-Protestantism, loss of faith in divine Providence and a desire to manipulate Muslim sensibilities) over historic Christian teachings.

Galli della Loggia then made the interesting observation that it was the most Catholic countries of Europe – Spain, Italy and Poland – whose governments backed the U.S. on the war, while it was France and Germany, the birthplaces of Revolution and Reformation respectively, that sided with the pope....

Why should loyalty to episcopal opinions influence the laity, if loyalty to the Christian faith barely matters to the bishops?

We also discussed the future of Europe, currently locked in debate over its “constitutional document.” Galli della Loggia doesn’t understand the Vatican’s push for an explicit reference to the religious roots of Europe.

“If the Catholic Church wants to be a global institution, it doesn’t make sense to identify itself with its European roots,” he argued.

An excellent point. The Church remains far too Euro-centric. Europe has 48.1% of the cardinals, but less than 10% of regular churchgoers (see, e.g., statistics at adherents.com). Geographical diversification would strengthen the shared Christian faith while diluting the influence of parochial prejudices.

On the current breach between the United States and Europe, Galli della Loggia believes it is destined to remain. Europe has ceased to believe in war as an instrument of politics, Galli della Loggia said, because it is incapable of judging its own military past in positive terms. The United States, on the other hand, sees itself playing a global role in the promotion of democracy and human rights, and believes its use of force in support of these ideals is just.

As for the Vatican, Galli della Loggia says that the Iraq crisis exposed a fundamental weakness in its foreign policy – hesitation to confront corrupt regimes in the developing world.

“The Vatican wants to be a global voice of conscience, supporting developing nations,” Galli della Loggia said. “Often they express this support by spouting the same economic formula they always recycle, blaming rich nations for poverty. But the principal obstacle to social and economic development is not the West, but dictatorial and corrupt regimes that strangle their own people. Catholic missionaries and even the Vatican polemicize against the West, hiding local responsibility. They’re afraid of being tossed into the ‘Western’ mix if they make problems for these governments.”

“Ironically, the only governments the Church criticizes are in the West, where it knows it won’t have to pay any price because those governments respect human rights,” Galli della Loggia said.

The Vatican, in other words, is like CNN: in fear of murderous tyrants, it refuses to speak the truth about injustice in unfree nations. By quickly and willingly criticizing free nations, but remaining mute toward unfree nations, the Church's words become slanted in favor of tyrants and tyranny, and against the West.

Pius XII, living under Axis rule, made sharper criticisms of the Nazis than Vatican bishops made of Saddam Hussein. As a Catholic, I want to be proud of my bishops. I wish they would make it easier for me.

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FOR UNILATERAL SPACE NONPROLIFERATION

Safeguarding GPS: Attempts to jam U.S. GPS-based weapons and navigation systems in Iraq were a reminder of just how vulnerable the technology is (Frank Vizard, 4/14/03, Scientific American)

The failure of the Iraqi military to continually throw GPS-equipped Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bombs and Tomahawk cruise missiles severely off course can be attributed to several factors. Among the most important was the installation of backup inertial navigation systems (INS) that could keep the bombs and missiles on target if the GPS signal was compromised. INS systems are slightly less accurate than GPS, however, so there is a greater risk that INS-guided weapons might be a tad off course, raising the risk of collateral damage and casualties in densely populated areas. Still, the danger is likely to be short-lived: high-powered GPS jammers can easily be traced back to their origin, effectively painting themselves with a bull's-eye. "In fact, we destroyed a GPS jammer with a GPS weapon," U.S. Major General Victor Renuart told reporters at a briefing in Qatar that described the attacks against GPS jammers.

Iraqi efforts at jamming may also have been thwarted by a novel, signal-boosting technology--deployed in Iraq under a shroud of secrecy--that overwhelmed the GPS jammers. Airborne pseudo satellites, nicknamed "pseudolites," installed on Global Hawk or Predator unmanned drones would have created a miniature GPS constellation over Iraq. These pseudolites would have captured the weak GPS signals from space and then relayed them, at substantially higher power and at closer range, to airborne bombs and missiles or to forces on the ground. Like the satellites in space, four pseudolites would be required to plot a navigational solution. Tests performed in April 2000 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's research arm, convinced the military that the psuedolites were powerful enough to overcome jamming. Specially developed beam-forming antennas and signal processors allow the pseudolites to acquire the space-borne GPS signal even when it’s under attack. New receivers called Precision Lightweight GPS Receivers (PLGRS), or "pluggers," have been made for use with pseudolites.

Pseudolites and backup inertial navigation systems mean smart bombs and cruise missiles are likely to reach their intended targets as long as the U.S. military controls the air space over a battlefield. But in a conflict in which pseudolites cannot be safely deployed, ground forces could go astray or misdirect their fire if they encounter a minefield of expendable, hockey-puck-size GPS jammers, each of which could disrupt the GPS signal within a one-kilometer radius. Iraq reportedly also purchased as many as 400 small GPS jammers from Aviaconversiya prior to the outbreak of hostilities in the region, although it is not known whether any of these were used.

"It's a serious threat," says Jim Hendershot, president of Radio Design Group, Inc., a maker of GPS jamming gear used for training purposes, based in Grants Pass, Ore., "because these small jammers can screw up the guy on the ground. Soldiers' GPS receivers don't have backup navigation systems. They would be deprived of their ability to navigate."

Just how dependent ground forces can be on GPS was inadvertently revealed to Greek authorities in August 2000, when the U.S., Britain and France competed for a $1.4-billion tank contract. As each country's tank entry demonstrated its prowess, it became clear that U.S. and British tanks could not acquire a GPS signal for navigation. Sometime later and to the amusement of Greek defense officials, reports the journal Military Review, it was revealed that French agents were remotely activating small, one-foot-high GPS jammers to disrupt the GPS signal when British and U.S. tanks were in the field. Such GPS jamming tactics should not have come as a surprise considering the fact that the U.S. and Australian militaries were jointly conducting research on GPS jammer locators in remote Woomera, Australia, as far back as March 2000.

In fact, small GPS jammers can be built by any hobbyist with a spare $400 to invest in electronic components, using plans supplied by the online hacker magazine Phrack, for example. Such devices can easily disrupt a commercial GPS signal and possibly a military GPS signal, even though the latter is encrypted with a code that changes on a regular basis. The military signal is a little harder to disrupt," Hendershot says, "but it's still easy."

That's why the military is lobbying for the launch of 20 new GPS satellites starting next year. These new satellites would transmit a GPS signal eight times stronger than the current signal, which means that any potential jammers would have to increase in size and complexity. Until then, note experts like Hendershot, "GPS is very vulnerable."

GPS is one of the many reasons that the U.S. should declare any even potential weapons technology deployed by other nations in space to be fair game and should develop our own capacity to kill their satellites. The advantages to be derived from blinding and silencing the enemy appear to be massive and
growing.

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MAILING IT IN

He's off to a slow start, so why is Lieberman smiling? (Scot Lehigh, 4/23/2003, Boston Globe)

Left in limbo for months while Al Gore, his 2000 ticketmate, mulled a comeback, the Connecticut senator got his own presidential quest off to a slow start, eroding his early standing. Once he did get in, Lieberman's outspoken support for military action to oust Saddam Hussein quickly put him on the wrong side of the divisive issue for many Democratic activists. At the New Hampshire Democratic Party's annual fund-raising dinner in Manchester on Feb. 27, a skeptical crowd sat on its hands as Lieberman outlined his reasons for going to war in Iraq. His first quarter fund-raising total of just over $3 million was less than half of those tallied by rivals John Kerry and John Edwards. And the latest New Hampshire poll shows him back in the pack, essentially tied with Dick Gephardt for third, behind Kerry and second-place Howard Dean. [...]

Despite the senator's slow start, his strategists claim to see opportunity in New Hampshire. Dean, they think, surfed the antiwar wave so hard he is now stranded outside the mainstream. Kerry, at 24 percent in the latest New Hampshire poll, is well shy of the 36 percent that next-door-neighbor Mike Dukakis tallied in winning the 1988 primary or the 33 percent that Tsongas garnered to win here in 1992.

Lieberman's combination of a muscular foreign policy, a progrowth, probusiness agenda, and progressive social stands is unusual among the candidates, he concedes. But not, he insists, among voters. Still, will a party driven halfway round the bend with loathing for the Republican incumbent really warm to a mild-mannered, low-key moderate, a man who thinks Bush has been a bad president, but is not a bad man, and certainly not the root of all evil?

Lieberman laughs out loud. ''Since I think you are describing me,'' he offers, '' I would say that that might be the New Hampshire way.''

This campaign is fast becoming an embarrassment. In fact, you have to assume he isn't running for president at all, but maybe for VP again.

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MMMMMMMMM....BUTTERMILK

Buttermilk Basics: A second look at a culinary commodity that's fallen out of favor but was once a staple in every household. (Sharon Hudgins, June 1999, World & I)

My first encounter with buttermilk was a disaster. Shortly after we were married, my husband brought home a carton of buttermilk, a substance I had managed to avoid for the first twenty-five years of my life. He offered me a taste, but I wasn't interested. Have you ever seen the streaky residue left in the glass after someone has just drunk buttermilk from it? Who in her right mind would want to drink something like that?

To make matters worse, the next day my husband performed a strange ritual that I had never seen before. He took a large square of homemade corn bread, crumbled it into a big glass, filled the glass with buttermilk, and then proceeded to eat the whole yucky-looking mess with a spoon. I couldn't bear to watch.

Later I learned that this buttermilk--corn bread concoction is a favorite food in the Deep South, where some people even gussy it up with a sprinkling of sugar. And, over the years, I also developed a taste for buttermilk--although I've never been persuaded to engage in weird activities involving buttermilk and corn bread, even if they are traditional below the Mason-Dixon Line.

What is buttermilk, anyway? Originally it was simply the liquid left over after whole milk or cream had been churned into butter. The churn's motion caused the butterfat to separate from the milk or cream and solidify into butter. The liquid that remained was called buttermilk. [...]

If you turn into a true buttermilk fanatic, you can even make an entire meal based on buttermilk, with recipes from around the globe. Start with an American appetizer of raw vegetables with buttermilk dip, followed by cold blueberry-buttermilk soup from Europe. Then serve a spicy Indian vegetarian main dish of okra with buttermilk, accompanied by white rice. For dessert, offer a choice of high-calorie buttermilk pie or buttermilk pralines, or low-calorie buttermilk sherbet--all classics from the American South.

And the next time you finish drinking a glass of pure buttermilk, look closely at the patterns on the glass. Maybe then you'll understand why a songwriter once described the streaks of cirrus clouds in winter as a "buttermilk sky." [...]

Blueberry-buttermilk soup

Cold soups made from fruits and berries are eaten in many parts of Scandinavia and in central and eastern Europe. This easy-to-make soup can be served by itself for lunch on a hot summer day, or as a first course for dinner any time of the year.

4 cups fresh blueberries or two 16-ounce packages unsweetened frozen blueberries
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
1/4 cup sugar (or more, to taste)
2 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice
1 1/2 cups well-chilled sparkling water

Garnish:
sour cream or cr?me fra”che
ground cinnamon

Wash and drain fresh blueberries (or thaw and drain frozen ones). Puree berries in a blender or food processor, then press puree through a sieve into a large glass bowl. Whisk in buttermilk, sugar, and lemon juice. Taste, and add more sugar if desired. Cover and chill until serving time. Just before serving, stir in chilled sparkling water. Mix very well.

Serve immediately, in chilled soup bowls. Garnish each serving with a dollop of sour cream or cr?me fra”che, and a light sprinkling of ground cinnamon. Makes 6 servings. [...]

Buttermilk pralines

A classic confection from the American South, pralines are served on many occasions--for afternoon tea, for dessert, as an accompaniment to after-dinner coffee, and as a sweet snack at any time of day.

1 cup buttermilk
1 tsp. baking soda
2 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1/8 tsp. salt
3 Tbsp. unsalted butter (plus extra butter for pans)
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 cups coarsely chopped pecans

Important note: You must use a very large pan with a lid (at least 4 quarts, preferably larger) for this recipe because the mixture foams up considerably during boiling. Do not try to double this recipe (or you'll have a big mess all over the stove). If you want more pralines, make 2 separate batches.

Lightly butter 2 large baking sheets. Set aside. Lightly butter inside of a large, heavy-bottomed cooking pot. Add buttermilk and baking soda, stirring to dissolve soda. Stir in sugar and salt. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until mixture comes to a boil. Cover pan and cook exactly 3 minutes longer.

Uncover pan and continue to cook mixture over medium heat. Do not stir. The mixture will bubble up considerably and will gradually turn caramel-colored as it boils. Let mixture boil until it reaches the soft-ball stage (236*F on a candy thermometer), about 10 minutes from the time you uncover the pan.

Immediately remove pan from heat and stir in butter. Let mixture cool for 3--4 minutes. Stir in vanilla and pecans. Beat mixture with a large wooden spoon until it just begins to become thick and creamy. Quickly drop it by heaping tablespoonfuls onto buttered baking sheets.

Let pralines cool completely before removing them with a spatula. Wrap each praline in aluminum foil or plastic wrap and store in an airtight container. Pralines will stay fresh longer if stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator. They can also be frozen. Makes 24 soft pralines, each
approximately 2 1/2 inches in diameter.

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SEND LAWYERS, GUNS, & MONEY

The legacy of 1993: Happy anniversary (LAWRENCE MARTIN, April 24, 2003, Globe & Mail)

The country is confronting an anniversary of sorts this year: the 10th anniversary of the year that killed Canadian politics.

One-party rule, or at least a facsimile of it, has been with Canadians ever since the election of 1993. Since that time, the Liberals -- no matter what they do -- have maintained an extraordinary 20- to 35-percentage-point lead in the polls. And there is no sign of a letup. The system is almost locked shut against change. One-party rule could be the rule for a generation to come.

Kim Campbell, Preston Manning and the campaign of 1993 are the culprits. It may well have been the most significant election in our history. It collapsed the political system.

Before you go to bed tonight, we beg you, say a prayer for Steve Martinovich.

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IGNOBILITY

Castro as ruthless as Hussein (Oscar Arias, Apr. 24, 2003, Miami Herald)

The Cuban regime took another disgraceful and unacceptable step when it sentenced to prison those who only attempted to defend their fundamental rights and to practice independent journalism. It was yet another example of the demented intolerance with which Fidel Castro wields his government.

The truth is that Castro is not all that different from his predecessor. His Sierra Maestra saga to overthrow dictator Fulgencio Batista turned into a betrayal of his own revolution and of an entire nation's dreams of freedom.

Castro is cut from the same cloth as Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, two of his less-notable contemporaries, or Paraguay's Alfredo Stroessner and the Somoza clan, all of them fully deserving members of the Hall of Shame. [...]

The international community must deal at once with the Cuban situation, using the tools of diplomacy -- lest the emboldened hawks in Washington decide to include Cuba in the axis of evil.

Geez. Saw that headline and started reading and couldn't believe this was the same communism-apologist nitwit who'd won a Nobel Prize, but then got to that last sentence and was reassured. Castro's as bad as Milosevic or Saddam but we should leave the Cuban people under his thumb?

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FAITH BASED INITIATIVE GOES GLOBAL

THE TIMES DEMAND WE FACE UP TO TERROR, CAN THE LEFT ANSWER?: Distinguished British journalist, JOHN LLOYD who resigned from the London New Statesman over its coverage of the war, asks: what future has the Left if it cannot deal honestly with the rise of terrorism and the crimes of dictators? (John Lloyd, OpenDemocracy)

What is very rarely recognised in the radical camp, except as the occasion for mockery, is that the major states have, since the collapse of the cold war, elaborated and put into practice some version of an 'ethical dimension to foreign policy' (the phrase was put into the public arena by Robin Cook, the former UK Foreign Secretary).

In an article in the current issue of Foreign Policy the journal of the US Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie Gelb and Justine Rosenthal write that "something quite important has happened in American foreign policy making with little notice or digestion of its meaning. Morality, values, ethics, universal principles--the whole panoply of ideas in international affairs that were once almost the exclusive domain of preachers and scholars--have taken root in the hearts, or at least the minds of the American foreign policy communiy...in the past, tyrants supported by Washington did not have to worry a lot about interference in their domestic affairs. Now, even if Washington needs their help, some price has to be exacted, if only sharp public criticism. Moral matters are now part of American politics and the politics of many other nations".

Note the many reservations. Ethics have not taken over foreign policy: it remains largely driven by national interests. The application of moral standards is often--indeed, one could say always--selective. Some tyrants are targeted, while others are cosseted – and the reasons given for targeting some are often applicable to those being cosseted. My contention, however, is that there is a significant effect which is growing. Namely that the ethical dimension is increasingly being linked with the realist concerns of the kind most famously associated, both when he was a scholar and when he was a practitioner, with Henry Kissinger.

This has not of course been confined to America. Britain has its own version of an ethical foreign policy, as has France and even Germany--the latter, under a social democratic government, confronting its own comfortable and popular pacifism in order to make some sort of effective response, even if tardy, to the horrors of former Yugoslavia.

Many on the left and most on the right have dismissed these shifts towards an ethical dimension in international policy as cosmetic, propagandist, hypocritical, over-idealist or useless. This is tragic, especially on the left, for this current of opinion has in the past--together with the United Nations, Christian churches and many international NGOs--been in the forefront of pressing for humanitarian intervention, and for an end to the possibility of using national sovereignty as a shield behind which tyrants can commit atrocities with impunity.

As a result the intellectual/creative opposition to this war has, in Europe, been quite close to a monopoly. Only a few have broken this monopoly, notably the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who wrote in La Repubblica on 16 April that "one of the few profound joys which history reserves for us is the end of a tyranny." But few of his fellow writers and artists have shared this joy. Most have felt something quite different: a profound disgust--at the US. [...]

According to a report last week in the Independent , poor Zimbabwean youths are asking when Bush will come and liberate them from Mugabe. Do we smile at their naivete and the falseness of their consciousness? Or, on the other hand, do those of us who are British--with some historical responsibility--allow an indifferent American administration to convince us that we have no dog in this fight because Mugabe is not part of any axis of evil? Or do we try to think through, as the times invite us to do, how we can better square our ideals, our humanitarian impulses and our internationalism with life as it is lived and deaths as they are meted out?

We should recognise that politics, and human rights, are becoming global. None of the answers to the often-hideous questions thrown up are easy. And those that spring from finely crafted denunciations of American wickedness are the least convincing of all.

Let Tony Blair lead the way and I suspect most Americans would be prepared to help Zimbabwe rid itself of Mugabism.

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WHO EVEN KNEW IT HAD GONE OUT OF STYLE?

Pabst Blue Ribbon: Another Winner: Retro Chic Suds Hit With Hip Young Adults (Bret Schulte, April 20, 2003, The Washington Post)

America has discovered a new beer, one that seems right for a country facing bad times.

Pabst Blue Ribbon, a forgotten if not forsaken brand, once the solace of the beleaguered working man, and, regrettably, a beer often associated with what people in polite company call "trash," has staged a surprising comeback. The resurgence is mostly among young adults, led by colleagues such as snowboarders and indie filmmakers.

Perhaps it's a sign of the times, or a remembrance of the way it was, or a toast to blue-collar virtue. However you pour it, PBR is America's new beer for a simple reason: It is not new at all. [...]

Of course, no amount of hipster or counterculture endorsement is going to resurrect Pabst to its former glory, or even bring it to levels competitive with Coors, Miller and Anheuser-Busch.

Steinman classifies PBR as "sub-premium," a real category among beer producers but one that also reflects the attitude of many American beer drinkers, an attitude that is unlikely to change as the beer proliferates among Establishment dropouts. And nothing is so tenuous as a youth fad, particularly one embraced by the ever-vigilant American iconoclast, who is likely to bail once he suspects corporate America has found him out, not to mention the media. If PBR becomes too visible, too much of a commodity, then it will lose its newfound support. (Note the brief and swiftly exploited revival of swing music in the 1990s.)

As Steinman points out, a sprinkle of sales doesn't mean a watershed is soon at hand. "The Pabst Brewing Company as a whole is still declining at a substantial rate," he says. "Pabst Blue Ribbon is a small component at this time. It's not their biggest brand." That distinction belongs to Old Milwaukee, not exactly a contender either. And the ground Pabst has lost since its heyday near the end of the 19th century will never be recovered.

In the 1890s Pabst produced the best-selling and most widely distributed beer in the country. It was the first beer to be accepted by the moneyed elite; sales were so brisk that Pabst purchased its own forest and barrel factories just to meet the demand. Today, Pabst products constitute about 4.2 percent of the domestic beer market, while Anheuser- Busch commands about 48 percent.

For now, low-saturation marketing has paid off. Pabst projects an image of casual earnestness. Buy it or don't buy it. Whatever. It is an image shared with today's indie rock scene, indie film scene, skateboarding scene, art and literary scenes. It is the image that, ironically, sells.

While most young consumers buy clothes and cars to make themselves seem as affluent and desirable as possible, the materialism of many of today's counterculture youth is just the opposite. It is meant to reflect the economics of "reality," of working-class thriftiness, of the notion of America at its best, at its most optimistic, at its blue-collar prime. Of course, this is not America. This is Americana -- and an appetite for what was good when things are going bad.

This puts us in mind of one of the all-time great songs:

Rednecks, White Socks and Blue Ribbon Beer

The barmaid is mad cause some guy made a pass
The jukebox is playin' there stands a glass
The cigarette smoke kinda hangs in the air
Rednecks, white socks and Blue Ribbon beer

A cowboy is cussin' a pinball machine
The drunk at the bar is gettin orn'ry and mean
Some guy on the phone says, "I'll be home soon, dear!"
Rednecks, white socks and Blue Ribbon beer

No we don't fit in with that white collar crowd
We're a little too rowdy and a little too loud
But there' s no place that I'd rather be than right here
With our rednecks, my white socks, and Blue Ribbon beer

The semis are passing on the highway outside
The 4:30 Crowd is about to arrive
The sun's goin' down and we'll all soon be here
With our rednecks, white socks, and blue ribbon beer

No we don't fit in with that white collar crowd
We're a little too rowdy and a little too loud
But there' s no place that I'd rather be than right here
With our rednecks, my white socks, and Blue Ribbon beer

With our rednecks, my white socks, and Blue Ribbon beer

---

14 YEARS?

300 reasons why we love The Simpsons: The 300th episode of The Simpsons is broadcast today. Find a space on the sofa and read why, in 14 years, Matt Groening's show has become the world's best TV programme. (Euan Ferguson, April 20, 2003, The Observer)

#37: Those critics who got it wrong at the start by billing the Simpsons as 'America's most dysfunctional family.' It's now clear that Homer almost always ends up doing the right thing; it is, it could be argued, one of the most moral
shows on television today. According to Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams: 'It's one of the most subtle pieces of propaganda around in the cause of sense, humility and virtue.'

The Simpsons manages at one and the same time to be dispositive proof that all comedy is conservative and that conservatives (many of whom have criticized it) are the stupid party.

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HAVE TO SAY?

Utah Sect Leader Criticizes Santorum (The Associated Press, April 24, 2003)

The leader of one of Utah's largest polygamist sects has objected to Sen. Rick Santorum's comment lumping plural marriage with other practices the Pennsylvania Republican considers to be antifamily.

Santorum has been under fire for comparing homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery.

Owen Allred, 89, head of the United Apostolic Brethen, based in the Salt Lake City suburb of Bluffdale, agreed with Santorum in part.

"He is absolutely right. The people of the United States are doing whatever they can to do away with the sacred rights of marriage," Allred told The Salt Lake Tribune.

But Allred said Santorum's inclusion of polygamy in his list tarnishes a religious tradition whose roots are traced to biblical figures such as Abraham, Jacob and Moses - defiling them as "immoral and dirty."

"The problem for anyone writing satire today is competing with the front page."
-Christopher Buckley

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DEVOLVING

Feds drop case after professor changes evolution policy (SEBASTIAN KITCHEN, 4/23/03, The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal)

The Justice Department has closed its case against Texas Tech and a biology professor after he changed his policy for giving recommendations - a policy that, the government alleged, "constituted religious discrimination."

"The new policy rightly recognizes that students don't have to give up their religious beliefs to be good doctors or good scientists," Ralph F. Boyd Jr., assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in a prepared statement.

"A biology student may need to understand the theory of evolution and be able to explain it. But a state-run university has no business telling students what they should or should not believe in."

Professor Michael Dini changed the criteria and wording on his Web site to alleviate any question that he required students to affirm a personal belief in evolution. The Web site now states that students must be able to explain the scientific theory of evolution.

That's unfortunate. Mr. Dini may be a bigot, but he should not have changed his policy as regards recommendations, which are a personal rather than an official matter, if he doesn't believe what he's now saying.

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BUSTED FLUSH

Tariq Aziz 'captured' (BBC, 4/24/03)

United States officials say they believe that one of Saddam Hussein's most prominent ministers, Tariq Aziz, is in US custody.

Tariq Aziz was deputy prime minister in the Iraqi regime and one of the best-known members of government in the West.

The BBC's Pentagon correspondent, Nick Childs, says it could be the most significant arrest by coalition forces so far.

Mr Aziz may have information on the location of Saddam Hussein and any programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction, which was the reason for the US-led coalition going to war.

He is listed among Iraq's so-called "dirty dozen" and as a member of the Revolutionary Command Council he is wanted by the US for war crimes against Kuwait, Iran and his own people.

Details are scarce and it is not known where or how he was arrested or even whether he surrendered.

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YOU ARE THE APPLE OF MY EYE

Poll Shows New Yorkers Favor President Bush More Than Democrats, Including Sen. Hillary Clinton (The Associated Press, April 24, 2003)

Heavily Democratic New York is showing growing support for President Bush over all potential Democratic challengers, including the state's own Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a poll showed.

Bush's approval rating among New Yorkers rose to 58 percent from 50 percent in February, before the war in Iraq, according to the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute poll released Thursday. [...]

Bush was favored 50 percent to 38 percent over Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman as well as Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry in potential presidential faceoffs.

Bush was favored 49 percent to 38 percent over Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri in a presidential matchup.

NY is how the GOP gets to 60, knocking off Chuck Schumer.

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THE TIMES, THEY ARE A CHANGIN'

Chinese whispers: The Chinese government's handling of Sars has given rumour and hearsay the currency of truth (Dominic Marsh, April 24, 2003, The Guardian)

A fortnight ago, the top story on CCTV9, China's international English-language channel, was "Sars is unequivocally under control".

The World Health Organisation had apparently complimented Beijing on its handling of the crisis, and archive footage of smiling, waving western tourists proved that even fickle foreign devils weren't scared.

The Communist party had successfully defended the Motherland from the ravages of Sars.

Here in Tianjin, just over an hour's train ride from the capital, Sars was little more than a big joke at that time. We mocked the Rolling Stones for pulling out of their China tour; those who donned surgical masks were ridiculed. Sars was nothing.

We didn't really believe the government's lies, but what they were claiming was by far the most comforting thing to tell ourselves.

It all changed four days ago. In the space of a few hours, the figure for cases in Beijing was revised from 30 to almost 400. And from then on, we kicked ourselves for having pretended to believe what we knew were lies.

The media's change of tack looks like a new attempt at honesty, but it has come far too late. Who knows how many have fallen ill or died needlessly?

No-one, Chinese or otherwise, can believe the offical line now.

Wow, even the The Guardian is acknowledging that communist governments lie....

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LET THEM EAT CORN

Harkin in Cuba Urges Castro to Free Dissidents (Anthony Boadle, 4/24/03, Reuters)

U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin traveled to Cuba to promote sales of Iowa farm products, but ended his visit on Thursday calling on President Fidel Castro to release jailed dissidents.

The Iowa Democrat, an outspoken defender of human rights in other parts of the world, had planned his sales pitch trip to Cuba before the island's communist authorities arrested 75 pro-democratic opponents of Castro last month and handed them stiff sentences of up to 28 years in prison.

"Some said I should not come here under these circumstances, but a policy of isolation and the embargo of 42 years has not achieved any U.S. objectives nor made life better for the average Cuban citizen," Harkin said.

The senator also asked the Bush administration to make it clear that it has no plans for military action against Cuba, responding to Cuban fears that Washington might be aiming at a regime change in Cuba after Iraq. [...]

After meeting with dissidents, including the Gisela Delgado, whose husband Hector Palacios was handed a 25-year jail term, Harkin said "it is clear that the best course of action now is moderation not escalation, engagement not isolation."

At that meeting on Tuesday evening at the Hotel Nacional, the dissidents recognized the waiter serving drinks as one of the witnesses the government produced at Palacios' trial to testify that the dissident had met with U.S. legislators at the hotel.

Have the Democrats completely lost their minds? You've got Howard Dean expressing uncertainty over whether Iraqis are better off with Saddam gone and Tom Harkin trying to cut a deal for Iowa farmers while Castro cracks down even further than usual on dissent. He then goes further and seeks to rule out regime change. Even realizing that propping up Castro has been official Democrat policy since the Cuban Missile fiasco, this is really too much. Is the Party pro-dictator at this point?

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THE LOVE THAT DARE NOT EXPLAIN ITSELF (via a very impatient Brian Hoffman)

Incest Repellent?: If gay sex is private, why isn't incest? (William Saletan, April 23, 2003, Slate)

Let's leave adultery and polygamy out of it for the moment. Let's set aside morality and stick to law. And let's grant that being attracted to a gender is more fundamental than being attracted to a family member. Santorum sees no reason why, if gay sex is too private to be banned, the same can't be said of incest. Can you give him a reason?

The easy answer--that incest causes birth defects--won't cut it. Birth defects could be prevented by extending to sibling marriage the rule that five states already apply to cousin marriage: You can do it if you furnish proof of infertility or are presumptively too old to procreate. If you're in one of those categories, why should the state prohibit you from marrying your sibling? [...]

I'm a lifestyle conservative and an orientation liberal. The way I see it, stable families are good, homosexuality isn't a choice, and therefore, gay marriage should be not just permitted but encouraged. Morally, I think incest is bad because it confuses relationships. But legally, I don't see why a sexual right to privacy, if it exists, shouldn't cover consensual incest. I think Santorum is wrong. But I can't explain why, and so far, neither can the Human Rights Campaign.

One of the keys to conservatism, in many ways the key, is that it is largely a matter of temperament and aesthetics. The former was famously captured by Michael Oakeshott:

The man of conservative temperament believes that a known good is not lightly to be surrendered for an unknown better. He is not in love with what is dangerous and difficult; he is unadventurous; he has no impulse to sail uncharted seas; for him there is no magic in being lost, bewildered or shipwrecked. If he is forced to navigate the unknown, he sees virtue in heaving the lead every inch of the way.What others plausibly identify as timidity, he recognizes in himself as rational prudence; what others interpret as inactivity, he recognizes as a disposition to enjoy rather than to exploit. He is cautious, and he is disposed to indicate his assent or dissent, not in absolute, but in graduated terms. He eyes the situation in terms of its propensity to disrupt the familiarity of the features of his world.

and by Albert Jay Nock:

As a man of reason and logic, I am all for reform; but as the unworthy inheritor of a great tradition, I am unalterably against it. I am forever with Falkland, the true martyr of the Civil War,--one of the very greatest among the great spirits of whom England has ever been so notoriously noteworthy,--as he stood facing Hampden and Pym. 'Mr. Speaker,' he said, 'when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.'

Edmund Burke captures the latter, in reference to patriotism:

For us to love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

So too does Nock, as regards the materialism (economism) of modern life:

Economism can build a society which is rich, prosperous, powerful, even one which has a reasonably wide diffusion of material well-being. It can not build one which is lovely, one which has savour and depth, and which exercises the irresistible attraction that loveliness wields. Perhaps by the time economism has run its course the society it has built may be tired of itself, bored by its own hideousness, and may despairingly consent to annihilation, aware that it is too ugly to be let live any longer.

What Mr. Saletan has touched upon here is just such conservative impulses. He sees us perched somewhere near the top of the slippery slope and though he's willing to venture down it as far as we've so far come (to the acceptance of homosexuality), he's reluctant to travel further. The problem arises because he's already slid too far; for as he notes, having once accepted homosexuality as normal he's lost any theoretical basis for applying the brakes and disavowing those things he retains sufficient judgment to know are abnormal and ugly.

Now, I know, we are no longer to speak in this way, but all of us know, even if only in the secret recesses of our minds, those parts we don't display in polite company, that there's nothing normal about homosexuality. No one, after all, is truly ambivalent about the question of whether their own child chooses to be straight or gay. Even the most "tolerant" of folks are not indifferent as to whether the sex scene in the movie they're watching is between two men. Even homosexuals do not pretend to normalcy:

The homosexual learns to make distinctions between his sexual desire and his emotional longing--not because he is particularly prone to objectifications of the flesh, but because he needs to survive as a social and sexual being. The society separates these two entities, and for a long time the homosexual has no option but to keep them separate. He learns certain rules; and, as with a child learning grammar, they are hard, later on in life, to unlearn.

It's possible, I think, that whatever society teaches or doesn't teach about homosexuality, this fact will always be the case. No homosexual child, surrounded overwhelmingly by heterosexuals, will feel at home in his sexual and emotional world, even in the most tolerant of cultures. And every homosexual child will learn the rituals of deceit, impersonation, and appearance. Anyone who believes political, social, or even cultural revolution will change this fundamentally is denying reality. This isolation will always hold. It is definitional of homosexual development.

That's Andrews Sullivan--here Camille Paglia:

Homosexuality is not 'normal.' On the contrary, it is a challenge to the norm; therein rests its eternally revolutionary character. Note I do not call it a challenge to the idea of the norm. Queer theorists - that wizened crew of flimflamming free-loaders - have tried to take the poststructuralist tack of claiming that there is no norm, since everything is relative and contingent. This is the kind of silly bind that word-obsessed people get into when they are deaf, dumb, and blind to the outside world. Nature exists, whether academics like it or not. And in nature, procreation is the single, relentless rule. That is the norm. Our sexual bodies were designed for reproduction. Penis fits vagina: no fancy linguistic game - playing can change that basic fact. However, my libertarian view, here as in regard to abortion, is that we have not only the right, but the obligation to defy nature's
tyranny. The highest human identity consists precisely in such assertions of freedom against material limitation.

So, when Mr. Saletan says that he's a "lifestyle conservative" and when he laments that he can't explain why Rick Santorum must be wrong, he has in fact revealed that he knows Mr. Santorum to be right and this is what troubles him. He's suddenly awoken to the fact that he's already given away too much and can no longer find purchase on the slope. But there's still hope. Mr. Saletan can always fall back--though he'll not be able to explain it intellectually--on a sublime statement of conservative principle, this one from Mark Helprin: "It should not be necessary to explain a praiseworthy revulsion."

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OBJECTIVELY PRO-SADDAM?

DEAN: Doesn't Know If Iraq Is Better Off Without Saddam (Hotline, 4/24/03)

[Howard] Dean appeared on "Wolf Blitzer Reports." Some highlights:

Asked if Iraqis are better off without Saddam: "We don't know that yet. ... We still have a country whose city is mostly without electricity. We have tumultuous occasions in the south where there is no clear governance. We have a major city without clear governance. We don't know yet."

CNN's Blitzer: "You think it's possible ... that whatever emerges in Iraq could be worse than what they have for decades under Saddam Hussein?"

Dean: "I do. We have to think of this from an American perspective, not an Iraqi perspective. The reason the president gave for going into Iraq, which I disagree with, is Iraq was a security threat to the United States. I don't believe Saddam was. But I believe a fundamentalist Islamic regime would be. ... The other thing is, you have to remember that this president has now created a new American foreign policy -- a preemptive doctrine. And I think that's going to cause America some serious trouble down the line too."

So if the Iraqi people are better off, but things are a tad more difficult for us, it's a bad thing? Who are the real imperialists around here? What other peoples should live in totalitarian terror so that they don't annoy us?

---

MAKING THE CONNECTION

Al Qaeda's credibility 'on the line' (David R. Sands, 4/24/03, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Al Qaeda and its terrorist allies remain a potent threat, but their failure to carry out a successful strike during the U.S.-led military campaign to topple Saddam Hussein has raised questions about their ability to carry out major new attacks.

The fears of senior Bush administration officials and private terrorism analysts that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden would attempt to "hijack" Muslim opposition to the Iraq war with a spectacular new attack have proved unfounded, even with American generals now occupying Saddam's Baghdad palaces.

"I think their credibility is increasingly on the line the longer we go without a successful terrorist strike," said Mark Burgess, director of the Terrorism Project at the Center for Defense Information.

"We know al Qaeda is a patient lot, but I don't know if they can afford to be too patient," he said. "Bin Laden made a lot of noise before the war about defending the Iraqi people, and so far there's nothing to show for it."

Despite a few suicide bombings that targeted U.S. forces in Iraq, speculation that Saddam's regime would resort to widespread terrorist attacks to disrupt the coalition campaign also did not pan out.

The link between the war in Iraq and the larger post-September 11 war on terrorism has been one of the most contested battlegrounds in the debate over toppling Saddam.

There's an opportunity here that we in the West should seize on: we should announce that there were no discernible operational connections between Saddam and al Qaeda, but that we toppled him as a result of 9-11 anyway and will topple Bashir Assad if there's another attack, then Muammar Qaddafi if there's another, and so forth... Our policy should clearly be reprisals not just against al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, but the regimes they support, regardless of whether those regimes aide them. Let al Qaeda not only have to explain why they've been so ineffectual but how they've actually been a detriment to their own vision of an Islamicist/pan-Arab Middle East.

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THE WAITING IS THE HARDEST PART

Discovery could silence debate over stem cells (Michael Bradley, April 25 2003, Sydney Morning Herald)

Scientists claim to have discovered a way of producing embryonic stem cells that could side-step the entire ethical debate surrounding such research.

Researchers from the US bio-tech company Stemron have produced embryos capable of providing stem cells, but which can never become human beings.

It is the first time scientists have used a technique called parthenogenesis on human cells.

Parthenogenesis is a form of reproduction in which the egg develops without fertilisation. The phenomenon occurs naturally in many insects, while artificial parthenogenesis has been achieved in almost all groups of animals, although it usually results in abnormal development.

Whether this turns out to be the breakthrough or whether it's days, months, or even years ahead, you know it's coming, which makes it even more repellant that so many folks--like Orrin Hatch, Nancy Reagan, Christopher Reeve and Michael Kinsley, to name a few--were willing to turn embryos into the moral equivalent of deli meat just because they were impatient.

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CARRION FEEDERS

Hawks Rip Into Mideast Plan: Neoconservatives and like-minded lawmakers blast State Department. (Edwin Chen, April 23, 2003, LA Times)

Emboldened by the U.S. military victory in Iraq, neoconservatives and their allies in Congress are mounting a preemptive campaign against the U.S. plan to implement a so-called road map for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. [...]

During the run-up to the Iraq war, President Bush announced his intention of unveiling the Middle East road map once Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority's prime minister-designate, forms his Cabinet and its members take office.

Bush made that commitment, at least in part, as a concession to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, his strongest ally on the war, who was concerned that Washington's failure to aggressively pursue an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord was enraging the Arab world.

As outlined in media reports, the plan details a series of reciprocal steps that Israel and the Palestinians would take leading up to the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005.

Neoconservatives take issue with the fact that it is a collaborative effort with the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.

Calling that arrangement a State Department "invention," Gingrich described it Tuesday as "a deliberate and systematic effort to undermine the president's policies procedurally by ensuring that they will consistently be watered down and distorted by the other three members."

Underlying such antagonism is the belief among many administration hawks, especially in the Pentagon, that Russia, France and Germany stymied U.S. efforts to obtain U.N. support for forcefully disarming Iraq.

"For us to invite them into a quartet is an absolute defeat before the process even begins," Gingrich said.

As a part of the new peace initiative, the Bush administration intends to press Israel to ease its crackdown in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

During an April 14 meeting at the White House, both Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security advisor, delivered that news to Dov Weisglass, an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who had brought to the White House Sharon's many reservations about the plan.

In an effort to present a united front, Rice included other senior administration officials whom Israel considers more sympathetic, among them Elliott Abrams, a top National Security Council advisor on the Middle East; I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney; and Douglas J. Feith, who is undersecretary of Defense for policy.

But Rice reportedly told Weisglass that the administration would make no changes to the road map before it was unveiled.

Here we see the neocons, who don't actually seem to believe in much more than the exercise of American power, drifting off into a little Cloud-Cuckoo land of their own. They imagine themselves "tough" if they deny they reality that there is going to be a Palestinian state--a position that is made easier since none of them have to worry about dealing with daily suicide bombings (yet anyway). But if America is now to stand for the idea that the Palestinian people should have no citizenship rights anywhere--neither in a state of their own, nor within Israel--we will have betrayed our own values just so the likes of Newt Gingrich can thump their chests. And should the bombings start here, it will be hard to say they aren't, on some level, justified.

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FOUR MEN AND A CLOSER

The Mechanics Of Baseball: Baseball has evolved in favor of the hitter. Here are nine factors that have changed the game. (JIM KAAT, April 2003, Popular Mechanics)

Critics of baseball will tell you that Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, N.Y., invented the game in 1839 and not a thing has changed since. Nothing could be further from the truth. First, no one has yet proved that Ol' Abner actually invented the game, and second, the game of baseball changes constantly--with every game, every day, and every player bringing something unique to the sport.

The peanuts and Cracker Jack are still there, but everything else is different than it was 20, 30, even five years ago. In my opinion, no sport has changed as radically as baseball has in the past 20 years. To me, baseball is a matter of who is in control--the pitcher or the hitter. The vast majority of the changes in major-league baseball over the past 20 years have favored putting the hitter in control. Why? Because fans would rather see an 11-8 ballgame with balls getting smacked over the fence than a 2-1 pitcher's duel. And hitters today are delivering.

Unfortunately, Mr. Kaat leaves out the most significant factor, which is poor management. If you look back at baseball stats from prior to the late-70s/early-80s, you'll find that the vast bulk of decisions and innings belong to only a handful of pitchers--four starters, a "closer" who went two or three innings if necessary, and a mop up guy for blowouts. Nowadays--thanks, or no thanks, to Whitey Herzog and Tony LaRussa--there's been a sea-change and every team has five starters, two set up men who go an inning each, and lefty and righty specialists who face only a batter or two per game, you just have way too many marginal pitchers tossing innings that matter.

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THE VELVET PUNDIT

Velvet President: Why Vaclav Havel is our era's George Orwell and more. (Matt Welch, May 2003, Reason)

Last fall, as the United States rumbled toward war against Saddam Hussein, literary reviews and higher-brow magazines wrestled with an intriguing if unlikely hypothetical: What would George Orwell say if he were here today?

Christopher Hitchens, the fire-breathing British journalist who kick-started the discussion with his book Why Orwell Matters, suggested that a contemporary Eric Blair "would have seen straight through the characters who chant 'No War On Iraq'" and helped the rest of us to "develop the fiber to call Al-Qaeda what it actually is." Washington Post book reviewer George Scialabba stated confidently that "Orwell would associate himself with the unsexy democratic left, notably Dissent and the American Prospect," and that "he might, in particular, have wondered aloud why the heinous terrorist murder of 3,000 Americans was a turning point in history." Commentary tried yet again to claim Orwell as a neocon, and The Weekly Standard's David Brooks argued that the great man's mantle and relevance had actually passed onto a new contrarian's shoulders: "At this moment, oddly enough, Hitchens matters more than Orwell."

At exactly the same time, the one man in the world of the living who could justifiably claim to be Orwell's heir was expounding almost daily on Saddam Hussein and international terrorism -- even while rushing through one of the most frenetic periods of a famously accomplished life. Vaclav Havel, the 66-year-old former Czech president who was term-limited out of office on February 2, built his reputation in the 1970s by being to eyewitness fact what George Orwell was to dystopian fiction. In other words, he used common sense to deconstruct rhetorical falsehoods, pulling apart the suffocating mesh of collectivist lies one carefully observed thread at a time.

Like Orwell, Havel was a fiction writer whose engagement with the world led him to master the nonfiction political essay. Both men, in self-described sentiment, were of "the left," yet both men infuriated the left with their stinging criticism and ornery independence. Both were haunted by the Death of God, delighted by the idiosyncratic habits of their countrymen, and physically diminished as a direct result of their confrontation with totalitarians (not to mention their love of tobacco). As essentially neurotic men with weak mustaches, both have given generations of normal citizens hope that, with discipline and effort, they too can shake propaganda from everyday language and stand up to the foulest dictatorships.

Unlike Orwell, Havel lived long enough to enjoy a robust third act, and his last six months in office demonstrated the same kind of restless, iconoclastic activism that has made him an enemy of ideologues and ally of freedom lovers for nearly five decades. [...[

The first targets of Havel?s considerable wrath and sarcasm were the poor fools making "halfhearted" efforts at creating "Socialism with a humanface." One of his first essays, 1965?s "On Evasive Thinking" (collected in the English-language volume Open Letters) makes cruel sport of a newspaper essayist who -- not unlike his modern American counterparts -- attempted to assess and then dismiss the broader significance of a temporal tragedy, in this case, a building ledge falling and killing a passerby. "The public," Havel wrote, "again showed more intelligence and humanity than the writer, for it had understood that the so-called prospects of mankind are nothing but an empty platitude if they distract us from our particular worry about who might be killed by [another] window ledge, and what will happen should it fall on a group of nursery-school children out for a walk."

Here, in Havel?s earliest essay to be translated into English, you can already find the four main themes that have animated his adult nonfiction writing ever since. One is the responsibility to make the world a better place. Another is that the slightest bit of personal dishonesty warps the soul. ("The minute we begin turning a blind eye to what we don't like in each other?s writing, the minute we begin to back away from our own inner norms, to accommodate ourselves to each other, cut deals with each other over poetics, we will in fact set ourselves against each other...until one day we will disappear in a general fog of mutual admiration.")

A third theme is that ideology-driven governance is practically doomed to fail. ("It prevents whoever has it in his power to solve the problem of the Prague facades from understanding that he bears responsibility for something and that he can't lie his way out of that responsibility.") Finally, there is his belief in the revolutionary potency of individuals speaking freely and "living in truth."

The last of these phenomena became nearly extinct after the tanks of 1968 rolled in from Russia. The new rulers ushered in the "normalization" period, during which tens of thousands emigrated and most "nonconformist" writers (including Havel) were inconvenienced, banned, or sometimes just locked away. In April 1975, facing an utterly demoralized country and an understandable case of writer?s block, Havel committed an act of such sheer ballsiness that the shock waves are still being felt in repressive countries 30 years later. He simply sat down and, knowing that he'd likely be imprisoned for his efforts, wrote an open letter to his dictator, Gustav Husak, explaining in painstaking detail just why and how totalitarianism wasruining Czechoslovakia.

"So far," Havel scolded Husak, "you and your government have chosen the easy way out for yourselves, and the most dangerous road for society: the path of inner decay for the sake of outward appearances; of deadening life for the sake of increasing uniformity; of deepening the spiritual and moral crisis of our society, and ceaselessly degrading human dignity, for the puny sake of protecting your own power."

It was the Big Bang that set off the dissident movement in Central Europe. For those lucky enough to read an illegally retyped copy or hear it broadcast over Radio Free Europe, the effect was not unlike what happened to the 5,000 people who bought the Velvet Underground's first record: After the shock and initial pleasure wore off, many said, "Wait a minute, I can do this too!" By standing up to a system that had forced every citizen to make a thousand daily compromises, Havel was suggesting a novel new tactic: Have the self-respect to tell the truth, never mind the consequences, and maybe you'll put the bastards on the defensive.

We like Matt Welch anyway, but note the diabolically clever conceit of this essay: first he dismisses the attempts of others to claim the mantle of George Orwell's approval for their position on the war, then grants the rightful mantle to Havel, who just happens to be pro-war. That's how you get to be a professional pundit.

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HEY, WE PAIRED THE MOP SQUEEZERS!

U.S. Captures Four Top Iraqis (Fox News, April 23, 2003)

Coalition troops in Iraq captured four top former officials of Saddam Hussein's regime Wednesday, including the air defense force commander and the former head of military intelligence.

The highest-ranking capture is Muzahim Sa'b Hassan al-Tikriti, who headed Iraq's air defenses under Saddam. He was No. 10 on the U.S. list of the top 55 most wanted officials from Saddam's regime and the queen of diamonds in the military's deck of playing cards listing those officials.

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HARVEST OF HATE

France's Headscarf Problem (Theodore Dalrymple, 23 April 2003, City Journal)

The French Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, is the first man for a long time to hold that post who has shown the courage and determination to confront France's growing social problems. He has put policemen back on the beat; he is testing drivers of crashed cars for the presence of cannabis in their urine. But he made a rod with which to beat his own back in creating the Union of French Islamic Organizations as an intermediary between French Muslims and the French government. He hoped that moderates would control the new group, but instead it has given extremists a platform from which to voice their demands. Last weekend, he brought down the extremists' ire by re-opening the question of the wearing of the headscarf by Muslim girls and women in a speech to the new Islamic union.

The fundamentalists booed Sarkozy, though a smattering of the women in the audience applauded when he remarked that the law required that photographs for the compulsory identity card should be taken bareheaded: that is to say, without a headscarf. He was implicitly asserting the supremacy of the law of the state over any religious custom.

The Conseil d'Etat had not long before ruled that the wearing of headscarves by Muslim girls at school was legal (it had previously been banned), provided that it gave rise to no conflict. This, of course, was asking for the circle to be squared: and conflict over headscarves duly started up again in several schools almost at once. But, in a spirit completely contrary to the Conseil d'Etat's ruling, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin announced his intention of prohibiting by law the wearing of the headscarf in the exercise of any public function. He did so in name of the difference between the public and the private sphere, and of the secularism of the state.

The wearing of the headscarf has clearly become a matter of the deepest symbolic significance in France, a matter over which it is not impossible to see hundreds or even thousands eventually being killed. What might appear to an outsider as a trivial disagreement is actually one of great philosophical importance-a fact that both parties to the disagreement instinctively understand.

While asking the women to remove the scarf for an identification photo seems entirely reasonable, banning the veil entirely would not be mere secularism but genuine religious hostility. Given that the French won't be in control there much longer, they might want to be careful about sowing such hostility, because they may not like what they reap.

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DIS-MAY

Hitler's Forgotten Library: The Man, His Books, and His Search for God (Timothy W. Ryback, May 2003, The Atlantic Monthly)

By his own admission, Hitler was not a big fan of novels, though he once ranked Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Don Quixote (he had a special affection for the edition illustrated by Gustave Dore) among the world's greatest works of literature. The one novelist we know Hitler loved and read was Karl May, a German writer of cheap American-style westerns. In the spring of 1933, just months after the Nazis seized power, Oskar Achenbach, a Munich-based journalist, toured the Berghof-in the Führer's absence-and discovered a shelf of Karl May novels at Hitler's bedside. "The bedroom of the Führer is of spartan simplicity," Achenbach reported in the Sonntag Morgenpost. "Brass bed, closet, toiletries, a few chairs, those are all the furnishings. On a bookshelf are works on politics and diplomacy, a few brochures and books on the care of German shepherds, and then-pay attention you German boys! Then comes an entire row of books by-Karl May! Winnetou, Old Surehand, Bad Guy, all our dear old friends." During the war Hitler reportedly admonished his generals for their lack of imagination and recommended that they all read Karl May. Albert Speer recounted in his Spandau diaries,

"Hitler was wont to say that he had always been deeply impressed by the tactical finesse and circumspection thatKarl May conferred upon his character Winnetou ... And he would add that during his reading hours at night, when faced by seemingly hopeless situations, he would still reach for those stories, that they gave him courage like works of philosophy for others or the Bible for elderly people.

Poor Karl May, he really deserves better than the fans he's found.

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BOWLING TOGETHER IN GUATEMALA

Guatemala at the Crossroads: The Future of Free Market Reforms (Anthony B. Bradley, April 23, 2003, Acton Commentary)

Prior to the administration of the country's present leader, Guatemala underwent significant economic and political development. Under the leadership of President Alfonso Portillo, however, the country has experienced a sharp reversal of many of the pre-1999 free-market reforms. The Portillo Administration's enactment of higher taxes and its cavalier treatment of the rule of law have stymied the nation's economic development.

These conditions have brought about a renewed interest in the free-market reforms that characterized government policy in the 1990s. The March conferences in which I participated were designed to bring together some of Guatemala's "best and brightest" to discuss the future of free market reforms and, by extension, the very future of Guatemala itself. The fundamental conviction of all the sponsoring organizations is that the future of Guatemala lies not with a centralized federal structure dictating economic policy, but with the economic and moral components of a revitalized civil society working in concert for the economic development of Guatemala.

Rodrigo Callejas, an attorney from Guatemala City and one of the conference organizers, provides critical insight into the changes necessary to unlock the economic and political potential of Guatemala. Callejas notes that, for Guatemala to have continued economic growth, "a national dialogue has to be set in order for all sectors of Guatemalan society to agree upon a long-term national vision, based upon a stable legal framework, rule of law, a democratic government, and a socially-aware free market economic system."

However, like other countries in the region, the desired free-market "culture" needed for long-term, systemic change in Guatemala has been deterred by an overbearing and unwieldy federal structure. This structure has made Guatemala, especially in the perception of most investors, a very unfriendly place for business. Significant structural reforms are needed-and needed immediately-if Guatemala is to survive and be competitive in the international marketplace. Callejas is convinced that new growth will ensue when Guatemala's assets are capitalized and when there is "a single tributary scheme that will motivate investors and provide them with the stability for their investments."

Perhaps such a possibility looms more imminently than one imagines, since federal elections are scheduled for November. The next generation of Guatemala's leaders, like Callejas, want to improve economic conditions by seeking "to take away the overwhelming power that the government actually has, and decentralize it to the civil society." A new vision for Guatemala is needed, continues Callejas, where " the government has to understand that its role is to serve . . . and respond to the needs of entrepreneurs in a just and efficient way."

His is not a lone voice. Organizations such as IPRES explore and disseminate the dynamic relationship between ethics, social responsibility, and the institutions of the free-market. A fundamental principle of The Instituto de Gobernanza is to promote the principles of limited government and respect for the autonomy of civil society.

Not to be trite, but it seems possible it may be less important for a nation to embrace capitalism than social capitalism.

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FTC FILES

European economic giant remains a political pygmy (CATHERINE FIELD, 23.04.2003, NZ Herald)

The best chance of fixing these problems came last year with the launch of a conference to overhaul Europe's institutions in the runup to the "Big Bang", when EU membership expands from 15 to 25 countries in May 2004.

The convention, chaired by former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, is due to submit its recommendations by the end of June. Some of its thinking has been ambitiously integrationist. Some delegates have suggested changing the name of the EU to the United States of Europe, appointing a permanent EU president, rather than rotating the presidency every six months, and having an EU foreign minister.

But the outcome of the Iraqi war has clearly tipped in favour of Britain and other "Euro-realists", who want an EU where member states co-operate if they can, but keep significant competencies, such as foreign policy and defence, for themselves. The pragmatists are now in the ascendancy, and are determined to water down the convention's ambitious reforms, or reject them outright if need be.

If so, the Europe of the future will speak with several voices rather than a single voice, and there will be vocal demands for intimate ties with Washington and Nato, opposing the radicals who want to weaken the transatlantic connection and set up the EU as a potential challenger to the US. The pro-US strand will be reinforced next year by the induction of Eastern countries such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

Even the economic ties that exist now are unfortunate, but if we've managed to slow or stop further political integration, and thereby saved Britain, this war will have been well worthwhile regardless of what happens to Iraq.

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THE ROAD TO ROSWELL

St Paul converted by epileptic fit, suggests BBC (Jonathan Petre and Jonathan Wynne-Jones, 19/04/2003, Daily Telegraph)

A documentary about St Paul has infuriated Christians by suggesting that the apostle's conversion on the road to Damascus may have been caused by an epileptic fit or a freak lightning bolt.

In one of the Bible's most dramatic stories, Paul was transformed from a zealous persecutor of Christianity into one of its most powerful advocates after being struck down by a blinding light.

Trembling and on his knees, he heard the voice of God asking: "Why do you persecute me?" Soon after, he began the missionary journeys that spread Christianity across the Roman Empire.

The documentary, to be broadcast on BBC1 on May 11, is presented by Jonathan Edwards, the athlete and evangelical. It challenges the belief that Paul's conversion was caused by divine intervention by quoting scientists who link religious experience with epilepsy.

It suggests that the apostle's reference to an ailment which he described as "a thorn in the flesh, which acts as Satan's messenger to beat me, and keep me from being proud" could be the condition. [...]

An even more bizarre theory, suggested by Dr John Derr, an American earthquake expert, is that Paul could have been struck by a bolt of electro-magnetic energy, similar to ball lightning, released by an earthquake.

It's sad to see the venerable Bebe participate in the cover-up: everyone knows it was an alien abduction.

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THE OTHER SHOE

Still Advising (Bob Ingle, 9/22/02, Gannett New Jersey)

Two days later, the governor was back at the station for his monthly call- in with News Director Eric Scott, who asked McGreevey to reveal the nature of his relationship with Golan Cipel, the former $110,000 aide sans job description.

"Very good friends," said McGreevey. "Remains a good friend?" probed Scott. "Yes," said McGreevey.

Scott also asked the Guv if he accompanied Cipel on a house-hunting expedition when the young Israeli citizen looked at a condo he eventually purchased not far from Drumthwacket, the governor's mansion.

McGreevey said he saw the place and told Cipel it made sense. The governor said he had done as much for others.

When asked if McGreevey still seeks counsel from Cipel, the Guv said, "Sure. Definitely." Rest well tonight, New Jersey.

Ed Driscoll notes a story about Republican prospects brightening in NJ, especially because Governor Jim McGreevey continues to shoot himself in the feet. And, from what our sources tell us, the Golan Cipel story may end up being even more harmful than it's been so far, leaving Mr. McGreevey very vulnerable.

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AMERICAN GIGOLO

Kerry Seeing Red? (Dotty Lynch, Douglas Kiker, Alex Hahn and Joanna Schubert, April, 23, 2003, CBS News)

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., tells the Boston Globe that he might consider tapping into his wife's fortune to compensate for the possibility of a $200 million fundraising juggernaut by President Bush.

Geez, he's like what we used to call a "kept man". Does he pumice the dead skin off her feet when she snaps?

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V-P DAY

Palestinian leaders agree cabinet (BBC, 4/23/03)

Yasser Arafat and his prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, have ended a dispute over who will take key security roles in a new Palestinian cabinet.

The agreement reached hours before a midnight deadline puts Mr Abbas as interior minister as well as prime minister while Mohammed Dahlan will report to him as minister of state for security.

Now it's incumbent upon America, Britain, and Israel to hand Mr. Abbas enough for him to show that his victory is worth the Palestinian people's while.

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THE WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY...AGAIN

French now say war maybe was a good idea (CHENE BLIGNAUT, April 23, 2003, Christian Science Monitor

Natalie Lavarra is having second thoughts about her position on the Iraq war.

''I still think it was right of [French President Jacques] Chirac to say no to the war,'' says the Paris secretary. ''But when I saw how happy the Iraqis were . . . I had to ask myself whether we didn't perhaps make a mistake.'' [...]

Chirac's staunch resistance boosted his popularity to an all-time high. But despite still scoring 65 percent approval ratings in French polls, his role has changed from that of an international hero walking the moral high ground to what appears to be a sulking lone voice, fighting not to be excluded from sharing in the spoils of the war.

The result, says Alain Madelin, a Conservative politician who opposed France's war policy, is that Chirac has been presented as Saddam's best friend.

''The Iraqis feel today they had been liberated without--and even against--the will of France,'' he says.

With apologies to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: The French--ten generations of imbeciles is enough.

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FIGHTING THE NEXT WAR

Rumsfeld Urges Overhaul of Pentagon Civil Service: Pay for Performance, Shift of 320,000 Jobs, Other Major Powers Sought in Legislation (Christopher Lee, April 23, 2003, Washington Post)

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wants to implement sweeping changes in the way civilian employees are hired, paid and promoted in the Defense Department.

Pentagon officials recently sent a 205-page bill to Capitol Hill detailing a proposed overhaul of the civil service system that would replace guaranteed annual raises for 470,000 workers with a pay-for-performance plan. It also would shift as many as 320,000 military members out of jobs that could be done by civilians, make it easier for the Defense Department to contract out work to the private sector and allow managers to hire and transfer employees without time-consuming competitions.

Moreover, the proposal would grant the defense secretary the power to implement major personnel changes over the opposition of the Office of Personnel Management and labor unions.

Pentagon officials said the changes are necessary to shape the Defense Department into a modern, responsive bureaucracy capable of efficiently carrying out the government's most important mission, protecting its citizens.

"We are trying to create a system in which people can think in one cohesive unit, and then act," said David S. Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, speaking yesterday at a human resources forum hosted by the IBM Endowment for the Business of Government.

"The current civil service system is rigid. It is not agile," Chu said. "We cannot succeed with the current system."

On the other hand (see below), if George W. Bush can break the civil service across the whole of government, it will be a more important achievement than anything else he's yet done.

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FIGHTING THE LAST WAR

Bush Backs Greenspan for Another Term at Fed (RICHARD W. STEVENSON, 4/23/03, NY Times)

President Bush said today that Alan Greenspan deserved appointment to a fifth term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, in effect leaving to Mr. Greenspan the decision of whether to extend his long tenure as head of the central bank.

Responding to a question in an interview with financial journalists about whether Mr. Greenspan had done well enough to be reappointed, Mr. Bush replied: "Yes. I think Alan Greenspan should get another term." White House officials said later that Mr. Bush would renominate Mr. Greenspan next year before Mr. Greenspan's current four-year term expires in June.

This--assuming the announcement is serious and not just an attempt to reassure the markets--is the second major misstep of the Bush Administration (the first was signing the Campaign Finance Reform law--good politics, bad constitutionalism). The problem with Fed chairmen is that they tend to fight the battles of their youth, rather than the battle of the day. Thus, Chairman Greenspan has remained an inflation hawk throughout over a decade of price stagnation or even deflation. He caused the current recession by tightening interest rates as we headed into surplus, a time when rates obviously should have been falling, and rates today should be at 0% or lower.

We've a solution to this problem though: the Fed chairman, if there's going to be one, should be required to be under thirty years of age. That way, the battles of his youth are the battles of the day.

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60-40 VISION

Bush presses Edgar to run for Senate (LYNN SWEET, April 23, 2003, Chicago Sun-Times)

President Bush called former Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar to persuade him to run for the Senate on Monday, and on Tuesday Edgar said he was "seriously'' considering the possibility. [...]

After the call from the president, Edgar dined at Mike Ditka's Restaurant in Chicago with a group of political intimates and top staffers from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, who flew to the city as part of a campaign to convince Edgar to run.

The dinner group included the committee's executive director, Jay Timmons, and its political director, Patrick Davis, as well as GOP consultant Carter Hendren and Bob Kjellendar, a member of the Republican National Committee and college friend of Bush's senior political strategist, Karl Rove. [...]

The meeting at Ditka's was described as a session where Edgar was "getting up to speed'' on new campaign finance laws and what would be involved in a federal campaign. Edgar, who served as governor for eight years and secretary of state for 10 years, has never been in a federal race.

With his considerable stature in the state, Edgar quickly emerged as the consensus pick of GOP officials. Illinois Republicans have a thin bench, and if Edgar decides not to run the attention would shift to State Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka, the state party chairman, who said last week her attention was focused on getting Edgar to say "yes."

What's not clear is if Edgar wants to give up his comfortable lifestyle, cushioned with money from teaching, lobbying and serving on corporate boards.

Mr. Bush really needs to run better in the Rust Belt than he did in 2000 and getting a strong top of the state ticket in IL would be a great help. If they can recruit Gov. Edgar, we'd expect to see the President log a lot of time in IL on his way to SD, WA, NV, and CA.

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TO MARKET

Crossroads of Culture (PETER WATSON, 4/21/03, NY Times)

[T]he golden age that Arab fundamentalists refer to was achieved only because Baghdad was wide open to foreign influences, much as the United States at its birth imported ideas of the Enlightenment from Europe and made more of them than did the Old World.

One can go further. Many of the scholars who translated the manuscripts of the Greeks, Indians and Chinese, and who flocked to Baghdad in the golden age, were Christians, Jews and pagans. Although the West as we know it didn't exist in the 9th and 10th centuries, one could say that the Arab world was, for a time, part of the intellectual circle that would become the West. Many of the Greek classics reached Europe via Muslim Toledo, in Spain, where they were translated from Arabic into Latin.

In other words, there is no need for the Arab world to fear the West--or to despise it, for that matter. If Arab history is any guide, more prosperity comes from openness, receptivity and curiosity than from the closed, self-referential world of fundamentalist religions. One of the reasons the golden age happened was that the natural sciences and the so-called Islamic sciences (or religious study) were kept separate in the colleges of the day. It seems no coincidence that only when the religious authorities started to interfere with the natural sciences, starting in the 11th century, did the golden age lose its glitter.

Historically, the place we now call Iraq has always been the most secular of Arab states. That is a precious asset. Whatever government follows Saddam Hussein, it must continue to turn its face against fundamentalism. The acrimony last week between imams and secular Iraqis at meetings on the shape of the new Iraq was worrisome, if not surprising. Unless the next Arab generation, in Iraq and elsewhere, embraces the intellectual openness that so characterized the Baghdad of the 9th and 10th centuries, a second Arab miracle is unthinkable.

However it came to pass--and it remains the most interesting question in all of human history--there arose in England at roughly the same time a set of theories that held that there should be a generally free market in religion (protestantism, with a small "p"), politics (democracy), and economics (capitalism). The process reached its highwater mark in 1776 with the publication of the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Though it's been pretty much downhill ever since, Britain and America went on to demonstrate, thus far conclusively, that a society predominantly structured around these free markets affords unique competitive advantages vis-a-vis societies that restrict any one of the three, and enormous advatages against those that restrict two or all three.

Now, some would have us believe that this demonstrates that freedom is the ultimate value and end of humankind and suffices to render a great society. Freedom, in this vision, is an engine that produces itself. Would that this were true, for were it, all a nation would have to do is create an initial condition of freedom and it would endure always. In fact, few of the nations that adopted the Anglo-American model remained very free for any length of time (see for example the innumerable temporary democracies of Africa and Latin America); most of those where the general structure of freedom does still obtain are now rather statist and authoritarian, even if relatively benevolent (see for example Old Europe); and even the states of the Anglosphere, to varying degrees, are a good deal less free today than they were in the 19th Century. As it turns out, the great mass of men don't necessarily want to be free, or, at the very least, aren't prepared to accept the burdens which make freedom sustainable, a phenomenon that has long been recognized by conservative philosophers and expounded upon by them in various memorable ways, a few of which follow:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:

from bondage to spiritual faith;

from spiritual faith to great courage;

from courage to liberty;

from liberty to abundance;

from abundance to selfishness;

from selfishness to complacency;

from complacency to apathy;

from apathy to dependency;

from dependency back again to bondage.
-Sir Alex Fraser Tytler (1742-1813)

My thesis...is this: the very perfection with which the XIXth Century gave an organisation to certain orders of existence has caused the masses benefited thereby to consider it, not as an organised, but as a natural system. Thus is explained and defined the absurd state of mind revealed by these masses; they are only concerned with their own well-being, and at the same time they remain alien to the cause of that well-being. As they do not see, behind the benefits of civilisation, marvels of invention and construction which can only be maintained by great effort and foresight, they imagine that their role is limited to demanding these benefits peremptorily, as if they were natural rights. In the disturbances caused by scarcity of food, the mob goes in search of bread, and the means it employs is generally to wreck the bakeries. This may serve as a symbol of the attitude adopted, on a greater and more complicated scale, by the masses of to-day towards the civilisation by which they are supported.
-Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

If freedom entails responsibility, a fair proportion of mankind would prefer servitude; for it is far, far better to receive three meals a day and be told what to do than to take the consequences of one's own self-destructive choices. It is, moreover, a truth universally unacknowledged that freedom without understanding of what to do with it is a complete nightmare.

Such freedom is a nightmare, of course, not only for those who possess it, but for everyone around them. A man who does not know what to do with his freedom is like a box of fireworks into which a lighted match is thrown: he goes off in all directions at once. And such, multiplied by several millions, is modern society. The welfare state is - or has become - a giant organisation to shelter people from the natural consequences of their own disastrous choices, thus infantilising them and turning them into semi-dependants, to the great joy of their power-mad rulers.
--ESSAY: Don't set the people free (Theodore Dalrymple, 12/14/02, The Spectator)
Well, you get the idea. So the question arises: what is it that has acted as a bulwark in the Anglosphere more than elsewhere, but most especially in America, to slow this slide and extend the period during which freedom--broadly speaking--has prevailed? It would seem self-evident that the difference lies in the basis upon which we've erected our freedom and the internalization of morality that acts as a self-limitation on extreme freedom. Thus, America at its Independence asserted that certain rights precede the State and derive from the fact of Man's Creation by a God who Thomas Jefferson described this as, "God, the creator, preserver, and supreme ruler of the universe, the author of all the relations of morality, and of the laws and obligations these infer". The importance of this derivation has been recognized by no less a modern democratic hero than Vaclav Havel:

I have often asked myself why human beings have any rights at all. I always come to the conclusion that human rights, human freedoms, and human dignity have their deepest roots somewhere outside the perceptible world. These values are as powerful as they are because, under certain circumstances, people accept them without compulsion and are willing to die for them, and they make sense only in the perspective of the infinite and the eternal. . . . While the state is a human creation, human beings are the creation of God.

And the matter has been written about quite brilliantly by Robert Kraynak.

If, on the other hand, you try to ground rights and freedom in the State itself, they must obviously be transitory. For, in a democracy, anytime there's a majority in favor of something, your "rights" can be redefined, and what recourse have you?

The importance of all this, as the reform of the Islamic world (hopefully) goes forward, is that mere openness is not enough. Freedom, in and of itself, will not restore the greatness of Islam. Freedom would be a welcome improvement over what prevails now and would give the Middle East a boost, but, if in the process of freeing themselves they lose their moral grounding, their new golden age will be as short and unhappy as that of France and Germany and the rest of post-Christian Old Europe has been. That would be a true tragedy.

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YEAH, BUT IN THE END, ALL YOU HAVE TO SHOW FOR IT IS A HOME...

Lending data show UK's spending spree continues (Jennifer Hughes, April 22 2003, Financial Times)

Britons continued spending apace last month, according to a report by the British Banker's Association which showed strong mortgage lending and weak savings rates.

This is an archetypal statement of a particular brand of economic idiocy. Economists prattle on endlessly about how much higher Japanese savings rates are than those in America (or Britain). Unfortunately, the Japanese have no other options of what to do with their money and those savings are all in accounts that pay about .01% interest these days. Meanwhile, in the States, we don't have much in our savings accounts, but we do happen to own our own homes and have 401k's, neither of which are factored into savings rates. Who really has the problem: us or Japan?

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RANTO, ERGO SUM

Paul Cella's off his meds, and we all get to watch.

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ALL POWER TO THE DE-GENERATES

Supertots And Frankenkids: On the Rights of Those Not Yet Designed (Erik Baard, April 23 - 29, 2003, Village Voice)

The personal decisions that would accompany genetic enhancement are frightening. How would you feel about your first child when the second one comes bundled with upgrades? Could the younger sibling ever enjoy a sense of real achievement, or would the kid forever wonder if that three-minute mile had been written in before birth? "I suppose if I were the only one enhanced, I'd feel a bit of a cheat," Watson admits. Where do you draw the line between risks and rewards? Changing the germ line—those genes that will be passed onto future generations--must be done ahead of the fetus's development, and so carries tremendous potential for cascades of disaster. Somatic therapies--delivering genes to a living person--have loosed cancers in test subjects.

Even in best-case scenarios, the questions are endless. Will genetically enhanced people be held back by society, just as gifted students are now woefully underserved? Should you have to pay insurance premiums inflated by others whose parents lacked the foresight to eliminate disease genes? How much privacy protection should such people have? Pity the presidential candidate who must reveal that she's been enhanced by a lab instead of a blue-blood pedigree.

Why should the DNA-boosted have to follow our usual strictures at all? "The minimum time you must invest to do a Ph.D. these days is something like three years," says Princeton philosopher Peter Singer. "But why force someone to do it in three years when it can be done in three months?" Need a person with faster reaction times be stuck driving 55 miles per hour?

Social pressure may end up curbing wild-eyed genetic hubris, says Princeton molecular biology professor Lee Silver. "Parents want kids like themselves, except maybe a little smarter," he says. "Not beyond the curve, but on the leading edge of the curve. I think this is all going to happen very slowly, step by step. That's much more insidious, of course."

The means to achieve GM babies are spreading, and if the practice ever catches on, it'll be because parents are trying to keep up with the Joneses.

Douglas Osheroff, a Nobelist for physics, opposes genetic enhancement on principle. Instead of molecular manipulation, he favors providing a stimulating environment, which as a Stanford professor, he could provide in spades. But even he concedes, "If it appeared that [my children] would not be competitive unless they were engineered, I suppose I would seriously consider this process."

So once created, what kind of reception would those kids get? Most visions of genetic engineering--Gattaca, Brave New World--focus on the danger of having a genetic uber-class. These dystopian renderings overlook one crucial fact: Time and again, mob rule has eliminated elites, real or perceived. "This could be another way privilege is concentrated and the underclass will be angry," Watson says. "The underclass has always been angry, sometimes with good reason."

Mr. Baard, of course, also overlooks one crucial fact: since these new beings will in fact be superior there's even less reason to believe that the underclass will be able to do anything with their anger than they've been able to do in the past, when their inferiority was, at least arguably, artificially imposed by social structures.

Meanwhile, we highly recommend Gattaca.

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RETEACHING THE OSIRAK LESSON

US draws up plan to bomb North Korea's nuclear plant (AFP, Apr 22, 2003)

The Pentagon has produced detailed plans to bomb North Korea's nuclear plant at Yongbyon if the Stalinist state goes ahead with reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel rods, an Australian report said.

Citing "well-informed sources close to US thinking", The Australian newspaper said the plan also included a US strike against North Korean heavy artillery in the hills above the border with South Korea.

This should be done regardless of whether negotiations might temporarily achieve the same thing. North Korea should be made an example of--the lesson being a kind of robust non-proliferation--that we won't allow any other countries to develop nuclear weapons or the capacity to deliver them.

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IN THE IMAGE OF GOD MADE HE MAN

Animals Suffer a Perpetual 'Holocaust' (Stephen R. Dujack, April 21, 2003, LA Times)

Isaac Bashevis Singer fled Nazi Europe in 1935 and came to this country. He married my grandmother, who had escaped from Hitler's Germany in 1940. He went on to become a lauded author and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978. His family--those who stayed behind--were killed in the concentration camps.

My grandfather was also a principled vegetarian. He was one of the first to equate the wholesale slaughter of humans to what we perpetrate against animals every day in slaughterhouses. He realized that the systems of oppression and murder that had been used in the Holocaust were the systems being used to confine, oppress and slaughter animals. He attributed to a character in one of his books something he believed in himself: "In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis. For [them], it is an eternal Treblinka." [...]

The Holocaust happened because ordinary people chose to ignore the extraordinary oppression and abuse being inflicted on innocents by the Nazis. Millions of people went about their daily lives, knowingly turning a blind eye to the suffering of those they didn't relate to, those who were deemed "unworthy of life."

My grandfather often said that this mind-set, whether it manifested itself as the oppression of animals or of people, exemplified the most hideous and dangerous of all racist principles. As Adorno said, "Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: They're only animals." We all have the power to stop suffering and misery every time we sit down to eat.

Well, yeah, except for one thing: THEY ARE ONLY ANIMALS! And people wonder why we think the idea of human progress is a farce...

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ONLY 44 YEARS TO RECOGNIZE A DICTATOR

Coddling Castro No Longer? (Michael Gonzalez, Wall Street Journal Europe, 4/23/2003, subscribers only)

The European left is having one of its sudden flashes of the obvious. Every time you pick up a paper these days in Europe you find out that some intellectual, journalist or union leader is coming around to the view that Fidel Castro is not such a good egg after all and that he may be depriving Cubans of their basic freedoms, when not their lives. Some socialist politicians are even insisting that, actually, they were the first to denounce Castro....

Jose Saramago, a Portuguese communist who had defended Castro for years, suddenly last week bid adios to his favorite uniformed tinpot dictator. In the briefest of notes to the Madrid daily El Pais, Mr. Saramago, a novelist, wrote words that have now become famous, because they have been quoted so often: "This is as far as I go. From now on Cuba will go its way, but I'll stay."

"To dissent is a right that is found and will be found written in invisible ink in every declaration of human rights past, present and future," the Nobel laureate wrote. "Cuba has won no heroic battle by executing those three men but it has lost my confidence, damaged my hopes, cheated my dreams."

I've long suspected that the dominant leftist trait just might be narcissism. Yes, Cuba was a cruel tyranny for 44 years, but that didn't justify opposing them; now, however, they have "lost my confidence, damaged my hopes, cheated my dreams" -- off with Castro's head!

I also like the "invisible ink" line. Clever of those authors of human rights declarations to put some rights in visible ink and others in invisible.

From Mexico, novelist Carlos Fuentes, like Mr. Saramago a supporter of Castro until yesterday, said this too was as far as he would go. But for lovers of Latin American magical realism, Mr. Fuentes put his criticism of Castro in its proper context. "I congratulate Saramago for drawing his line in the sand. Here's mine: against Bush, against Castro."

Clearly, abandoning an elderly dictator is not the same thing as seeing the light.

Back in the U.S., the stifling of dissent under the Bush regime continues apace:

After showing his documentary about Castro, "Comandante" at the Berlin Film Festival in February, [Oliver] Stone said of the dictator he had been privileged enough to spend three days with: "We should look to him as one of the Earth's wisest people, one of the people we should consult." Mr. Stone described Castro as "a very driven man, a very moral man. He's very concerned about his country. He's selfless in that way."

The U.S. cable network Home Box Office, which had planned to air the Stone paean to Castro next month, has now put it on ice. "In light of the recent alarming events in the country, the film seems somewhat dated or incomplete," said HBO.

Strangely, HBO didn't acknowledge the influence upon its decision of the USA Patriot Act.

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BETWEEN THE ROCK AND THE REICH

Pro-Franco book a bestseller in Spain (Giles Tremlett, April 22, 2003, The Guardian)

A controversial, revisionist history of the Spanish civil war which claims it was sparked by a leftwing revolution and that Winston Churchill was crueller than General Francisco Franco has proved a surprise publishing success.

The Myths of the Civil War, by the former communist guerrilla turned Franco apologist Pio Moa, has outraged the Spanish left and many mainstream historians with its attacks on the icons of the period. [...]

"Franco did not think he had rebelled against a democratic republic but against an extreme danger of revolution ... Undoubtedly, he was right," Moa states.

"Franco's victory saved Spain from a traumatic revolution ... his regime saved it from involvement in the world war, modernised society and established the conditions for a stable democracy," he adds.

Moa paints those who joined the International Brigades in the late 1930s to fight Franco as a bunch of lawless, anti-Spanish communists.

He lashes out at historians who have written about Franco and the civil war, including the British author Paul Preston, and claims there is a leftwing academic plot to demonise the dictator.

Moa, who in 1976, the year after Franco died, helped found an armed communist revolutionary group, now blames modern rightwing politicians for not defending the dictator's reputation. "The right will swallow anything just so that it does not seem itself to be Francoist," he complains.

We, on the other hand, are unabashedly pro-Franco. The funniest part of the story is just to look at the claims that Mr. Tremlett cites with apparent disbelief:

* Franco fought a dangerous revolution

* Franco kept Spain out of WWII

* Franco established the conditions in which democracy could eventually flourish

* Those who fought with the International Brigades were "anti-Spanish communists"

* Leftwing academics have demonized Franco

* Conservatives, who should defend him, are afraid of being branded fascists

Not only are these points all true, they're basically inarguable.

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60-40 VISION

Fla. Sen. Graham May Not Seek 4th Term (BRENT KALLESTAD, April 22, 2003, Associated Press)

Democratic presidential hopeful Bob Graham said Tuesday that he's urging potential successors to start working on their bids to replace him in the U.S. Senate.

The Florida lawmaker has not ruled out seeking a fourth term next year if his presidential campaign falters. Still, a handful of state Democrats have expressed interest in the race, and Graham said he has heard from several.

"I've been encouraging them to get organized, start forming a campaign and be ready to go," he said during a campaign appearance.

Democrats are learning the bitter lesson that Republicans knew so well from 1930 to 1980--senior Congressmen don't much like being the ranking minority member of a committee. If there's no prospect of being the Chairman in the near future, they tend not to hang around.

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CRANKING THE TORQUE

Blair joins last push for Palestinian cabinet (Conal Urquhart, April 23, 2003, The Guardian)

Tony Blair joined an international push to rescue the Israeli-Palestinian peace process yesterday by urging Yasser Arafat to make every effort to help his prime minister designate, Mahmoud Abbas, form a cabinet.

If an agreed cabinet is not given to the Palestinian legislative council by tonight Mr Arafat will have to nominate another prime minister and the hope of progress to peace will be dashed, for the time being at least.

Mr Blair phoned Mr Arafat at his headquarters in Ramallah and urged him to overcome his differences with Mr Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, whom Mr Arafat appointed prime minister in March.

The main sticking point between Mr Arafat, president of the Palestinian Authority, and his nominee seems to be Mr Abbas's wish to appoint Mohammed Dahlan his head of security.

The European Union's Middle East peace envoy, Miguel Moratinos, and many national governments have also been putting pressure on Mr Arafat.

It is said that when Mr Moratinos told him that the EU would accept no one but Mr Abbas as prime minister, Mr Arafat screamed at him and slammed down the phone.

Mr Arafat has also had calls from Jordan, Egypt, Spain, Germany and the US.

Let's see if the Europeans are willing to walk away from Palestine if Arafat doesn't yield power.

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THE STRANGE CASE OF THE DOPPELGANGERS WHO DON'T BARK

Parallel Universes: Not just a staple of science fiction, other universes are a direct implication of cosmological observations (Max Tegmark, April 14, 2003, Scientific American)

Is there a copy of you reading this article? A person who is not you but who lives on a planet called Earth, with misty mountains, fertile fields and sprawling cities, in a solar system with eight other planets? The life of this person has been identical to yours in every respect. But perhaps he or she now decides to put down this article without finishing it, while you read on.

The idea of such an alter ego seems strange and implausible, but it looks as if we will just have to live with it, because it is supported by astronomical observations. The simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 1028 meters from here. This distance is so large that it is beyond astronomical, but that does not make your doppelg?nger any less real. The estimate is derived from elementary probability and does not even assume speculative modern physics, merely that space is infinite (or at least sufficiently large) in size and almost uniformly filled with matter, as observations indicate. In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere. There are infinitely many other inhabited planets, including not just one but infinitely many that have people with the same appearance, name and memories as you, who play out every possible permutation of your life choices.

You will probably never see your other selves. The farthest you can observe is the distance that light has been able to travel during the 14 billion years since the big bang expansion began. The most distant visible objects are now about 4 X 1026 meters away--a distance that defines our observable universe, also called our Hubble volume, our horizon volume or simply our universe. Likewise, the universes of your other selves are spheres of the same size centered on their planets. They are the most straightforward example of parallel universes. Each universe is merely a small part of a larger "multiverse."

By this very definition of "universe," one might expect the notion of a multiverse to be forever in the domain of metaphysics. Yet the borderline between physics and metaphysics is defined by whether a theory is experimentally testable, not by whether it is weird or involves unobservable entities. The frontiers of physics have gradually expanded to incorporate ever more abstract (and once metaphysical) concepts such as a round Earth, invisible electromagnetic fields, time slowdown at high speeds, quantum superpositions, curved space, and black holes. Over the past several years the concept of a multiverse has joined this list. It is grounded in well-tested theories such as relativity and quantum mechanics, and it fulfills both of the basic criteria of an empirical science: it makes predictions, and it can be falsified. Scientists have discussed as many as four distinct types of parallel universes. The key question is not whether the multiverse exists but rather how many levels it has. [...]

So should you believe in parallel universes? The principal arguments against them are that they are wasteful and that they are weird. The first argument is that multiverse theories are vulnerable to Occam's razor because they postulate the existence of other worlds that we can never observe. Why should nature be so wasteful and indulge in such opulence as an infinity of different worlds? Yet this argument can be turned around to argue for a multiverse. What precisely would nature be wasting? Certainly not space, mass or atoms--the uncontroversial Level I multiverse already contains an infinite amount of all three, so who cares if nature wastes some more? The real issue here is the apparent reduction in simplicity. A skeptic worries about all the information necessary to specify all those unseen worlds.

But an entire ensemble is often much simpler than one of its members. This principle can be stated more formally using the notion of algorithmic information content. The algorithmic information content in a number is, roughly speaking, the length of the shortest computer program that will produce that number as output. For example, consider the set of all integers. Which is simpler, the whole set or just one number? Naively, you might think that a single number is simpler, but the entire set can be generated by quite a trivial computer program, whereas a single number can be hugely long. Therefore, the whole set is actually simpler.

Similarly, the set of all solutions to Einstein's field equations is simpler than a specific solution. The former is described by a few equations, whereas the latter requires the specification of vast amounts of initial data on some hypersurface. The lesson is that complexity increases when we restrict our attention to one particular element in an ensemble, thereby losing the symmetry and simplicity that were inherent in the totality of all the elements taken together.

In this sense, the higher-level multiverses are simpler. Going from our universe to the Level I multiverse eliminates the need to specify initial conditions, upgrading to Level II eliminates the need to specify physical constants, and the Level IV multiverse eliminates the need to specify anything at all. The opulence of complexity is all in the subjective perceptions of observers--the frog perspective. From the bird perspective, the multiverse could hardly be any simpler.

The complaint about weirdness is aesthetic rather than scientific, and it really makes sense only in the Aristotelian worldview. Yet what did we expect? When we ask a profound question about the nature of reality, do we not expect an answer that sounds strange? Evolution provided us with intuition for the everyday physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, so whenever we venture beyond the everyday world, we should expect it to seem bizarre.

A common feature of all four multiverse levels is that the simplest and arguably most elegant theory involves parallel universes by default. To deny the existence of those universes, one needs to complicate the theory by adding experimentally unsupported processes and ad hoc postulates: finite space, wave function collapse and ontological asymmetry. Our judgment therefore comes down to which we find more wasteful and inelegant: many worlds or many words. Perhaps we will gradually get used to the weird ways of our cosmos and find its strangeness to be part of its charm.

This is all fun to think about until you realize that if you take it seriously it stumbles over the Fermi Paradox. Given a genuine infinitude of universes, there must be some where folks have figured out how to travel between universes, so where are they?

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THE END?

The Other War: The Bush administration & the end of civil liberties (Elaine Cassel, 4/23/03, City Pages)

Some of the more drastic incursions on civil liberties resulting from these Patriot Act provisions:

* It is a crime for anyone in this country to contribute money or other material support to the activities of a group on the State Department's terrorist watch list. [...]

* The FBI can monitor and tape conversations and meetings between an attorney and a client who is in federal custody, whether the client has been convicted, charged, or merely detained as a material witness. [...]

* Americans captured on foreign soil and thought to have been involved in terrorist activities abroad may be held indefinitely in a military prison and denied access to lawyers or family members. [...]

* The FBI can order librarians to turn over information about their patrons' reading habits and Internet use. [...]

* Foreign citizens charged with a terrorist-related act may be denied access to an attorney and their right to question witnesses and otherwise prepare for a defense may be severely curtailed if the Department of Justice says that's necessary to protect national security.

* Resident alien men from primarily Middle Eastern and Muslim countries must report for registration.

* Lawful foreign visitors may be photographed and fingerprinted when they enter the country and made to periodically report for questioning.

* The government can conduct surveillance on the Internet and e-mail use of American citizens without any notice, upon order to the Internet service provider. [...]

* The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) can search any car at any airport without a showing of any suspicion of criminal activity.

* The TSA can conduct full searches of people boarding airplanes and, if the passenger is a child, the child may be separated from the parent during the search. [...]

* The TSA is piloting a program to amass all available computerized information on all purchasers of airline tickets, categorize individuals according to their threat to national security, and embed the label on all boarding passes. [...]

* The TSA distributes a "no-fly" list to airport security personnel and airlines that require refusal of boarding and detention of persons deemed to be terrorism or air piracy risks or to pose a threat to airline or passenger safety. [...]

* American citizens and aliens can be held indefinitely in federal custody as "material witnesses," a ploy sometimes used as a punitive measure when the government does not have sufficient basis to charge the individual with a terror-related crime. [...]

* Immigration authorities may detain immigrants without any charges for a "reasonable period of time."

* American colleges and universities with foreign students must report extensive information about their students to the BCIS. [...]

* Accused terrorists labeled "unlawful combatants" can be tried in military tribunals here or abroad, under rules of procedure developed by the Pentagon and the Department of Justice. [...]

* A warrant to conduct widespread surveillance on any American thought to be associated with terrorist activities can be obtained from a secret panel of judges, upon the affidavit of a Department of Justice official. [...]

* The FBI can conduct aerial surveillance of individuals and homes without a warrant, and can install video cameras in places where lawful demonstrations and protests are held.

One of the difficulties that civil libhysterians like Ms Cassel face in convincing average Americans that any of this marks the "end of civil liberties" is that none of these provisions will ever affect us. In fact, the tax bill before Congress will have a far greater impact on our freedoms than will any of these laws, rules, and regulations.

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PATHOLOGIES

Islamic dissidents say liberals are 'pathologically nice' (Julia Duin, THE WASHINGTON TIMES Magazine)

In real time, world Islam may be in the 21st century, but in practice, it's closer to the Dark Ages, panelists said at a forum on April 12.

"The theory and practice of jihad was not concocted in the Pentagon," said Ibn Warraq, a speaker at the conference on Islam sponsored by the Council for Secular Humanism at the Capitol Hilton in Washington, D.C. "It was taken from the Koran, the Hadith [additional sayings of Muhammad] and Islamic tradition. Western liberals, especially humanists, find it hard to believe this. The trouble with Western liberals is they are pathologically nice. They think that everyone thinks like them, including the Islamic fundamentalists.

"For humanists, terrorists are frustrated angels forever thwarted by the United States of America," he said.

Mr. Warraq was a participant at a "One Nation under God?" conference and, along with five other Muslim dissidents, spoke for three hours on "Will Islam Come into the 21st Century?" [...]

Mr. Warraq criticized listeners for their naivete, adding that humanists need to face facts.

"Islamic fundamentalists are utopian visionaries who wish to replace Western-style liberal democracies with Islamic theocracy, a fascist system of filth that aims to control every single act of every individual," he said. [...]

Bringing Islam into the current century, he said, would mean following Turkey's example in forming a secular society in which mosque and state do not mix. It would also mean subjecting the Koran to the kind of textual criticism as the Bible has undergone, rewriting school textbooks to include pre-Islamic history and comparative religion and closing the "madrassas," which are fundamentalist Islamic schools for young boys.

It's hard to see how calling Islam "filth" serves to advance the much needed process of reform, however, the analysis of Islam's problems as stemming from its totalitarian nature seems accurate.

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ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

Few atheists in U.S. foxholes (Steve Sailer, 4/21/03, UPI)

The old saying "There are no atheists in foxholes" turns out to be virtually correct, at least for the U.S. armed forces. About 0.1 percent of all American military personnel officially declare themselves to be atheists.

Overall, 44 percent of Americans in the volunteer military call themselves Protestants and 24 percent say they are Catholics, according to the Defense Manpower Data Center. The other major world religions are not heavily represented: Muslims and Jews make up 0.3 percent each, Buddhists 0.2 percent and Hindus 0.1 percent. The "other" category numbered 5 percent.

The religious makeup of the armed forces is similar to that of the general population. A 2000 Gallup Poll found that 56 percent of all Americans consider themselves Protestant, 27 percent Catholic, 2 percent Jewish, 1 percent Orthodox, 1 percent Mormon, and 5 percent "other." An additional 8 percent gave their religion as "none."

Maybe it is a Crusade...

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DEFINING DEVIANCY DOWNWARDS

Santorum Angers Gay Rights Groups (Alan Cooperman, April 22, 2003, Washington Post)

Gay rights groups called yesterday for Senate Republicans to repudiate remarks by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) comparing homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery.

Santorum made the remarks in an interview with the Associated Press about a Supreme Court case challenging the constitutionality of a Texas law against sodomy.

"If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything," Santorum said, according to the AP. [...]

The gay rights groups likened Santorum's remarks to those last December by Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) extolling Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist presidential campaign. Accused of racism, Lott was forced to resign as majority leader.

"For the second time in a matter of months, we see a senior Republican leader in the Senate disparaging an entire group of Americans," said HRC spokesman David Smith. "While we welcome his spokeswoman's clarification that he has no problem with gay people, it's analogous to saying, 'I have no problem with Jewish people or black people, I just don't think they should be equal under the law.' "

Though it may be appropriate at this time to remove anti-sodomy laws from the books via the legislative process--we're ambivalent about the matter--Mr. Santorum is correct that the creation of a "right" to engage in such sexual acts opens the door to all manner of deviance. The Constitution is silent on the question of sexual behavior--such moral issues are rightly the province of localities--so the Court should be too.

One interesting sidelight though is the way libertarians insist that the Court declare these behaviors "rights" and intervene to protect them, thereby further ceding power to the State and taking it away from communities. So does the absolutism of liberty and tolerance tend toward statism and the destruction of all intervening institutions.

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CRACK IN THE FUNDAMENT

Is theology irrelevant in modern life? (Peter Sellick, April 15, 2003, Online Opinion)

The loss of the theological stance leaves us truly at a loss in the world because none of the secular disciplines will help us orient our lives. The young man who peddles pornography on the Internet justifies his behaviour by saying that he just wants a nice lifestyle. This is what liberalism is, it is the pursuit of happiness sans value.

There is another downside of the loss of the theological stance and that is we lose the ability to analyse culture, both our own and others. We fail to recognise that metaphysics shapes culture because we have been told that metaphysics - how we view the world - is irrelevant.

This is where we really get nervous because we are tempted to make unfavourable comparisons between Western and other cultures and that smacks of ethnocentrism and the incitement of inter-religious hatred. We would much rather talk in the abstract about the "World's Great Religions" as if that abolishes any difference. We also are apt to say that there is, after all, only one god worshipped in many different ways.

But this high-flown language will not hide the deep rifts that exist between the religions of the world. Neither will cultural relativism smooth over the cracks or the romantic attitude that we are apt to take towards traditional cultures that makes everything seem of equal value. The argument of this essay is that we cannot afford to abandon the theological/critical stance either towards our own civilization or towards others.

At the present time the West is engaged in a war against an Islamic country. Our leaders have pressed the case that this has got nothing to do with religion and in the case of Iraq this is partly correct. However, if we fail is to understand how Islam has shaped the culture of Islamic countries then we will never see a large part of the picture. Let us take just three examples of differences between Judeo/Christianity and Islam.

1. Creation.

Islam, like Judeo/Christianity understands God as the creator of all things. The difference between them is that for Islam God cannot be contaminated by the human, God is pure, unknowable all powerful etc.

This is why Islam can accept Jesus as a prophet but cannot believe that he is the son of God. This would threaten God's purity. Such a metaphysic does not affirm the existence and importance of the world and human life that the creation stories and the incarnation do so strongly.

While both Islam and Christianity are tempted by Neoplatonism, in which the reality of the world is reduced to an emanation of the divine and the only real things are the heavenly, this is subverted in Christianity by the incarnation - God becomes a man. This is one of the reasons that the West is so ascendant in the material sciences, because its metaphysics affirms the reality of time and the world as the arena of human destiny. The world cannot be reduced in favour of heaven.

2. Law

Christian fundamentalism and Islam both agree that salvation comes by obeying the divine law. St Paul argued that our efforts to obey the law and to be justified by that are futile. He opens a new way of being that takes into account our frailty of purpose and puts revelation in its place. We see what human life is in the history of the nation of Israel - and the stories it told - and in the life and death of Jesus. We find our way via story.

So instead of slavishly obeying a text that tells us how to behave we are set free to make the journey into the human mystery. This has enormous implications for culture because it is always open to the new thing and is able to search the depths of the human heart.

3. Sin.

Both Judeo/Christianity and Islam deal with the story of Adam and Eve and the fall. However, Islam says that God forgave the human so that we did not carry the fall into the future. While Christianity affirms that there is something up with us, that there is something broken at the very basis of our lives, Islam projects the existence of evil onto Satan. The logic of this difference produces self examination and confession in the Christian tradition and the disowning of evil in the Islamic. Private admission of sin is necessary for public reformation. [...]

Metaphysics cannot be voided; it is rather the case that one displaces another. The radical Enlightenment of the 17th C with its emphasis on the objective and on freedom from all creeds, and the subsequent reorientation of life towards the pursuit of happiness, thanks to the Americans, has displaced the dreaming that was at the base of Western civilization.

For my money this is a thinner narrative of the human and produces thinner lives and thinner culture. If the West is to find itself exhausted, economically, culturally and politically, then it will be because it has grasped to its bosom an inadequate narrative of the human.

It seems that we have out-paced ourselves. We find ourselves with increasingly powerful new toys and we do not know their import for us. And so we invent things called "ethics" that purport to tell us. But ethics cannot be derived from an inadequate narrative of the human; all you get is inadequate ethics. The solution to all this? That is another story.

The one point that Mr. Sellick neglects is that America, uniquely within the West, rejects the thinner narrative and clings to the theological metaphysics. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is why America has a healthier society and greater freedom than its peers--even its closest peers like Britain and Australia. The internalization of this richer narrative appears to provide the only sound base for an enduring republic of freedom. The import of this is that unless there is a Judeo-Christian religious revival in the rest of the West, it is likely to continue to sicken and die just as surely as Islam.

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OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW

Polish Prime Minister "Astonished" By Prodi Fighter Jet Reproach (AFP, Apr 22, 2003)

Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller said on Tuesday he was "astonished" at criticism by European Commission President Romano Prodi of Poland's purchase of US F-16 fighter jets, a day after Poland signed EU entry papers.

In an interview to Italian newspaper "La Repubblica" on Saturday Prodi said he was "not happy at the signature by Poland of the massive purchase contract to buy US fighter jets a day after the Athens summit". [...]

Prodi made his remarks after Poland had signed on Friday 3.5-billion-dollar (3.24-billion-euro) contract to buy 48 multi-role Lockheed Martin F-16 planes.

The US giant knocked out Swedish-British consortium BAE Systems-SAAB, which wanted to sell the Jas-39 Gripen, and France's Dassault Aviation, which wanted to sell the Mirage 2000-5.

Remind us again: how did the Mirages perform in the recent war?

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ONLY THE EU CAN STOP THE SPREAD OF DEMOCRACY!

The bottom dollar: There is only one way to check American power and that is to support the euro (George Monbiot, April 22, 2003, The Guardian)

The problem with American power is not that it's American. Most states with the resources and opportunities the US possesses would have done far worse. The problem is that one nation, effectively unchecked by any other, can, if it chooses, now determine how the rest of the world will live. Eventually, unless we stop it, it will use this power. So far, it has merely tested its new muscles.

The presidential elections next year might prevent an immediate entanglement with another nation, but there is little doubt about the scope of the US government's ambitions. Already, it has begun to execute a slow but comprehensive coup against the international order, destroying or undermining the institutions that might have sought to restrain it. On these pages two weeks ago, James Woolsey, an influential hawk and formerly the director of the CIA, argued for a war lasting for decades "to extend democracy" to the entire Arab and Muslim world.

Men who think like him - and there are plenty in Washington - are not monsters. They are simply responding to the opportunities that power presents, just as British politicians once responded to the vulnerability of non-European states and the weakness of their colonial competitors. America's threat to the peace and stability of the rest of the world is likely to persist, whether George Bush wins the next election or not. The critical question is how we stop it.

Of all the contradictions that the war on terror has so far forced, the clearest is between the Left, which it must now be obvious values peace and stability above all else, and the rhetoric of extending freedom and democracy, which as Mr. Monbiot points out here, they actually view as monstrous. Thus is security revealed as the enemy of freedom.

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THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Syria Is Forced to Adapt to a New Power Next Door: The toppling of Saddam Hussein may push the kind of political and economic opening sought by critics of Syria's government. (NEIL MacFARQUHAR, 4/22/03, NY Times)

Riad al-Turk, Syria's most outspoken dissident, ticks off the roughly one-third of his life spent as a political prisoner: 13 months under the current president, Bashar al-Assad, a whopping 18 years in solitary confinement under Mr. Assad's late father and sundry years or months stretching almost back to independence in 1946.

Now, like everyone in the Middle East, he has a new political factor to consider: the United States military, setting up next door in Iraq as the latest occupying power.

Like many Syrians, he is horrified, yet he--like other government critics--also recognizes that the welcome toppling of Saddam Hussein, if handled right, may push the kind of political and economic opening that they have sought for decades.

"Iraq had a bloodier system--when we compare the number of victims here to the number in Iraq, it had many, many more," said Mr. Turk, 73. "But in substance they are the same." [...]

However, even Syrians much closer to the establishment than Mr. Turk is seem certain that this country, and the region, will adapt--even if the American action in Iraq smacks of the kind of external control from which the Arabs have been trying to free themselves for the better part of a century.

"We don't know what will happen to us after the Iraq war," said Haitham Kilani, a retired diplomat and general. "But it is certain there will be change."

Syria in some ways feels like the Iraq of old, and will probably be prominent on Washington's list of despotic states needing evolution.

Like Mr. Hussein's Iraq, Syria stands accused of developing chemical weapons and aiding groups that Washington considers terrorists--in Syria's case, Hezbollah, which dominates southern Lebanon and threatens Israel from that base. Syria also allows most Palestinian groups to maintain what it insists are information offices here, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Is the Times suggesting that Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization or that Syria does not aid it?--not that it really matters since both facts are undeniable.

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PENUMBRAS AND EMANATIONS

Justices Will Revisit Rules Governing Use of Evidence (LINDA GREENHOUSE, 4/22/03, NY Times)

The justices said today that they would review a decision by the federal appeals court in Denver, which ruled last September that physical evidence--a gun, in this case--discovered as a "fruit" of a Miranda violation could no longer be introduced as evidence at trial despite Supreme Court rulings to the contrary. The appeals court's reasoning was that the premise of the earlier cases was "fundamentally altered" when the Supreme Court declared three years ago in Dickerson v. United States that the warnings set out in Miranda were not simply "prophylactic" measures to insure that confessions were voluntary, but were directly required by the Fifth Amendment's protection against compelled self-incrimination.

The earlier cases, principally Michigan v. Tucker in 1974 and Oregon v. Elstad in 1985, were based on the premise that a Miranda violation was not a constitutional violation as long as the suspect's statements were voluntary, the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit noted in its opinion. That court ordered suppression of a pistol that police found in the Colorado Springs home of a suspect, Samuel F. Patane, whom they had just arrested for violating a domestic violence restraining order. The police asked Mr. Patane about the gun, and he described its location without having first received the Miranda warnings.

"Because Dickerson now concludes that an un-Mirandized statement, even if voluntary, is a Fifth Amendment violation," the evidence had to be suppressed, Judge David M. Ebel wrote for the appeals court.

But that was a misunderstanding of the Dickerson decision, Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson told the justices in the government's appeal, United States v. Patane, No. 02-1183.

Rather than rejecting the notion that physical evidence derived from a Miranda violation was admissible, Mr. Olson said, the Supreme Court in its 2000 decision incorporated that concept into its conclusion that because the Miranda decision was limited to actual statements, it had not imposed an unduly difficult burden on law enforcement.

Further, Mr. Olson said, while one purpose of the Miranda rule was to "guard against the use of unreliable statements at trial," physical evidence like the gun in this case "undoubtedly constitutes reliable, trustworthy evidence."

The "Fifth Amendment's protection against compelled self-incrimination"? That's strange, our copy of the Constitution says: "No person...shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself". Telling the police something that incriminates you is hardly the same as being a witness. Meanwhile, by definition, a voluntary statement is not compelled, so even if you accept the "self-incrimination" standard, the Fifth still isn't implicated.

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GIVE THEM ENOUGH ROPE...

Explosion hit North Korea missile test site: report (AFP, Apr 21, 2003)

A US spy satellite monitored a strong explosion that rocked North Korea's test site for ballistic missiles in November last year, South Korean reports said Monday.

Washington has passed information concerning the explosion to South Korean military authorities, according to Yonhap news agency.

The blast occurred during a missile engine test and crippled operations and facilities at North Korea's missile launch site at Musudan-ri, Hwadae county, northeast of Pyongyang, Seoul's Chosun Ilbo newspaper said.

Remember the scene in Blazing Saddles where Cleavon Little takes himself hostage? Such is North Korea's nuclear doctrine: Unilateral Assured Self-Destruction.

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WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS...FRANCE?

Galloway was in Saddam's pay, say secret Iraqi documents (David Blair, 22/04/2003, Daily Telegraph)

For more than a decade, Mr Galloway, MP for Glasgow Kelvin, has been the leading critic of Anglo-American policy towards Iraq, campaigning against sanctions and the war that toppled Saddam. [...]

It purported to outline talks between Mr Galloway and an Iraqi spy. During the meeting on Boxing Day 1999, Mr Galloway detailed his campaign plans for the year ahead.

The spy chief wrote that Mr Galloway told the Mukhabarat agent: "He [Galloway] needs continuous financial support from Iraq. He obtained through Mr Tariq Aziz [deputy prime minister] three million barrels of oil every six months, according to the oil for food programme. His share would be only between 10 and 15 cents per barrel."

Iraq's oil sales, administered by the United Nations, were intended to pay for only essential humanitarian supplies. If the memo was accurate, Mr Galloway's share would have amounted to about £375,000 per year.

The documents say that Mr Galloway entered into partnership with a named Iraqi oil broker to sell the oil on the international market.

The memorandum continues: "He [Galloway] also obtained a limited number of food contracts with the ministry of trade. The percentage of its profits does not go above one per cent."

Too bad they banned the death penalty in Britain, because Mr. Galloway is a traitor and should dangle at the end of a rope.

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THE CRUX OF THE MATTER

Israel is an occupier with a duty to protect: Palestinians are the only ethnic group denied by their occupiers both citizenship and separate statehood (Henry Siegman, 4/22/03, Financial Times)

International law recognises a major difference between the rules that apply in a war between armies and an occupying power, for an occupying army has special obligations to the population under its control. Thus, when military activities ended in Iraq, entirely new standards of conduct were applied to the coalition force. They are now judged by how well they protect and meet the needs of a civilian population under their occupation. That is why the US now faces international criticism for failing to prevent looting and lawlessness in Iraq and for delays in re-supplying power and drinking water, and in repairing infrastructure.

It seems not to register with many Israelis that they are occupiers and as such have inescapable responsibilities towards those in their custody and an obligation to end the occupation as speedily as possible. It is an obligation reinforced by Israel's decision after the 1967 war not to grant citizenship and equal rights in the Jewish state to the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza, even in return for Israel's permanent retention of the occupied territories. The inescapable corollary of this decision is that Israel must grant Palestinians the right to their own state. The alternative is permanent disenfranchisement and subjugation of the Palestinians.

Palestinians are not the only ethnic minority denied separate statehood. The Kurds, the Albanians in Kosovo, and others have been denied a separate homeland. In the case of the Kurds and the Kosovo Albanians, the international community intervened so they would at least be granted the same rights as the majority. However, Palestinians are the only ethnic group denied by their occupiers both Israeli citizenship (which in any case Palestinians do not want) and separate statehood. Mr Sharon's notion of a Palestinian "state" in less than 50 per cent of the West Bank and in parts of Gaza would create South African style bantustans entirely under Israel's control.

The Sharon-led government opposes a viable Palestinian state, and a political process that may result in one, on the grounds that it would serve as a haven for Palestinian terrorism impossible for Israel to control. It is a disingenuous argument. The contrary is the case: it would be far easier for Israel to deal with terrorism from a neighbouring state than terrorism from 3.5m people it is deeply intertwined with and whose national aspirations it represses. This, too, is the lesson of Iraq, where the US and Britain devastated Iraqi forces using measures they could never have used against an occupied population.

But it is Israel's own experience that best demonstrates the difference between internal terrorism and state-sponsored terrorism. There is no cross-border terrorism into Israel from any of Israel's Arab neighbours. This is not because any of them have a special affection for Israel, but because they have experienced the devastating price of allowing such terrorism. And the terrorism Israel failed to subdue when it occupied southern Lebanon for two decades ended immediately when Israel withdrew and threatened a full-blown war should terrorism continue. There is no reason to doubt that a neighbouring Palestinian state would be similarly constrained.

These are exactly the reasons why Yasser Arafat and those in the Palestinian leadership whose goal is the destruction of Israel, rather than an independent Palestine, have always undercut the peace process when it looks like it might be succeeeding. A Palestinian state is a greater threat to them than it is to Israel, and those Israelis and supporters of Israel who seek to put off statehood until a later date are, sadly, de facto allies of the Palestinian extremists.

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DOES ACME SELL A PRODUCTIVITY KIT?

The Productivity Gap: European governments are worried because their workers aren't as efficient as Americans. (Irwin M. Stelzer, 04/15/2003, Weekly Standard)

The Europeans are worried about the productivity gap. Their studies show that America leaves them in the dust when it comes to producing goods and services efficiently. Since the only way a nation can increase the welfare of its citizens is to have each worker produce more, this productivity gap is worrisome. After all, what good European wants to contemplate a future in which the gap between U.S. and E.U. living standards progressively widens?

So in this one regard they want to become more like the otherwise despised United States. One answer the Europeans have concocted is to meet--year after year--and promise a variety of "reforms" to make it easier for new firms to set up shop, and existing firms to hire. So far, no luck. Unemployment in Germany is over 10 percent, and in France is approaching double digits--and rising. Only Britain is doing moderately well, and even there rising taxes and continental-style regulations are starting to take their toll.

The Europeans understand that without rapid economic growth, the funds for the cherished expansion of their welfare states just won't be available. So they try to talk like Americans. In the words of Europe's most savvy finance minister, Chancellor Gordon Brown of the UK, they are promising they "will learn from American competition and enterprise. . . ."

But in looking to America for guidance, Europe seems to have learned too much from Franklin Roosevelt and too little from Jack Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. FDR followed the advice of an adviser who promised "We shall tax and tax, and spend and spend, and elect and elect." The result was a prolonged depression that ended only when America entered WWII. Kennedy and Reagan took the road less traveled, cut taxes, and set in train periods of extended and rapid growth.

Not Europe's politicians. Brown has raised taxes steadily since taking office. Jacques Chirac was elected on a promise to cut taxes by 30 percent over five years, but after an initial reduction of 5 percent, gave a Gallic shrug and reversed course. Gerhard Schroeder's economic recovery plan seems to change daily.

Meanwhile, deficits in all of these countries continue to rise, and now exceed the 3 percent of GDP that the European Central Bank considers prudent. Such deficits are probably appropriate in a period of slowing growth, and the Europeans like to point out that they are merely following the lead of President Bush in spilling some red ink. But there is a difference. Europe's deficits are the result of massive overspending by the public sector America's deficit, on the other hand, will result from a tax cut that puts more money into the hands of consumers to spend in the private sector. Not for E.U. politicians the teaching of leading experts such as Princeton's William Baumol and his colleagues: "Restraining public expenditures," they conclude, "can make private investment easier and more rewarding financially."

There is worse. Europe's leaders see a productivity gap and feel called upon to develop government programs to eliminate it.

Here's the odd thing: in the Road Runner cartoons, when Wile E. Coyote runs off the cliff and his feet churn for awhile, he's fooled into thinking he's still on solid ground, but the viewer's in on the joke. But, where Europe is concerned, an astonishing number of pundits and politicians seem not to have noticed that the long plunge awaits.

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BETTER LET SLEEPING DOGS LIE

Baghdad and Beyond: Another Victory for the Bush Doctrine (Alan W. Dowd, April 15, 2003, Hudson.org)

The Bush Doctrine of coercive diplomacy, preemptive action, and regime termination has passed another important test: After destroying the terrorist regime run by the Taliban and bankrolled by al Qaeda, it has dismantled the Saddam Hussein vast prison state, thus eliminating one of the centerpieces of global terrorism and preempting the use or transfer of weapons of mass murder onto the American homeland. But there?s more to come?and there?s more happening than meets the eye.

While the U.S.-led coalition swept through Iraq, the Pentagon quietly continued its ongoing operations throughout the eastern hemisphere?a fact underscored by large-scale raids in eastern Afghanistan timed to coincide with the initial assault on Saddam?s regime. In Pakistan, the Bush Doctrine?s coercive diplomacy has converted President Pervez Musharraf from the Taliban?s only friend into a dependable ally in the War on Terrorism. U.S. Special Forces now roam freely along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, conducting search and destroy missions on both sides of the border?sometimes deep inside Pakistani territory, and often with the assistance of Pakistani troops.

In the Philippines, teams of U.S. troops are conducting what the diplomats call ?counterterrorism training missions? with the Philippine army. But if it?s training, it?s on-the-job training. As in Afghanistan, the U.S.-led force has smashed and scattered the enemy. Likewise, in Georgia and other former Soviet republics, U.S. troops are training and equipping local forces to clean out al Qaeda and its kindred movements.

From their perch in Djibouti, U.S. intelligence agents and military taskforces are conducting operations in and around Yemen (recall the Predator strike on al Qaeda commanders in November 2002), monitoring terrorist activity in the lawless lands of eastern Africa, reminding the Sudanese and Libyans that there?s a new sheriff in town, and intercepting suspicious ships transiting the vital waterways around the Horn of Africa. One of those ships was a North Korean vessel loaded with SCUD missiles bound for Yemen. Although the ship was allowed to continue to its destination, the episode sent an unmistakable message to North Korea and its ilk: America is watching and can strike at will.

Yet all of this was little more than background noise as the United States waged and won two major military campaigns in the span of eighteen months. Like some twenty-first-century posse, U.S. Special Forces rode into Afghanistan on horseback, the Marines by helicopter. The warplanes came from the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, the former Soviet Union and the continental United States. The Taliban promised another Vietnam, a replay of the Soviet?s Afghan nightmare. But what the world witnessed was liberation in its fullest sense, as this improbable taskforce rewrote military history and helped Afghanis take their first steps toward freedom in a generation.

Then, before a new government was even installed in Kabul, the United States swung its sites to Iraq and began assembling an invasion force like no other. Once called into action, it moved across the sands and skies of Iraq like lightning across the heavens. Saddam promised a Stalingrad, a Mogadishu. He wanted oil fires and mass casualties to show the world that the allies were no different than his thugs. But what the world has witnessed is the power of restraint, the shock and awe of a military juggernaut limited only by the conscience of a moral people. From the airmen and sailors using their missilery like a sniper?s rifle to the Marines and soldiers sharing food with Saddam?s victims after destroying his armies, America?s finest have risked their own lives to limit the bloodshed.

Saddam?s Baathists have done the very opposite. Cribbing their battle plan from bin Laden?s al Qaeda and Arafat?s al Aqsa Martyrs, they marched noncombatants in front of tanks, used school buses and pregnant women as time bombs, and converted holy sites into missile sites. Yet none of this deterred the liberators of Iraq. Instead, they fought harder and plunged deeper. Could it be that every fake surrender, every suicide attack, every atrocity, reminded the Americans of the men who planned and executed September 11?

In all of this, one recalls what an awestruck Churchill observed in the middle of World War II: "With her left hand," he marveled, "America was leading the advance of the conquering Allied armies into the heart of Germany, and with her right, on the other side of the globe, she was irresistibly and swiftly breaking up the power of Japan." Such is the reach of a wounded America.

The most remarkable aspect of all of this is that by the end of Condi Rice's first term of office, in 2012, we'll be returning to our natural isolationist posture. This is all, from the Phillipines to Yemen, really just something we do when sufficiently annoyed.

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SAFE HAVEN?

France still roiled by 2002 election (Elizabeth Bryant, 4/21/2003, United Press International)

A year after National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen placed second in French presidential elections, the country's political establishment continues to digest the seismic results.

From a spate of analyses and editorials of the April-May 2002 voting, to the government's hardening line against fundamentalist Islam, to polls showing voters may not have changed all that much over a year, the fallout of the far-right's influence is being felt in ways large and small.

The anniversary was marked most obviously by the National Front itself, which had its annual congress last weekend in Nice. [...]

A new poll suggests Le Pen's party continues to wield influence among the French electorate. Seven out of 10 French believe a far-right candidate could again place second in the 2007 presidential race, according to the Ipsos survey, to be broadcast Monday on France 2.

It's not hard to envision a near-future France where the two major contenders for power are an anti-Muslim nationalist party and an Islamic party--winner gets to exterminate the opposition.

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SHOOTING THE MOON

No. 18 on Most-Wanted List Arrested in Iraq (Fox News, April 21, 2003)

Muhammad Hamza al-Zubaydi, who played a key role in the brutal suppression of the Shiite Muslim uprising of 1991, was arrested Monday in Iraq, the U.S. Central Command said.

Al-Zubaydi, a former member of the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council and central Euphrates regional commander, was No. 18 on a list of the 55 most-wanted figures from Saddam Hussein's regime. [...]

He was the queen of spades in the deck of former Iraqi officials distributed to U.S. forces.

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NEOCONSPIRACY

Neo-socialists versus neoconservatives (Avraham Tal, 4/21/03, Ha'aretz)

Besides the Histadrut labor federation, the parliamentary opposition, and dozens of social organizations, a broad front of social affairs experts has come out against the government's economic austerity program. In the past, professors and lecturers from social work schools and other schools had reservations about individual issues, but it seems that the social aspects of the current plan have evoked an unprecedented level of vehement and broad criticism.

It's possible to understand when criticism is leveled at the specific social elements of a plan, but in this case, what's amazing are the generalizations some critics have employed to couch their critiques. With a tone of absolute certainty, they have reached sweeping conclusions that they would likely not allow for within their own scientific research.

Particularly bothersome is their reading of the program as a deliberate attempt by the planners to wipe out the welfare state, or at least "delegitimize its ideas," as one of them was quoted in an April 16 article by Ruth Sinai. Another thinks the plan "is clearly meant to harm the social security of the citizens of Israel," because the government believes "it's a shame to waste money on the weak sectors of the population, since they are not productive."

Such nonsense is barely worthy of a fire-breathing politician from the opposition, let alone someone who wears the cloak of academia. "The right does not regard education as productive, only as a social expense," says another, while ignoring the fact that spokesmen for the right, just like spokesmen for the left, are committed to the position that the future of the state's security is dependent on the level of education given to the next generation (which doesn't mean there is no room for efficiency measures). "The neoconservative position cynically exploits the distortions created by political bribery (to the Haredim - A.T.) to destroy the welfare state which they fundamentally do not believe in," adds a spokesman for the neo-socialists, who then analyzes the ramifications of globalization from the social perspective: global systems have no commitment to the poor in Dimona, only to maximizing profits, and in that same spirit, the state is now ridding itself of responsibility for the weakest in society.

Neo-cons get a powerful voice (Robert Manne, April 21 2003, The Age)

Among the political intelligentsia a kind of public conversation concerning values is perpetually going on. Unlike the US and Britain, Australia does not have influential intellectual magazines. As a consequence, it is mainly in the pages of our quality newspapers - The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Financial Review and The Australian - that this conversation is conducted.

If one of these papers changes political direction, the ears of the intelligentsia prick. In recent months many of its members have been privately discussing the rather rapid ideological shift of The Australian towards the kind of neo-conservatism currently dominant on the right side of the "culture wars" being fought out in the US. [...]

Neo-conservatism is the ideology founded on the 1970s marriage of anti-communism with free-market liberalism. At its centre is the belief in the possibility of spreading Western economic and political values across the globe and the conviction that, to achieve this victory, the baleful influence exercised by self-hating left-wing intellectuals on the home front must be destroyed.

As David Brock shows in his defection memoir, Blinded by the Right, in the US Rupert Murdoch has been the most important financier, in both the serious and popular media, of the neo-conservative cause. Given this, it should come as no surprise that in Australia his flagship paper has finally been mobilised in the service of the crusade.

Is there anywhere in the world that the neocons aren't secretly running the show?

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THE WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY

Arafat rejects plan by Abu Mazen to disarm Fatah militia (Arnon Regular, 4/21/03, Ha'aretz)

The dispute between Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat and Palestinian prime minister-designate Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) over the formation of a new government centers around the latter's plans to dismantle Fatah's Al Aqsa Brigades and his intentions to deal with the other armed factions in the territories.

Most reports have focused on Abu Mazen's plan to make Mohammed Dahlan, the Gazan strongman and former head of the Preventive Security Services in the Gaza Strip, head of the new government's security services. However, Palestinian sources said the dispute actually revolves around the premier-designate's plans for establishing a new PA security policy, and whether he must win Arafat's approval for every decision he makes.

The sources said Abu Mazen's plans to disarm the underground armed wing of Fatah, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, and how he will confront Hamas and Islamic Jihad are at the heart of the dispute.

Yasser Arafat can not be allowed to stand in the way of what may be the best chance ever for some kind of tolerable deal for the Palestinians.

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FOOL THEM ONCE...

The Most Dangerous President Ever: How and why George W. Bush undermines American security (Harold Meyerson, 5.1.03, The American Prospect)

[W]here, in the panoply of American presidents, do we situate Bush? He's not the first president to try to reconstruct the economic order. But the president who really attempted a general fix -- Franklin Roosevelt -- did so because the old order was plainly collapsing. No such situation exists today. Worse yet, what Bush is proposing is to erect a new economy by giving more power to the shakiest element -- the private-sector safety net -- of the old.

Just over a century ago, William McKinley set America on the course of acquiring a colonial empire, setting off a debate over America's proper role in the world every bit as impassioned as the one raging today. McKinley's path was a radical departure from past practice, but the United States was still a second-tier power. The shift did not destabilize the world. A half-century before that, James Polk plunged us into war with Mexico over considerable northern-state opposition (including, in the later phases of the war, that of Congressman Abraham Lincoln), but at that point, America was a third-tier power.

The three presidents who sought to build a multilateral framework for international affairs were Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Wilson's plan was killed in its crib when Congress refused to ratify our entry into the League of Nations. Roosevelt's and Truman's contributions -- setting up a structure of international law, bringing prosperity and freedom to Western Europe, cementing alliances with other democracies, containing and eventually defeating Soviet communism -- are the enduring triumphs of U.S. foreign policy. Bush seems bent on destroying Roosevelt's and Truman's handiwork, however, and substituting a far more grandiose version of Polk's and McKinley's, in what is distinctly
a postcolonial world. As with his assault on Roosevelt's New Deal order, he professes to replace an architecture that may be flawed but certainly isn't broken -- in this case, with an empire not likely to be backed up by the consent of the governed.

None of these presidents, great or awful, seems quite comparable to Bush the Younger. There is another, however, who comes to mind. He, too, had a relentlessly regional perspective, and a clear sense of estrangement from that part of America that did not support him. He was not much impressed with the claims of wage labor. His values were militaristic. He had dreams of building an empire at gunpoint. And he was willing to tear up the larger political order, which had worked reasonably well for about 60 years, to advance his factional cause. The American president -- though not of the United States -- whom George W. Bush most nearly resembles is the Confederacy's Jefferson Davis.

Yes, I know: Bush is no racist, and certainly no proponent of slavery. He is not grotesque; he is merely disgraceful. But, as with Davis, obtaining Bush's defeat is an urgent matter of national security -- and national honor.

Our thanks to Mr. Meyerson for clearing up last week's controversy over the assertion that he'd compared George W. Bush to Nathan Bedford Forrest because of Forrest's association with the KKK rather than his military prowess. One doubts even Harry will continue to argue that Mr. Meyerson's motives were innocent.

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THE PROPAGANDIST OF RECORD:

'Republic of Fear' (Cynthia Cotts, Village Voice, 4/16/2003, via Andrew Sullivan)

[B]etween July and October 2002 ... Raines killed several stories by Golden and fellow reporter David Kocieniewski. For months, the two had been pursuing allegations of influence peddling by former New Jersey senator Robert Torricelli, who was running for re-election. The New York Observer reported last week that Raines felt the pieces he spiked had been "reckless."

Times insiders tell another story: They say editors asked Raines to spell out his complaints about the spiked pieces, but he declined, citing only his aversion to "piling on" or to giving prosecutors too much credence. After all, the Justice Department had declined to press charges, and the Senate only gave the senator a severe reprimand....

Adding insult to injury, someone else got the scoop. On September 26, after some of the Times pieces were spiked, WNBC ran a special Torricelli report by Jonathan Dienst, featuring a jailhouse interview with Chang and an inventory of evidence. According to someone close to the Torricelli case, key sources tired of waiting for the Times to use their info, so they turned it over to WNBC. Four days after the WNBC report aired, Torricelli pulled out of the race, expressly to avoid further harm to the party.

It appears the New York Times editors spike stories that would hurt Democratic politicians, just as CNN spikes stories that reflect unfavorably on foreign tyrants. This introduces a systematic bias in their news reporting. Whatever their personal preferences may be, these media outlets are objectively pro-Democratic and pro-tyrant.

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NEARLY NASTIAN:

EDITORIAL CARTOON: Hannibal? (Jim Borgman, Cincinnati Enquirer)

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PERSONAL PLASTICITY:

Does a Ring Bring Happiness, or Vice Versa? (Shankar Vedantam, April 21, 2003, Washington Post)

[Richard E.] Lucas's study concludes that people have a happiness "set point" to which they return after marriage and other life events. The study is part of a broad inquiry into psychological adaptation, the notion that people "are doomed to experience stable levels of well-being because, over time, they adapt to even the most extreme positive and negative life circumstances."

Studies have shown, for example, that people who win large amounts of money through the lottery get a temporary boost in happiness from winning, but the emotional high quickly subsides to pre-winning levels.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that people who face tragedy -- such as a devastating spinal cord injury -- also adapt. One study of such disabled people found that while negative emotions overwhelmed them immediately after the misfortune, patients' feelings were more positive than negative eight weeks later.

David Lykken, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, conducted a study comparing the happiness of middle-aged twins. Though siblings experienced very different life circumstances, genetically identical pairs had similar levels of happiness. Lykken's conclusion: "Happiness varies around a genetically determined set point."

Still, adaptation studies have been difficult to conduct on questions of romance and happiness, because they run into chicken-and-egg questions. By examining long-term happiness levels in a large group of people before they got married, after marriage, and if they divorced, Lucas and a team of other researchers were able to tease apart the happiness mystery.

When people are asked to rate how happy they are on a scale of zero to 10, most score between 5.5 to 8, Lucas said. People who eventually got married scored, on average, a quarter-point higher on this scale before marriage.

During the year before marriage -- presumably a period of courtship and falling in love -- these people's happiness rose by another fifth of a point. Immediately after marriage, they got a boost of yet another fifth of a point.

Given that most people rate their happiness within a 2.5-point range, a total difference of two-thirds of a point is considerable, said Lucas. But two years after marriage, he found that the married people's happiness levels had dropped back down to a quarter point higher than average -- exactly what they were before marriage. [...]

While the study examined heterosexual marriage and happiness, Lucas said his "intuition is these processes apply to lots of other relationships," including gay and cohabiting couples.

Though skeptical about the survey--before you can use a twin study to even begin to show it's nature not nurture it would have to be twins separated at birth--two eternal truths are implicated by the discussion: (1) of course people adapt even to catastrophic injury, which is one reason why euthanasia, which preys on people at their low points, is so evil; (2) the idea that straight couples are "intuitively" similar to gay couples is ludicrous.

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WHAT WALL?:

Pols find place to live in D.C. with secretive group (LARA JAKES JORDAN, April 21, 2003, AP)

Six members of Congress live in a $1.1 million Capitol Hill town house that is subsidized by a secretive religious organization, tax records show.

The lawmakers, all Christians, pay low rent to live in the stately red brick, three-story house on C Street, two blocks from the Capitol. It is maintained by a group alternately known as the ''Fellowship'' and the ''Foundation'' and brings together world leaders and elected officials through religion.

The Fellowship hosts receptions, luncheons and prayer meetings on the first two floors of the house, which is registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a church.

The six lawmakers--Reps. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) and Sens. John Ensign (R-Nev.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.)-- live in private rooms upstairs.

Rent is $600 a month, said DeMint, a Presbyterian.

''Our goal is singular--and that is to hope that we can assist them in better understandings of the teachings of Christ, and applying it to their jobs,'' said Richard Carver, a member of the Fellowship's board of directors.

If only our biggest problem was politicians living in group religious housing when away from their families.

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