Don't miss:

Tim Dunlop on the value of the inspections process and the danger of forgetting about the important stuff.

Lisa English on recent developments in faith-based opposition to war.

I can't remember the last time I bought Starbucks coffee. But my coffee pot died this morning, and, unable to face the day without caffeine, I fed the addiction at the strip mall Starbucks up the street. As I was about to toss the cup, these words caught my attention:

Building Relationships With Coffee Growers

Relationships? That sounds good. You don't keep people locked in cycles of debt and poverty if you have "relationships" with them. At least I would assume that caring about people's welfare would go along with having a "relationship." That's generally the way it works with most people I know.

I peeled off the cardboard heat protector to read the words underneath:

By traveling to origin countries and talking with coffee growers about the quality we seek, we create truly global partnerships. It is these valued friendships, built over many years, that allow us to offer the world's most exceptional coffees.

Aw, that's sweet.

Maybe I'm over-interpreting, but I have a strange feeling that all that stuff about "valued friendships" and "truly global partnerships" is supposed to suggest to me and all the other glassy-eyed suburban mommies in line that Starbucks has nothing to do with this. We may be addicts, but we really don't like the idea that the people who are growing this absurdly priced coffee are pulling their children out of school and cutting back on food and medicine because the price Starbucks is paying for the coffee is below the cost of producing it.

They don't come right out and say that they buy fair trade coffee, but, after all, the coffee growers are their friends. Surely we can assume they pay their friends a fair price so that they can earn a living wage?

Starbucks got some good p.r. a couple of years ago when they announced they'd sell some fair trade coffee in their stores, but they haven't always kept their word, and fair trade coffee is only a tiny portion of the company's business. There's still a campaign on to pressure them to brew the stuff every day and offer it to customers. Theoretically, they brew it once a month -- but there's some question as to whether they're actually carrying through even on that meager promise. But why bother keeping your promises, and paying people for their labor, if you can blather about global friendships. It sounds good. It makes the caffeine addicts feel good. And who has time to check if it actually means anything?

It's the corporate equivalent of a State of the Union address: No one actually listens to a president speak. You're clearing the table and washing dishes and keeping one ear focused on the bathroom, where the seven-year-old is taking a bath (hey, no dancing in the bathtub, sweetheart, you could slip) and you hear blah, blah, blah...energy efficiency and conservation... blah, blah, blah...Clear Skies legislation... blah, blah, blah...Healthy Forest Initiative...and you think, wow, the environment is clearly in good hands, and you can forget all about it and go check on the dancing princess in the tub, who obviously needs your attention more than the forests do.

Because who has time to check if the words actually mean anything?

By way of Kieran Healy's Weblog, I found Who Dies for Bush Lies? -- which I think pulls together, in an especially striking way, information about the lies the Bush Administration has told about Iraq, the cost of war (in money and lives), and who will benefit from the war.

And speaking of the cost of war...

From the New York Times:

On national security, Mr. Cheney has been consumed by planning for the political reconstruction of a post-Hussein Iraq. The plan, so far, is for an American military commander to run the country alongside a civilian administrator, with an eventual transition to an Iraqi-led government. Toward that end, Mr. Cheney met for 45 minutes in his office in mid-January with Barham Salih, the prime minister of the eastern Kurdish zone in Iraq and one of several potential future leaders of that country.

Does anyone feel encouraged knowing that a man who has made a career doing business with thugs seems to be in charge of planning what's going to happen in post-war Iraq?

I don't know what to make of this, but it's interesting. The next chairman of the board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria will be Tommy Thompson.

One of the biggest problems in the AIDS proposal Bush made in the SOTU is that Bush seems to want to control how the money is spent (brand name drugs to keep the drug companies happy and abstinence education for the fundies?), and so is not putting enough of it into the UN's Global Fund. The Washington Post calls Thompson's chairmanship "a move that could presage much larger U.S. contributions to the new organization." Maybe. My fear is that it could presage less pressure to relax patent laws that keep the cost of antiretroviral drugs high, and that it could offer the administration one more opportunity to return a little something to its contributors.

Don't miss Liberal Oasis on the word games the administration is playing with the AIDS proposal.

The Global Aids Alliance and Africa Action also express some skepticism about the plan, particularly about the failure to adequately fund the Global Fund to Fight Aids, the lack of awareness of the connection between AIDS and debt (Africa's debt drains $15 billion per year out of the continent), the lack of commitment to generic drugs (without that commitment, Bush's plan becomes not much more than a welfare program for the pharmaceutical companies), and the fact that some of the most heavily affected countries were left out of Bush's proposal.

I'm beginning to feel like Charlie Brown, and Bush is Lucy, grabbing away the football once again.

Pro-war or anti-war, we all share our beliefs with some people we'd rather have nothing to do with.

(Via The Better Rhetor)

The Institute for Public Accuracy has a point-by-point analysis of the State of the Union speech, making extremely good use of hyperlinks. Their comments on the AIDS proposal especially interested me. Yesterday I was torn between hope and cynicism. Today cynicism is winning.

(Quotes from the SOTU are italicized.):

Today, on the continent of Africa, nearly 30 million people have the AIDS virus, including 3 million children under the age of 15. There are whole countries in Africa where more than one-third of the adult population carries the infection. More than 4 million require immediate drug treatment. Yet across that continent, only 50,000 AIDS victims -- only 50,000 -- are receiving the medicine they need.

Raj Patel (policy analyst at Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy, and a visiting fellow at Berkeley): "It is important to remember here that the epidemic might have been mitigated much earlier by increased public health expenditure. Unfortunately, at the very time that the pandemic was seeping through the poorest countries in the world, the U.S. dominated World Bank and IMF were urging cutbacks in health expenditure under their structural adjustment plans. The timing could not have been more disastrous."

Because the AIDS diagnosis is considered a death sentence, many do not seek treatment. Almost all who do are turned away.

A doctor in rural South Africa describes his frustration. He says, "We have no medicines, many hospitals tell people, ‘You’ve got AIDS. We can’t help you. Go home and die’."

In an age of miraculous medicines, no person should have to hear those words.

AIDS can be prevented. Anti-retroviral drugs can extend life for many years. And the cost of those drugs has dropped from $12,000 a year to under $300 a year, which places a tremendous possibility within our grasp.

Ladies and gentlemen, seldom has history offered a greater opportunity to do so much for so many.

Diana Zuckerman (president of the National Center for Policy Research for Women and Families): "If we are to prevent HIV/AIDS in Africa, the Caribbean, or anywhere else, the Administration will have to embrace the kinds of prevention programs that work. That includes condoms, not just abstinence education, and not just treatment of people who are already ill. And yet, the Administration has been rejecting these kinds of comprehensive prevention programs at home."

We have confronted, and will continue to confront, HIV/AIDS in our own country. And to meet a severe and urgent crisis abroad, tonight I propose the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa.

This comprehensive plan will prevent 7 million new AIDS infections, treat at least 2 million people with life-extending drugs and provide humane care for millions of people suffering from AIDS and for children orphaned by AIDS.

I ask the Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean.

Jacqueline Cabasso (executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation): "This sounds like a lot of money, but it’s important to put it in perspective. The U.S. military budget, at nearly $400 billion a year ($396.1 billion for FY 2003) is larger than the military budgets of the next 26 countries combined ($394.2 billion); and 35 times larger than the combined military budgets of the "Axis of Evil" countries (Iraq, Iran and North Korea -- $11.8 billion). U.S. nuclear weapons research, development, testing, and production, at $5.9 billion for 2003, is significantly higher than spending during the average Cold War year, for directly comparable activities ($364 billion). This does not include delivery systems. How could this money be better spent to ensure real human, national and global security?"

Salih Booker (executive director of Africa Action): "Bush’s announcement would be the height of cynicism if the president does not now request at least $3.5 billion of his new total for funding this year. This is the U.S. share of what is urgently needed to fight HIV/AIDS now. According to the White House, the President’s request for additional funds to fight HIV/AIDS will not affect the 2003 budget, and will only begin in 2004, with an increase of just $700 million. The real measure of the president’s sincerity will be in the budget numbers for 2003 and 2004. Large numbers for 2007 are meaningless to people who will die this year without access to essential medicines. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is the most important vehicle in the effort to fight the pandemic and the U.S. should contribute a far greater share. The new commitment of only $1 billion to the Fund, over a period of 5 years, would actually undermine Africa’s greatest hope. Africa’s illegitimate external debts are draining $15 billion a year from the War on AIDS. The spirit and logic of the President’s own initiative demand the immediate cancellation of these debts."

This nation can lead the world in sparing innocent people from a plague of nature.

Raj Patel: "This policy is disingenuous to its core. Under existing World Trade Organization legislation, countries can already ‘compulsorily license’ drugs, waiving the patent protection of pharmaceutical companies in the interests of public health. It is, in fact, U.S. sponsored legislation at the World Trade Organization that prevents those countries in the third world which lack the production capacities to produce generic retroviral drugs from importing them from other countries. This compassion for the third world doesn’t pan out either. In December, the United States was alone among members of the World Trade Organization in its opposition to an expanded list of diseases which waives reimportation rules. What looks like a moment of heartfelt generosity on the part of the Bush regime is, in fact, a hard-nosed recognition that pharmaceutical companies around the world aren’t winning the PR battle to justify their monopolies. To put it more simply, this is a $15 billion subsidy to the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, in lieu of political battles lost at the WTO by U.S. negotiators. It remains to be seen quite how much of this new-found largesse will go to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, which last year was on the verge of bankruptcy."

...............................

Go read the whole thing -- both for the rebuttal of the other sections of the speech, and the priceless links.

War Crime and Punishment (Part 2)
There are few things I believe more firmly than that people -- including the most powerful -- should be held accountable for crimes against humanity. Unfortunately, there are few more important goals I think less likely to be fully accomplished in my lifetime.

I think war crimes trials are a move in the right direction. I'm especially heartened by the establishment of the ICC (despite US opposition), creating a permanent court where victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity can be heard. In fact, I think that's one of the most important benefits of   courts set up to deal with atrocities. As important as achieving justice is, and as important as it is to discourage genocide in the future by making it clear that perpetrators will be called to account for their crimes, it is equally important that victims get a chance to tell their stories. The most horrible crimes are made worse when the victims are silenced. And it isn't just a matter of the pain the silence causes. Behind that silence, a need for vengeance often builds, giving birth -- as soon as the opportunity arises -- to more atrocities.

And yet, I share most of the objections and concerns about war crimes trials that Donald Johnson and John Steppling brought up in the letters I posted recently: They're inevitably political, and far from being -- as conservatives fear -- aimed at the US and Israel, they go after the weak (the despicable weak, but the weak nonetheless) and don't deal with the crimes of the powerful. But I also think that the whole concept of international justice and accountability for human rights violations is in its infancy -- and whether it will be a source of real justice or just another weapon in the hands of the powerful is still undetermined.

There's a debate in Belgium at the moment that may offer some clues about that. Since 1993, Belgian courts have become extremely hospitable to atrocity victims who have no other place to take their cases, because that year Belgium gave its courts the power to investigate atrocity charges, even if the accused was not in the country. Technically, almost all countries subscribe to the international law principle of "universal jurisdiction" -- that countries have to either prosecute, or extradite for prosecution, anyone in their territory accused of war crimes. The idea is that for certain heinous  crimes, there should be no "safe haven." But few countries had laws as broad and liberal as Belgium's. Cases have been brought in Belgium against Saddam Hussein, Augusto Pinochet, Fidel Castro, Rwandan President Paul Kagame, former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani, Yasser Arafat, Ariel Sharon, and many others. So far, the only convictions have been of four Rwandans sentenced in 2001 for their role in the 1994 genocide of the county's Tutsi minority.

It was the Sharon case that shook Belgium's law. In 2001, survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacres filed a complaint against Sharon, who was minister of defense at the time of the massacres, in a Belgian court.. Not surprisingly, the United States and Israel attacked the decision to accept the case. And clearly the U.S. interest was not just protecting Sharon, but insuring immunity of the powerful. If you can try Sharon, who's next -- Kissinger?

Last June, a Belgian appeals court dismissed the case against Sharon, and declared that foreigners cannot be tried unless they are in the country. There are currently two bills pending in the Belgian Parliament to restore the original law and nullify the court's decision. Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian prime minister, has come out in favor of the bills. American and Israeli diplomats are lobbying against them.

They're not lobbying against them because they believe that the only potential those laws have is to put a few obscure and unimportant Rwandans in prison. They're lobbying against them because they see a real potential to go after even powerful people. And in the long run, I suspect they're right.

I'm not Belgian. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not remotely qualified to weigh in on the subject of international law. Even I can see problems with trying people who aren't there (Human Rights Watch has an interesting analysis of this issue.) And the complexities of the issue that even I'm capable of understanding are more than I can squeeze into a single post (if you want to know more about the Belgian anti-atrocity law, however, HRW has a good backgrounder.) But my bleeding heart, layperson's, quick reading of the issue is that if Israelis fear that Ariel Sharon could be asked to explain his role in Sabra and Shatila, I think that is a very good thing. If he has to avoid Belgium, or any country that has an extradition treaty with Belgium, so much the better.

It's also a good thing that men like Pinochet and Kissinger have as much need for their lawyers as they do for their suitcases on foreign trips. I agree with Donald Johnson that we're never going to see Henry Kissinger facing a war   crimes tribunal. But he's wanted for questioning in Chile, Argentina and France, and there are countries where he can't travel, because they can't guarantee his immunity from legal proceedings. If you believe -- as Robert Bork seems to -- that Americans should be above international law, that's frightening. If you believe in justice, the fact that Bork is worried about it is encouraging.

For awhile I suspect all we'll see will be trials of leaders like Milosevic, who aren't sitting on valuable resources and have no value to major powers. Or people like Saddam, who have resources, but have outlived their usefulness to us (and a trial of Saddam, if it wasn't controlled by the United States, would be fascinating -- because how can you deal with his crimes without questioning his accomplices ?)

The existence of courts to try human rights violators makes the lives of powerful criminals more difficult. Laws defining crimes against humanity cause people to ask, if we can try a Milosevic, why not a Kissinger? It's not going to happen in the near future, but it's a good question. A lot of progress begins with good questions.

That's entertainment
I want to watch the next State of the Union speech at Julia's house.

No comment...

(Via Alas)

A woman is in jail in California because she refuses to tell a court where her two daughters are. Because of her refusal to co-operate, a court awarded custody of the children to their father -- an alcoholic, convicted child molester, and illegal alien who has been ordered deported back to his native Chile. The D.A. says, get off his back, "he's led an honorable life." The honorable gentleman has been arrested for molesting another child. Read the rest of the story.

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Inmate punished for sex with guard

A mentally ill inmate at Taycheedah Correctional Institution who was impregnated by a prison guard overseeing her was ordered to serve nearly a year of solitary confinement as punishment.

The guard, Matthew Emery, 24, was fired, but he cannot be charged criminally: Wisconsin is one of only four states in the country that does not explicitly prohibit sexual contact between prison staff and inmates.

Legislators from both parties described prisoner Jackie Noyes as a victim and expressed outrage at the way she was treated. Noyes, who has a well-documented history of mental problems, told her family that she believed the prison guard loved her...Prison officials found her guilty of "sexual conduct, soliciting staff."

............................


Vatican to Publish Buzzwords Dictionary

The Vatican has compiled a dictionary of words like "reproductive rights" and "gender" in a bid to clarify what it says are neutral-sounding terms that can mask anti-Church meanings.

The 1,000-page Lexicon, containing 78 key terms about family, life and ethical questions, is due to be published soon, according to Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family... Lopez Trujillo said that a basic word like "gender" takes on other connotations in international meetings and "is used to signify a radical ideological feminism."

I have to admit Bush surprised me last night.

I can't compare his speech to any previous State of the Union addresses, because, to be honest, I've never been able to sit through one -- and this was no different. After about ten minutes, I decided doing the dishes would be a lot more interesting. I happened to finish the dishes just as Bush started talking about AIDS in Africa. It was one of those situations where if I didn't yell back at the television, I'd burst.

As our nation moves troops and builds alliances to make our world safer, we must also remember our calling, as a blessed country, is to make this world better. Today, on the continent of Africa, nearly 30 million people have the AIDS virus, including 3 million children under the age of 15. There are whole countries in Africa where more than one-third of the adult population carries the infection.

And you're going to brag again about how the United States gives more money than any other country to the cause, aren't you? Even though, given the size of our economy, our contributions put us at the bottom of the heap. And it's not even a big heap.

Anti-retroviral drugs can extend life for many years. And the cost of those drugs has dropped from $12,000 a year to under $300 a year.

It could drop even more if you'd stop letting your contributors in the pharmaceutical industry protect their precious patents at the cost of people's lives. It wouldn't hurt if you'd dump your anti-antiretroviral foreign aid chief, either

I ask the Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean.

Did he say $15 billion?

Jesus, he did.

Fifteen billion dollars is real money. Divided evenly, that's $3 billion per year, which is pretty damn close to the $3.5 billion that Physicians for Human Rights and other activists have said is needed.

This is Bush, Inc., of course, so I turned off the television thinking there was a catch somewhere. They're talking about some miserly amount this year, with a promise of an increase in future years (which will magically disappear when the budget gets tight), right?

It doesn't look like it -- although there's certainly some reason for skepticism. According to the fact sheet on the White House web page, the program will start somewhat small -- with $2 billion next year. AIDS activists are reading the fact sheet as promising that half of that money would go to the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, which is important because there is a need for one large scale, comprehensive program, not a lot of small programs competing for the same money, and repeating each others' efforts, and the U.S. has repeatedly been accused of not contributing its fair share to the Global Fund. Even $1 billion isn't enough. It's better than the $500 million we previously pledged, but still well under the $2.5 billion that we'd need to give to make our contribution equal that of Europe in terms of the size of the economy. And looking at the fact sheet -- where the language is somewhat ambiguous -- I'm not even sure they're right about the $1 billion. The White House promises that $1 billion out of the $10 billion in new spending will go to the Global Fund. Does that mean $1 billion stretched out over 5 years? Does it mean that the vast majority of the programs will be new U.S.-controlled programs (don't want the UN to get any credit, or hand out any condoms)? I don't know, but I'm not the only one who's concerned about the ambiguity. Dr. Paul Zeitz, Executive Director of the Global AIDS Alliance, worries that the contribution the United States is talking about will still "leave the fund vastly underfunded and undermine its success."

I don't know. Maybe The Washington Times is right and it's just a cynical attempt "to reach out to the black community, the Democrats' most loyal voting bloc." (Has anyone noticed that conservatives are at least as cynical about conservatives' motives as liberals are?) But it's money, real money, triple what we had previously committed to, for a cause that desperately needs the money. So I'll save cynicism and mistrust for tomorrow, and today just join the applause.

UPDATE: I really didn't want to be cynical about the president's AIDS proposal, and did my best to hold off on the mistrust for a day, but I'm pretty convinced by the suggestion at Liberal Oasis that it's reasonable to be concerned that only $1 billion of the new money is earmarked for the Global Fund. The GF purchases cheaper generic drugs. U.S.-tailored programs can spend the money -- waste the money -- on American goods and patented drugs. That means less medicine for people who need it, and more money for drug companies.

Via Blue Streak, I learned that Bishop William K. Wiegand recently told Governor Gray Davis to either oppose abortion or stop taking Communion. It's the first step in a plan to target out-of-step Catholic politicians.

Kevin Drum suggests that the campaign will backfire, reminding Catholics who disagree with the Church on this issue (and I don't have any statistics at hand, but the polls I've seen suggest Catholic opinion on abortion is similar to overall American opinion) how unwelcome they are, and making the Church look overly politicized to other Americans. I think he's right on the political analysis, but I have to disagree with something else Kevin says: " It's hard to criticize the church on practical grounds since it considers this to be a purely moral issue."

I don't find it the least bit hard to criticize the Church on moral grounds over this issue. I realize there's a difference between the Church's stand on birth control and abortion -- teachings that must be accepted by practicing Catholics -- and on the death penalty and war (both of which the Pope and the American bishops -- among others -- have opposed), but if the Church has any moral authority on abortion (and I'll probably surprise some people here -- but I think it does), it grows out of its consistency in arguing for the importance of valuing life, all life. When it pulls out one strand of the web, and insists on enforcing that, without mentioning any of the other elements, the whole thing unravels, and it becomes very obvious that it's not an issue of morality at all, but an issue of power.

UPDATE: Digby and Kevin Raybould have more thoughts on the subject.

The latest chapter of The Story Point is up.

Most of the time a rant is just getting something off your chest. Sometimes it's poetry.

The Slacktivist: George Will suggests that domestic violence is no big deal, and thinks it's silly to remind people that it's a crime.

Tim Dunlop, over at The Road to Surfdom has a good memory that leads him to some important questions. Shortly before Christmas, a German newspaper revealed that the Iraqi weapons report given to the non-permanent members of the UN security counsel was incomplete. The United States had edited 8,000 pages out of an almost 12,000 page document. Among the cuts was some embarrassing information about Western (including American) companies that had helped Saddam Hussein build his weapons program. I wondered at the time why the American press virtually ignored this story and misstated the facts when they mentioned it at all.

Tim brings up the issue again, not only to castigate the American press for ignoring it, but to point out that the omission now has further importance: "If the US has removed 8,000 pages of the declaration, and it hasn't shown those pages to anyone, how is the UN meant to decide if Iraq has disclosed all relevant information?"

I'm not sure about that "hasn't shown those pages to anyone" part. According to The Guardian, the five permanent members of the security council have seen the full report. It's still a good question though. How can the UN decide what the truth is, if its most powerful member is allowed to snip out inconvenient facts?

Dear President Bush:

I seldom write letters to politicians for the same reason I seldom call radio stations – because too many other people are trying to do the same thing at once, my voice is most likely going to be lost. Why bother? But given the gravity of the current situation I don't feel that I can, in good conscience, remain silent. I feel I need to try to get through, even though I most likely will not.

Just to give you some background about myself, I'm a 39 year old male Ph.D. candidate in English at Drew University. You spoke here near the end of your election campaign and was warmly received; I remember the hundreds of people lined up across campus, off the campus, and down the street to get into the Simon Forum to hear you speak. You've recently named the President of my university, Tom Kean, to serve on your 9/11 committee, and for that I'm grateful. I'm confident you've made a good choice and that he will do his duty without compromise. I've also voted Republican in every election since 1984, including the election that put you into the White House.

But to be perfectly honest, the Republican Party is on the verge of losing me.... (more)

Jesse's back! And if you've ever been embarassed by the sappiness and silliness of some of the peace movement (as my son complained to me about an anti-war rally he went to in Santa Cruz recently, "Mom, they had puppets. Jesus. Giant puppets."), read Jesse's link and be grateful you don't have to wallow in the other side's kitsch.

Zizka pulls together the case (including essential links) against trusting George Bush to get anything right in "Why I Fear Bush More Than Saddam"

This is what war looks like.

A future I don't want to be around to see...
Scientists are exploring ways to medicate away the conscience.

The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article on US attempts at "regime change" over the past 50 years -- which don't exactly inspire confidence in the long-term outcome of a war in Iraq.

Bush and Company Strike Another Blow Against Human Rights...

Bush Moves to Restore Military Ties With Indonesia
The administration of U.S. President George W. Bush has moved a major step closer toward normalising military ties with the Indonesian military (TNI), which it hopes will be a key ally in its ''war against terrorism'' in Southeast Asia.

The Senate voted 61-36 Thursday to defeat an amendment that would have barred funding for enrolling Indonesians in Washington's International Military Education and Training (IMET) programme until it cooperates fully in an investigation into the killing of two U.S. teachers in West Papua last summer.

The administration's eagerness to restore military aid and training to Indonesia - first restricted in 1991 after a well-publicised massacre in East Timor, and then cut off entirely in 1999 when TNI-backed militias ransacked the former Portuguese colony - has made it a top foreign-policy priority since the Sep. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against New York and the Pentagon.

The administration has claimed that Indonesia, the country with the world's greatest Muslim population, remains a key recruiting ground and possible safe haven for al-Qaeda and its sympathisers... But there has been substantial opposition to renewing military ties with the TNI, which is widely considered by international human rights groups as one of the world's most abusive and corrupt national military institutions... In October, eight major Indonesian human rights groups wrote to members of Congress expressing ''great alarm'' at the administration's efforts to lift restrictions on U.S. aid, including training, for the TNI.

''Irreparable damage will be done to our efforts at reform,'' the groups warned. ''Any further attempts by the TNI to change old practices will almost certainly end'' if Congress provides IMET training or other forms of military aid, the letter said.

Rights groups here, such as Human Rights Watch, also actively opposed renewing IMET funding, and expressed outrage at Thursday's vote.

''The Indonesian military has sabotaged international efforts to attain justice for crimes against humanity committed in East Timor, exonerated itself of the strong implication that its elite Special Forces recently murdered two U.S. teachers and beat a U.S. nurse - yet the Senate voted to give the military a level of support not seen in more than a decade,'' said Kurt Biddle, Washington coordinator of the Indonesia Human Rights Network (IHRN). ''Why is the Senate rewarding this behaviour?''

''Human rights groups understand perfectly well that if there is to be any real reform in Indonesia, you've got to get the army out of politics, and renewing ties now is not going to help that,'' according to Dan Lev, an Indonesia expert at the University of Washington in Seattle. ''On the contrary, it's going to boost the army's political clout.''

Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the Egyptian democracy and human rights advocate who was imprisoned last year for his activities, and freed last December, after international pressure on the Egyptian government (his retrial is set for February 4), will take part in an on-line chat at the Digital Freedom Network this Thursday at 11:30 Eastern Time in the DFN chat room.

Dr. Ibrahim is a professor of sociology at American University in Cairo and founder of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Developmental Studies, a research organization that promotes democratic reform in Egypt and the Arab world. He was first arrested in the summer of 2000 on charges related to a grant he received from the European Union to encourage participation in Egyptian elections. His activities included making a documentary film on fraud in the Egyptian electoral process. In May 2001, he was convicted of accepting foreign funding without governmental approval, and defaming Egypt by spreading false information.

If you have questions, but aren't able to make the chat, you can e-mail them here and DFN will mail Dr. Ibrahim's response back to you.

I'm almost speechless, so bear with me while I write in childishly simple sentences, trying to get a hold of this story :

There is a strike in Venezuela. We aren't getting enough oil from Venezuela. The price of oil is going up. We need to get more oil. We double imports from a country we are about to bomb.

We double imports from a country whose leader we consider the epitome of evil?

No, it doesn't help. No matter how simply I put it, it doesn't make sense.

(Via Tom Tomorrow)

From the e-mail box

WAR CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

I posted a long piece last week on the issue of trying Saddam Hussein for war crimes, which grew out of an essay on the topic by Iraqi-American jurist Sermid al-Sarraf. Al-Muhajabah and Salam Pax have more thoughts on the essay, which also inspired some interesting ideas from readers. I plan to come back to this issue soon, but in the meantime, I'd like to share my readers' thoughts:

Donald Johnson writes:
The problem I have with war crimes trials is that in practice, the only people who are tried tend to be dictators who have either outlived their usefulness to us or never were our friends at all. I think you could make a serious case for trying various famous Americans (not just Kissinger, though I grudgingly admit Hitchens has done a good job summarizing other people's research), but at the moment this seems unlikely to ever happen. Kissinger is avoiding certain countries, but if he ever were arrested while overseas there would be intense pressure from the US for his release and that would be the end of that. Even the prospect of forcing him to testify about what he knew about Latin American death squad activity seems rather remote.

Some of the liberal American supporters of the ICC don't inspire me with confidence either. For a long time conservatives claimed they were opposed to the ICC out of fear that American servicemen overseas would be subjected to political trials, but then some months back I remember the NYT publishing a story where the Bush Administration admitted their real fear -- high-ranking Americans like Kissinger might become targets. (I didn't clip the article, unfortunately.) The problem with some American liberals is that they would respond by saying that there were safeguards in the treaty to prevent that from happening. I want safeguards too -- no one wants false accusations made against Americans. But by defending the ICC in this way and avoiding the Kissinger question, these ICC supporters give the impression that no real case could ever be made against an American.

In the end, I do support trials for people like Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, because, to paraphrase what you said, just because you can't fight every evil in the world doesn't mean you shouldn't fight any. The victims of Hussein and Milosevic deserve justice, even if other victims don't get any. But in the end, that kind of justice is little more than another well-intentioned idea twisted to serve the needs of the powerful. It won't stop the US from supporting future Husseins when convenient, or from punishing a country's innocent civilians for the crimes of their tyrannical leader.

UPDATE: The NY Times article that Donald Johnson mentions can be found here.

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John Steppling writes:
I wanted to comment on the argument about Saddam is bad, but so are a lot of other leaders. I've used that argument, so I have to defend it a little. The reasoning, I think anyway, goes like this: to selectively pick oil rich Iraq (Saddam) and not, say, Mugabe or Charles Taylor, or allies like The House of Saud or Favored Nation Trading Partners like China is to be hypocritical (not to mention the greatest threat to anyone, which is Pakistan). Also, the fact that there are endless tyrants around the world makes the idea of policing and liberating the people under them a bit fatuous. Even the US cant police everyone -- though it may try to under Bush.

Does that mean one won't still be doing some good by getting rid of Saddam? Well, I doubt it. In theory it might, in practice it never has. So I doubt one can assume at all that Iraqis will be better off. But even if they were, even if they were "liberated", the final tally on intervention is really bad, and I think that this notion of "us" telling anyone who is good or bad is a questionable practice...

I think by saying Saddam is bad and so are countless others, what one is really saying is that selective justice is not justice. This is also why I am against all international criminal courts -- because they are always selective and political and can never be anything but political and weighted by bias and self interest. I don't think you can do good, or help a population suffering under a tyrant, by selectively picking one regime and ignoring others. It's just in bad faith. And such bad faith ends up self destructing -- in part because it is in bad faith. Unless the US said, ok, the world must be totally democratic, must adhere to our notion of universal liberal democracy and transparent due process (which not even the US practice) then to pick out an easy target that serves one purpose is pure hypocrisy. There are many bad leaders, to my mind, and probably to most of the people living under them, so lets pick --uh -- this one, and the hell with the rest of them. This sounds like a good way to make a whole lot of people resent and dislike the US even more. But maybe the real argument (meaning Saddam is bad but so are many others) was to simply point up the selectivity...

I am constantly amazed at how little is discussed about the political nature of [military trials]. I argue it all the time. The Hague, or the Maddie Albright Court as one might better describe it, is a farce, and Milosovic's trial is a sham. I signed on to defend Milosovic just because I found the coverage and the process so offensive. The Serbs were bad, but so was everyone in that conflict, and the reporting became a kind of "received wisdom" process where nobody (almost) challenged the assumptions being handed out by NATO. Milosovic cant be convicted because there is no evidence -- and if they convict him on what scant evidence they do have, then Westmoreland should be brought up on charges, not to mention Kissinger and Sharon. One cannot have international courts that are impartial or fair -- it's just not possible. And the US refused to sign on to the International Court anyway. Not that I blame them, because, actually, the Bush people were right that US soldiers would get singled out, such is the international dislike of America. The Milosovic trial hasn't found it necessary to look into any of the NATO collateral damage nor, more importantly, into the other parties in the conflict, but perhaps my bottom line feeling is that International Courts are a way to sanitize war, to make war legal and accountable -- as if war need not have horrible killing and maiming, as if war were somehow something else, and one could assuage one's guilt (or faux guilt) by convicting a symbolic villain (much like the death penalty, come to think of it). Milosovic goes on trial and is convicted (which I don't think he will be, but...) and then everyone can say, see, the Balkin conflict was handled well and we made those atrocities accountable -- even if the actual people who did the killing will not be brought to trial because that is impossible. And never mind the big corporate deals in arms that fueled much of that conflict.

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It's eerie how seemingly unconnected stories intertwine. Last week, I mentioned the latest news about women in Nigeria fighting oil companies -- Chevron in particular -- who pillage the country and give nothing back. This morning (in the post immediately below this one), I wrote about the fortune Dick Cheney made off of human rights violations. I just figured out that in some ways, those are aspects of the same story.

In 1999, Human Rights Watch did a report on the role major multinational oil companies have played in human rights violations in Nigeria's oil-producing communities. Oil production has damaged the environment of the Niger Delta. Large oil spills have killed fish, destroyed crops and polluted water. Oil companies have also expropriated land for oil production under laws which allow no effective due process protections for landowners. Oil companies provide very little local employment, and spend little on local development.

Protests against this situation have been widespread, and suppression of the protest has been draconian. Human Rights Watch found:

repeated incidents in which people were brutalized for attempting to raise grievances with the companies; in some cases security forces threatened, beat, and jailed members of community delegations even before they presented their cases. Such abuses often occurred on or adjacent to company property, or in the immediate aftermath of meetings between company officials and individual claimants or community representatives. Many local people seemed to be the object of repression simply for putting forth an interpretation of a compensation agreement, or for seeking effective compensation for land ruined or livelihood lost.

One of the worst incidents happened in 1997, in Opuama, a community whose local fishing grounds had been destroyed by a canal dredged by Chevron. In protest, a group of youths stopped a barge belonging to a Chevron contractor, blocking access to a Chevron facility. The authorities sent in the notoriously brutal Mobile Police (whom Nigerians have nicknamed "kill and go" because of their history of murdering innocent people with impunity). They killed one of the protestors, a young man named Gidikumo Sule. According to HRW, Chevron expressed no concern about the actions of the Mobile Police and took no steps to avoid similar tragedies in the future. The contractor whose barge was the center of the controversy decided to overlook the serious human rights problems in the area and increase its business dealings there.

The contractor was Halliburton. It's CEO at the time was Dick Cheney.

Everybody knows this already, but a quick review --

Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense in 1992 when the Pentagon paid Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, to study how it could save money by contracting with private companies -- like Brown & Root -- to do some of the military's work. After he left office, Cheney became CEO of Halliburton. The company has been doing government work since the 1940s, but with Cheney's help, the value of its Defense Department contracts grew from $300 million per year to $650 million per year. Cheney was useful not only for connections that gave Halliburton, and Brown & Root, an inside track on government contracts, but also in devising creative ways get around sanctions, so that the company could do business with a few of the more despicable dictators on the planet. I don't have to tell anyone about Halliburton's business with Saddam Hussein. (If you want a re-cap, Molly Ivins wrote one of her best pieces on the subject), but Cheney hasn't been picky about dealing with monsters. Brown & Root has also serviced Muammar Qaddafi (which makes the recent U.S. opposition to Libya's chairmanship of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights both right and mind-bogglingly hypocritical.) The still evolving Bush Wars have also been good for Brown & Root. Contracts for building everything from bases in Djibouti to detention facilities at Gitmo could be worth more than a billion dollars in the next decade.

The Los Angeles Times briefly frets that Cheney's history provides "fodder" for "conspiracy theorists." I'm not prone to conspiracy mongering, but can anyone give an innocent reading of those facts? The simplest explanation is that death and human rights violations have provided Dick Cheney with a very good living. It doesn't seem to bother Cheney's conscience at all, so I'm not sure why we have to whisper about it. The LA Times lays out most of the facts, but shrinks from the obvious conclusion.

Despite that lapse, the Times piece is a good summary of the problems involved in our increasingly privatized military.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. -- Matthew 23:27

Here's a nice story. Our surgeon Senate Majority leader, with his well-polished reputation for caring about AIDS victims in Africa, just eeked out a victory in the Senate by twisting the arm of a fellow Republican who had the audacity to consider voting for famine relief for southern Africa.

"Congratulations to our leader for holding a tough group together," commented Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum.

I don't know -- somehow I'm not impressed. I just don't think convincing Republican politicians to be mean and hypocritical is a major accomplishment.

Please tell me that either the newspaper got something wrong, or I'm misreading this. An article in today's LA Times on Governor George Ryan's mass commutation of death sentences in Illinois, and its effect on victims' families, contains a section on how prosecutors are responding:

Prosecutors... were going to great lengths to skirt Ryan's order, in some instances searching for technical legal glitches -- the kind they usually lament for freeing the guilty -- in the hope of sending some who received clemency back to death row. They were combing old records to see if perhaps sentencing papers had not been signed or otherwise properly processed, on the theory that if an inmate had not been legally, technically, sentenced to death he could not be granted clemency from that sentence.

They're looking for people whose death sentences were technically illegal to send back to death row, because if someone's sentence wasn't legal to begin with, they can't be given clemency (but can be executed)?

How do lawyers manage to hang on to their sanity?

If I don't stop reading the LA Times, I could easily turn into a manic depressive. Yesterday's lead story had Bush, under pressure from skeptical allies (not to mention a skeptical American public) backing down a bit on letting the inspections run their course. It wasn't much, but it offered a little hope. Today's lead story, however -- Prepare for War With Iraq, Bush to Tell America -- along with the news that the Pentagon is considering (and preparing for) using nuclear weapons in Iraq, sucked all the air out of yesterday's optimism.

Alas, a blog has a well-written and well-researched post demonstrating how little negative effect affirmative action has on white college applicants. It's fascinating stuff, a must-read.

I can't remotely match Barry's research skills, but a few personal experiences suggest to me that not only does affirmative action have very little negative effect on whites, sometimes the effect is positive.

I was an affirmative action admit to Berkeley in the seventies. I didn't know it at the time -- all I knew is that my getting in didn't make a lot of sense: My grades weren't close to being good enough for any UC, let alone the jewel of the system. It was only when UC was eliminating affirmative action, and I read about the types of things they took into account besides race -- single parent families, income below poverty level, parents who didn't go to college (or, in my father's case, even high school) -- all of which applied to me, that I understood why I'd been accepted. My grades were bad, my SATs were close to perfect -- an affirmative action program allowed UC to decide that meant something.

When I was eighteen, I thought they were nuts. I looked at my peers with their good grades from good high schools, and stacks of awards for one thing or another, and, above all, their overwhelming confidence (I'd sell my soul for a small portion of the confidence affluent teenagers have), and thought an enormous mistake had been made, and I couldn't possibly compete with them. It took me a long time to get past that belief. In some ways I think I still haven't gotten over it.

But I was wrong. You can do well in high school by filling in the blanks and doing what you're told. My problem in high school was that I was terrible at that kind of thing. I had a habit of leaving multiple choice tests blank, turning them over, and writing essay answers to the multiple choice questions on the back. (That's still my habit, isn't it? Ask me to choose between option A and option B, and my answer will always be "Don't you realize how many other options there are?") I only had one teacher in high school who turned the paper over, read what was on the other side, and didn't assume that knowing more than what was on the test was a bad thing. But at UC, that love of writing and passion for ideas -- which most of my high school teachers hated, or at least didn't understand -- turned out to be a good thing. And a lot of students with high grades discovered that their ability to give the "right" answer didn't mean much any more. In college I did a lot of tutoring of people who were, on paper, much smarter than me.

Without affirmative action, I wouldn't have had that chance.

Hesiod raises an issue that has bothered me as well. I've read several times that one of the first priorities after an invasion of Iraq will be to destroy Saddam's stores of chemical and biological weapons (Hesiod has a link to the latest variation on the theme.) But in order to do that, we'd have to know where those weapons are, right? So, what's going on here? Are we basing plans for war on a fantasy scenario (as soon as war starts, information about where the weapons are will magically drop from the sky), or are we withholding useful information from inspectors because we really don't want them to find anything? Very weird.

These women are my heroes and my inspiration.

Last summer, a group of unarmed women from Itsekiri and Ijaw communities in southern Nigeria took over ChevronTexaco's main oil terminal in Escravos, demanding jobs, schools, town halls, roads, electricity, potable water and other necessities for their neglected communities. If the story doesn't sound familiar, you might remember them as the women who threatened to take off their clothes if their demands weren't met. Naked women protestors -- that was the angle a lot of the Western press latched on to.

For years Western oil companies have been taking billions out of Africa, bribing dictators, and putting almost nothing back into the villages where they operate. The women's siege resulted in a loss of three million barrels of oil production, and an agreement by Chevron to invest in social improvements for the communities. Those naked women may have been a joke to the Western press, but they accomplished more than previous protestors -- who were male and heavily armed.

So a small group of unarmed women took on an oil giant, gained a little ground, and that's the end of the story, right?

Not a chance. The women of the Niger Delta are back. And this time they're taking on the government.

Nigeria is Africa's biggest oil producer, one of the top ten oil producers in the world, and for ten years there have been clashes between police and bands of machete-wielding young men, who frequently kidnapped oil company workers, and stopped production. In response, President Olusegun Obasanjo has moved to protect oil installations by increasing the military presence in the region, vying, apparently, for the title of the George Bush of sub-Saharan Africa.

Hundreds of women, with the strange idea that money would be better in their villages than in building a naval base to protect the oil companies from the people they're exploiting, blocked the waterways to keep construction materials from reaching the site. The navy turned back.

Are these women terrific, or what?

Christian Science Monitor: Turkey hosts antiwar summit: Iraq's neighbors met in Ankara Thursday, hoping to find ways to avert a war that could rattle the region.
Turkish officials say that if European leaders such as France and Germany oppose the use of force, this will make it increasingly uncomfortable for Turkey to fall into step with Washington, considering that one of the government's key goals is an invitation to join the European Union. "Yes, I think it will put Turkey in a more difficult position," Yusuf Buluc, the spokesman for the foreign ministry, says of increased European opposition to the war. Officials in the prime minister's office say that Turkey cannot be on board without another UN resolution and that the stationing of new troops here would have to be approved by Turkey's parliament. "We cannot act unilaterally, even bilaterally. There should be a base of international legitimacy for any action in Iraq," says Ahmet Davutoglu, a policy adviser to Prime Minister Abdullah Gul. "If the answer is 'no' in the parliament," he says of ongoing military cooperation. related to a potential US war in Iraq, "all of these technical developments would be stopped."

Washington Post: Putin Calls Bush, Sides with France and Germany in Resisting War
Russian President Vladimir Putin told President Bush in a telephone call Thursday that the key to future action on Iraq would be found in next Monday's report by U.N. arms inspectors, joining leaders of China, Canada, France and Germany in opposing any rush to war. The spokesmen for the big powers said U.N. weapons inspectors should be allowed to continue efforts to disarm Iraq by peaceful means.

Globe and Mail: PM to Bush: Hold off on war: Canada will break with U.S. if it hits Hussein without mandate from UN
Prime Minister Jean Chrétien says the United States has not yet made the case for war with Iraq, and that he has told U.S. President George W. Bush that Canada does not want the United States to attack without a UN mandate. Arguing that United Nations weapons inspectors should be given more time, a skeptical Mr. Chrétien said yesterday he is not afraid to part company with Canada's closest ally if the United States attacks Iraq without the backing of the UN Security Council. An increasingly frustrated Mr. Bush phoned Mr. Chrétien on Wednesday looking for political support from Canada after a rough day in which France's President Jacques Chirac and Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder joined together in a sharp challenge to U.S. policy on Iraq.

International Herald Tribune: NATO wavering on war with Iraq
In a new sign of wavering allied will, NATO postponed a decision Wednesday on a U.S. request for six measures to support a possible war against Iraq.
The move followed what was described as a heated debate, with the United States and Britain on one side, and France, Germany and some other members on the other.

"It was a pretty tough discussion," said a diplomat at the Brussels headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Reuters reported. "The arguments were flying."

The 19-nation alliance is expected ultimately to approve the measures, mainly aimed at defending Turkey - which is granting the United States limited basing rights - against a potential Iraqi attack.

But the NATO hesitation, in a forum long dominated by the United States and where an almost pro-forma approval might once have been expected, sent a dramatic signal: The debate about war has taken a bad turn for Washington as some of its closest allies have joined in opposition. This in turn increases the likelihood of a narrower U.S. war coalition with no UN backing.

The Guardian: World opinion moves against Bush
In Spain and Italy, majorities against war are over 60%, despite the expressed support for US policy of the countries' respective leaders, Jose Maria Aznar and Silvio Berlusconi. These largely Catholic countries will have listened to the Pope's recent denunciation of war as a "defeat for humanity".

The developing position in Britain is, in a sense, even more remarkable. For historical and cultural reasons, the British feel a greater affinity with the US than people elsewhere in Europe. Their instinct is to support the US, as the response to September 11 showed.

During the past six months or more, Britons have been repeatedly told by the prime minister, Tony Blair, that the threat posed by Iraq is urgent and must be dealt with, if necessary by force, as the US says.

Mr. Blair's government has published dossiers on Iraq's estimated weapons of mass destruction capability and its human rights abuses in a bid to bolster the case for war. It has also followed the Bush administration's lead in drawing a link, without any evidence, between al-Qaida terrorists and Iraq.

It argues that the worldwide problem of weapons of mass destruction proliferation, and particularly the threat of weapons falling into terrorist hands, will somehow be curbed if Iraq's regime is ousted.

Yet from beneath the weight of this official, and media-backed, scaremongering and arm-twisting, a near-majority of Britons opposed to war is emerging. Over the past three months, those against an attack on Iraq has risen by 10 points to 47%, according to a Guardian poll.

Other polls show that more than 80% of Britons believe clear evidence of Iraqi non-compliance with the UN inspection regime's requirements, and specific UN authority for the use of force, are essential prerequisites for military action.

USA Today: Bush lacks votes in U.N., diplomats say
Mounting criticism from key U.S. allies this week on Iraq isn't just talk. The Bush administration doesn't have enough votes now on the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution to authorize an invasion of Iraq, diplomats say. That weakness complicates U.S. strategy as polls here and abroad show low support for an invasion unless the United States can rally U.N. support and a broad coalition of allies. Though President Bush has said the United States would act with only a handful of allies to disarm Iraq if it had to, the White House would prefer allied help.

MSNBC: NBC-WSJ Poll: Bush support drops: President’s ratings slip on economy, foreign policy, handling of war on terrorism
President Bush’s popularity ratings — once among the highest of any president in the past 60 years — are eroding across the board, according to a new NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll... The president’s overall approval rating slipped to 54 percent, down from December’s 62 percent... Thirty-six percent of the respondents said the nation is generally headed in the right direction, a drop from last month’s figure of 43 percent and a dramatic drop from January 2002, when 62 percent said the country was moving the right way... Seventy-two percent believe Bush should show evidence of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, compared with 22 percent who say he should not. And by a margin of 48 percent to 24 percent, the poll indicates that Americans believe the al-Qaida terrorist network, responsible for Sept. 11 attacks, is more a threat to the country than Iraq. On Wednesday, a senior administration official who has long insisted the White House doesn’t pay attention to polls took the unusual step of acknowledging the numbers are slipping, blaming a period of slow economic growth.

CBS News: Poll: Talk First, Fight Later
Many people think the Administration isn’t so much following a policy as it is reacting to events. 55% believe it is reacting to foreign events as they occur, while 40% believe the Bush Administration has a clear plan for its foreign policy. Similarly, in the campaign against terrorism, just over half -- 53% -- think the Administration is reacting to events as they occur, and 43% say it appears to have a clear plan.

As new reports surfaced about how Osama bin Laden may have escaped U.S. capture last year, respondents were asked how much progress the Bush Administration had made in eliminating the threat of terrorists operating from Afghanistan and other countries. The vast majority of Americans believe it has made at least some progress, though only a few (15%) say it has made a lot.

The threat from Al Qaeda is still on the minds of many and is still seen to outweigh the threat from Iraq. Asked whether Iraq, North Korea or Al Qaeda represents the greater threat to peace and stability, 46% said Al Qaeda, more than double the 22% who said Iraq.

Pew Research Center: Public Wants Proof of Iraqi Weapons Programs: Majority Says Bush Has Yet to Make the Case
The Bush administration may face a major challenge in winning public support for the use of force if U.N. weapons inspections yield anything less than evidence that Iraq has been hiding weapons of mass destruction. Only about three-in-ten Americans say they would favor war in Iraq if no weapons program is discovered, even if there is no proof that Iraq is not hiding weapons.

There is greater support for using force if the U.N. inspectors conclude that Iraq has the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction, but does not possess them. But in this case the public is split (46% in favor, 47% opposed). The only possible outcome in which a clear majority backs military action is if the inspections show that Iraq is actually hiding weapons of mass destruction.

Los Angeles Times: Kerry Urges Bush to Go Slow on Potential War With Iraq
The speech also marks another shift in emphasis for Kerry on Iraq. Last year, he accused Bush of ignoring international opinion in the administration's initial moves toward a confrontation with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. But after Bush pledged to work through the U.N., Kerry voted for the congressional resolution in October that authorized the president to use force against Iraq. Kerry now has moved closer to the war's critics, who maintain Bush is once again risking dangerous divisions with allies in repeatedly raising the prospect of invading Iraq, even without U.N. approval. Indeed, the heart of Kerry's speech was a charge that, across the board, Bush has pursued a "belligerent and myopic unilateralism" that has isolated the United States and increased threats to American security.

Los Angeles Times: United States, Britain Give Consideration to Compromise
The outlines of a possible compromise on Iraq began to take shape Thursday, as the United States and Britain seriously considered allowing U.N. weapons inspections to continue for several weeks in hopes of making the case with skeptical allies and public opinion.

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Like a lot of people, I've spent months opposing war with Iraq, and not really believing that my opposition, or anyone else's would make a bit of difference. I'm still not sure, but I feel more optimism today than I've felt in a long time. Yes, Bush is throwing tantrums, Colin Powell is starting to sound more like Bush than Bush does, and there's talk of assembling coalitions that slip further and further away, and grand talk of going it alone, but right now -- and God knows this changes from day to day -- this looks increasingly like they're trying to give a war and nobody's coming.

Wolf Blitzer is trying so hard to get a war on the air, and you people just aren't co-operating. First he tried asking this question:

"Whose views are most like yours when it comes to the Iraqi crisis?"
Your choices: President Bush or Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.)

The last time I checked, the result was 76% in favor of Kennedy's anti-war position.

Well, that must have shaken Wolf up, because he tried a slightly more leading question the next day:

"Would you support a war with Iraq without France and Germany’s support?"

As Jim Capozzola noted, that question leaves a lot of options open. Nevertheless, Wolf still didn't get the answer he wanted. Those things drop off the page too fast to get a final tally, but as of yesterday, Jim noticed NO leading with 72%.

Wolf is getting really tired of you peace-mongers, so now he's trying to make it really easy for you to vote for war. Today's question:

Would you support a war with Iraq if the U.N. Security Council authorized the use of force?

Surely he can get a war going under those conditions, right?

The result right now? Fifty-two percent still say no war.

Tomorrow's question:

Would you support a war with Iraq if Wolf Blitzer promises to be on the front lines?

Go vote. It means so much to Wolf.

Tom Tomorrow has a nice piece up on the death of Bill Mauldin,

I must say, as I read Mauldin's obituary this morning, one passage stood out as symbolic of a passed (and much mourned) era:

Mauldin's characters offered a counterpoint to the clean-cut, gung-ho fighting man put forth by the Army publicity machine. There was no gauzy sentimentality in Willie and Joe, no chest-thumping heroics. They were just doing their job and wanted only to finish it and go home. It was an apt description of America's new military.

"The old professional soldiers didn't care for these new people, these wiseacres who talked backed and didn't show them the proper respect," said Lee Kennett, professor emeritus of history at the University of Georgia and author of "GI: The American Soldier in World War II."

"Mauldin captured the basic attitudes of the GI. He spoke for them in a very clear way."

Mauldin's detractors said he was sowing seeds of discontent. Gen. George S. Patton — whom Mauldin lampooned in a sketch about his insistence that soldiers be clean-shaven and wear ties, even in combat — was so infuriated he tried to stop Stars and Stripes from being circulated among his 3rd Army. Patton called in Mauldin, dressed down the sergeant and threatened to throw him in jail.

But Patton's boss — Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower — interceded. Eisenhower, himself part of the Army's old guard, thought soldiers needed an outlet to vent their frustrations. He told Patton to leave Mauldin alone.

I immediately remembered Donald Rumsfeld recent disparagement of the value of draftees, and didn't really have to wonder which side he would have been on. Along with Bill Mauldin, an era when we all believed that smart-ass citizens were more important than a take-orders military may have passed away.


"Beautiful view! Is there one for the enlisted men?"

I was surprised recently to find a brief but interesting anti-war piece on the State Department's website. I suppose the key is the headline: Iraqi-American Jurist Says Saddam Must Account for His Crimes. Sermid Al-Sarraf's article focuses on the need to indict and try Saddam Hussein for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and devotes quite a bit of space to summarizing independent human rights organizations' cases against Saddam. In the interest of making that case, maybe the State Department decided to ignore the first sentence: "Opposing a war in Iraq is essential because such a war would undoubtedly be detrimental most to the Iraqi people." Or maybe someone at State appreciated the criticism of the anti-war movement that followed:

At the same time, only opposing a war, without anything further, implies that Saddam Hussein should remain in power to perpetuate his well-documented crimes against the Iraqi people and others. In other words, while decrying what might happen to the Iraqi people during a war, the anti-war movement is forgetting that Iraqis are suffering and dying at the hands of one of the most brutal dictators the world has seen since World War II.

That's an argument pro-war people often use, usually in cheap and cynical ways -- don't those anti-war people understand how bad Saddam is? -- and the cynicism with which it's served up invites an equally quick, cheap response: There are lots of bad leaders; we can't get rid of them all. Even though it usually emanates from people I agree with overall, I've never been satisfied with that response. The fact that you can't do it all is a piss poor argument against doing whatever good you can. And it has always seemed to me that there was an element of truth in the criticism, despite the obvious hypocrisy involved in people who've never shown the slightest concern with human rights wielding the charge.

But in this case the argument isn't coming from someone with no genuine concern for human rights, or someone itching for war. Sermid Al-Sarraf begins with a clear opposition to the war -- and maybe that makes what is reasonable in the argument easier to hear.

Al-Sarraf spelled out his idea of the form justice in Iraq should take in another State Department paper last week -- an Iraqi-based tribunal, with international observers. Although promoting an international, not Iraqi, tribunal, Jeri Laber, one of the founders of Human Rights Watch, made a similar case recently, in the op-ed pages of the Los Angeles Times, for trying Saddam for crimes against humanity.

No one can accuse Laber of hypocrisy or opportunism. Human Rights Watch has been pressing for prosecution of Saddam, members of his inner circle, and others, as well as documenting Iraqi genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, since the early 90s -- when no one else was interested. Her account of the difference between trying to get international support for indicting Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein is fascinating and revealing. Milosevic was relatively easy because "Yugoslavia was of no special economic or strategic significance to the outside world," but Saddam was another matter:

France and Russia aspired to commercial dealings with Iraq and threatened to veto the establishment of a tribunal. China, concerned about reaction to its treatment of Tibetans, was disinclined to see the Kurdish issue raised. Corporations in the United States, Germany and various other European countries had been supplying Iraq with advanced technology for its weapons program during the Iran-Iraq war, a war in which the U.S. tacitly supported Iraq as a counterweight to the spread of Iranian fanaticism. Neither was any government willing to take on Iraq in a civil suit before the World Court, for fear of losing business or of alienating Arab governments.

We're not doing much business with Iraq anymore, and it doesn't have any more political leverage, and so the issue can be raised. The fact that it's being raised is a good thing. And yet the way it's being raised is discomforting.

The Washington Post recently reported a plan by several Arab leaders to encourage Saddam to go into exile in exchange for a guarantee that he wouldn't face a war crimes tribunal. Plan B -- in the extremely likely event that Saddam rejected such a proposal -- would be to offer amnesty to high level people in the government and army if they remove him through a coup. The same day State Department spokesman Richard Boucher was asked about the plan and went on to talk about the possibility of a post-war tribunal. He mentioned that the U.S. has provided funding since 1998 for Indict, a British NGO which collects evidence that can be used to prosecute Iraqi war criminals, but no plans have been made for a tribunal. Curiously, while Boucher rejects the idea of Saddam being tried by the International Criminal Court (which the Bush administration has infamously opposed), neither Boucher nor the reporter who asked the question seemed to realize that the ICC has no jurisdiction over crimes committed by countries that have not signed the statute within their own countries, nor over crimes committed before July 1, 2002. There are other, more cumbersome methods, but the ICC isn't even available as a solution. (Human Rights Watch, in fact, suggests that signing the ICC statute should be an early priority for any new Iraqi government, since it would give the country the power to try crimes committed after July, 2002.) I would have thought knowing simple, layman friendly facts about international law would be a prerequisite for being a State Department spokesman.

In any case, on Sunday the administration pronounced itself interested in the proposal -- Donald Rumsfeld called it "a fair trade to avoid a war" -- while remaining understandably skeptical that the plan could succeed. Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice also supported the idea. And Bush himself raised the issue in the form of a threat.

Me? I'm torn. If some plan was hatched to get Saddam out of the country, I'd say a quick prayer of thanks that thousands of lives would be saved. If a coup toppled (and presumably killed) Saddam, I'd say the same prayer, but there'd probably be a nagging coda attached: This was the best solution You could come up with, huh? You trying to encourage more of this kind of thing?

But then I'd start wondering what had been achieved, and what had been given up. Are people close enough to Saddam Hussein to kill him really any better than Saddam himself? In the short term interest of the United States, perhaps -- in the same sense that Saddam was "preferable" to the Ayatollah Khomeini. Those preferences have a short shelf life, though. They stink almost as soon as you set them up. And more importantly, they don't take into account the fact that the people who have to live with the "preferable" leader don't necessarily find him all that preferable. Before the Gulf War, Saddam may have been just fine for the United States, but he was as bad for Iraqis then -- if not worse -- than he is now.

There is also a long-term issue of justice. If there is a single lesson to be learned from the twentieth century I think it is that genocide and other crimes against humanity demand justice. Not vengeance, not retribution -- justice. It has to be clear that genocide is not something you walk away from, that from top to bottom, people will be held accountable. Let's be honest: we're nowhere close to making that a reality. But the existence of organizations like Human Rights Watch, breaking the silence by documenting and publicizing crimes, and the movement toward creating an infrastructure for international justice represented by the ICC, are steps in the right direction. Human rights law is still a pretty fragile, cobbled together, and not entirely respectable, thing. At it's best, it's always got a tinge of victor's justice to it. But it offers a hope for the future -- a hope that's crushed when powerful nations use the threat of war crimes prosecution as a weapon, and amnesty as a prize. The message has got to be that criminals (including powerful ones) will be held accountable, not that war crimes prosecution is another weapon in the hands of the powerful.

From the e-mail box:
I'm a regular reader of your site and I like your style a lot. You're the first to point out the good and the bad evenhandedly, not to mention you always seem to delve a little deeper than most. For that reason alone, I ask that you reflect on the sentence in the subject line ("We have no interest in the obvious violations of women's rights in the Islamic world.")

You couldn't be more right when it comes to Republicans (and some Dems as well) making a farce of most feminist's views, but I took offense to that sentence. I'm Muslim, so I can speak firsthand about the shitty behavior (forgive the language) that most of my "brothers" in Islam conduct in our "favor". It's a gargantuan problem, that has to be dealt with: more for our own sake than for others. But what surprised me was here you had this general statement("the whole Augusta thing..."), and instead of saying something like how women in Third World countries are treated, the Islamic world was specifically mentioned.

I'm not one for being PC all the time (in fact, most of the time it's pointless), but I can't help but think that all the Arab-bashing and Islamophobia (another generic term, I know, but you get the gist) isn't subconsciously rearing it's ugly head. As far as I know, women in every non-Western country face just about (not quite up to par) the same problems as Muslim women do. Healthcare, violence, rape, second-class citizenship, etc., all of that is just as prevalent in the Muslim dominated Middle East as it is in the "Christian or Animalistic" Africa ( I know, Africa has a substantial Muslim population, but again, I think you understand what I mean). Women can't confront their rapists in Yemen, but neither can women who are forced into the Prostitution/Slavery market in Eastern Europe, or Cambodia, or any other countless countries where women and children are the most vulnerable.

Anyway, that's my two-cents, for what they're worth. Thanks for listening..er..reading.

Peace,

Sylvia Haider

***************************************

I couldn't agree with you more, Sylvia. The denigration of women is universal, and extreme forms of it are common throughout the developing world, not just in Muslim countries. I'm not sure if you followed the link to Ampersand's post, which I was commenting on, but that was the reason I specifically mentioned the treatment of women in the Islamic world -- he had linked to an essay arguing that feminists avoided the issue of how women were treated in many Muslim countries, and had demonstrated that that was not true. I was simply reiterating what he said.

The issue of over-emphasizing the mistreatment of women in many Islamic countries, and failing to see it as part of a broader pattern of denigration of women in poor countries, is, I think, a separate one -- but one that's at least as important to raise. We're all drowning in information in the popular media right now about how badly women in Muslim countries are treated. I'm glad people are learning more about that, even if the reasons for raising the issue are less than honest. But as a feminist with a concern for human rights, and someone who pays attention to news about the condition of women around the world, I'm often frustrated with how unaware many people are of how badly women in poor, non-Muslim countries are treated. It's only possible to view the brutal treatment of women Saudi Arabia or parts of Nigeria as unique if you don't know anything about, for example, female infanticide, child marriage, abortion of female fetuses, torture and even murder of women in dowry disputes, and using rape as a means of punishing women for the crimes of their male relatives in India. Or sexual slavery and forced prostitution of poor, migrant women in Greece, Thailand, Bosnia and Herzogivina, Cambodia, and even the United States. Or sexual violence as a weapon of war . Religion is often an excuse for the mistreatment of women, but it's not the cause. Nor is any one religion or culture uniquely guilty.

I have a strange mental block when it comes to reading the news. I start with two complementary assumptions: If you are incompetent, you're eventually going to trip up so badly that everyone will notice, and if you're cynical and manipulative, you at least have to be smart to pull it off. I don't know why I hang on to that assumption. It's dumb. I've met plenty of manipulative people with IQs that have to stretch to reach double digits, and smart people who aren't the least bit crafty. But somehow that's a cliche I'm constantly tripping over: You don't have to worry about fools, it's the smart ones you have to look out for.

By the time George Bush leaves office, I might be cured of that blind spot.

Everyone, of course, has read Josh Marshall's masterful skewering of Dick Cheney's bumbling "Mayberry" side. It's a great antidote to the common wisdom that Cheney is some kind of Machiavellian whiz.

We can probably drop the "whiz" part, but we don't want to forget the Machiavellian angle. John Dean published a very good essay recently, The Nixon Shadow that Hovers Over the Bush White House, which nominates Cheney as heir to Richard Nixon's attempted usurpation of power -- a power grab Dean argues would have succeeded if Nixon had not overreached and criminally abused his powers. The attempt to eliminate all checks on the executive branch was picked up again in the Iran-Contra scandal, during which Dick Cheney was the Reagan administration's strongest Congressional supporter.

The essay raises some important issues. One of the most disturbing things about this administration is its naked power-hunger. At some level most Americans are aware of it, and uncomfortable -- if not yet worried -- about it. That's why the polls show 2/3 of Americans against the war unless it's carried out through the UN. That's really pretty remarkable when you consider how uninterested in foreign policy we usually are, and how unconcerned we're reputed to be with what the rest of the world thinks. In fact, the vast majority of Americans don't want to give a president the power to rush off madly making wars wherever he wants, and -- even without paying much attention -- they're aware that that's what he wants.

The Dean piece brings up the domestic equivalent. This administration is treating Congress and the press and the public the same way they're treating the UN -- as mildly annoying impediments to be stepped around or stepped on. Dean sets that attitude in an historical context. We all recoil at the return of the Iran-Contra crowd (and in a few cases the Nixon crowd), but Dean pins down what's important about that -- this same crowd has been trying to turn this into a government without any checks and balances for a generation. They've failed twice, and the same group of people is back to try again. That's really something that's important to keep in the back of your head when you look at their manipulations.

Jim Capozzola urges everyone to go vote in Wolf Blitzer's latest online poll on Iraq. Online polls always veer far to the right, so the results right now (subject to change, of course), are stunning -- 24% supporting Bush, 76% anti-war.

In an article in Foreign Policy In Focus, Michael Klare looks at the stated reasons for war with Iraq -- eliminating Saddam's WMD arsenals, diminishing the threat of terrorism, and promoting democracy in Iraq and the surrounding areas -- and finds them paper thin. The only reason for war that makes sense, Klare argues, is that we continue to build on the Carter Doctrine of 1980: The United States has a vital interest in unrestricted access to the Persian Gulf and, to protect that interest, we will employ "any means necessary, including military force." You can make a case, Klare admits, for the Carter Doctrine -- but it's a formula for empire, and the Bush administration isn't making that honest case.

There's nothing really new in this article, but it's one of the clearest arguments about the oily roots of this war that I've read.

There is no one more articulate than an annoyed Sisyphus.

What Do Women Want?
Ampersand demonstrates that conservatives never give up telling the same stupid lies about feminists. All we care about is the minor problems of women in this country, like not being able to golf at some men's clubs. We have no interest in the obvious violations of women's rights in the Islamic world. Well, I guess they've got me there. Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I'm obsessed with golf. You can tell by all the golf sites listed over to the right.

Ampersand does a great job of demolishing the latest variation on the feminism is irrelevant theme. But I have to add that not only are feminists far less insular than most Americans (even most Americans who have an interest in political issues), their local concerns tend to focus on things like welfare and poverty, domestic violence, childcare and education, reproductive and health care rights, labor rights and other very serious women's issues -- and only tangentially on things like Augusta. I ran a Google search similar to Ampersand's to find out how many pieces Feminist Majority had run on Augusta or golf and found 22 articles, although that's a bit of an exaggeration. One article was about the Coalition Against Sexual Assault in Augusta, Maine; one was about the Augusta Rape Crisis Center, one was about a female golfer who had recently died of breast cancer, and many were about women's participation in sports in general. On the other hand, here's the number of articles on various other women's issues I found:

Poverty -- 95

Welfare -- 134

Child care -- 86

Health -- 701

Education -- 605

Domestic Violence -- 256

Rape -- 162

Those seem like pretty reasonable priorities to me. Conservatives don't just lie about how insular feminists supposedly are, they lie about the types of issues feminists work on in this country, because they want to pretend that sexism has disappeared, and the only "problems" women in this country face are silly little inconveniences like which golf courses they can use. Apparently someone needs to tell conservatives something that most women don't have any trouble understanding. Rape exists. Domestic violence exists. Health care disparities exist. Child care in this country stinks. Welfare and poverty are women's issues. Sweatshops and low-wage, no-benefit work are women's issues. Most feminists have plenty to do; we don't have time to worry about where to golf.

I started writing something this morning about the plan being floated to offer Saddam immunity from war crimes prosecution if he would just go hide out in Libya or something. It got long and rambling (I tend to do that, don't I?) and complicated, so I'll probably end up exploring a few more side roads before I put it up tomorrow, but in the meantime, Hesiod pretty much sums up my immediate reaction. (Some people just have more of a talent for putting things succinctly than I do...)

It's amazing how much agreement there can be between two people on opposite sides of an issue when both people have honest, well-considered reasons for their beliefs. First, read Chris Bertram's case against war, which looks at both self-defense and humanitarian arguments for war and finds both lacking in evidence and in reasons to believe that war will improve the situation. Then look at Kevin Drum's pro-war response, which I think is as good and honest a case for war against Iraq as you will ever read. Kevin admits that much of what anti-war people say is true -- the doctrine of pre-emption would set a horrible precedent, made worse if carried out by a single nation; and there is little reason for hope that democracy will follow Saddam's departure. Kevin simply believes that even though the bar for pre-emptive war should be extremely high, the need to keep WMDs out of Saddam's hands reaches -- barely reaches -- that bar.

I think that's a reasonable argument, even though I disagree, mainly because I don't think there has been any real evidence offered that Saddam represents a threat to us. I do think the inspections are necessary, and would be of value if it were possible to see them as honest inspections and not an excuse for war. If their was a shred of evidence that the inspections were more than a pretense, I'd be tempted to agree with Kevin that an invasion of Iraq under UN auspices would be preferable, because it would set the bar for pre-emptive war in a zone of reason. I don't completely write off the idea that sometimes pre-emption and humanitarian interventions may be necessary. But in this case, with Bush doing everything he can to bully the UN into doing things his way, I'm afraid that if he finally does get UN support, it will be from a battered UN that has no more moral authority than a single nation acting on its own. The precedent set by a UN giving moral cover to its most powerful member is not a good one.

And by the way, while you're over at CalPundit, read Kevin's post on European "anti-Americanism" (or is it anti-Bushism?) as well.

There's an interesting (unfortunately premium) article at Salon today on the myth of the death penalty's power to "heal" victims' families. A excerpt:

No psychological study has ever concluded that the death penalty brings "closure" to anyone except the person who dies, and there's circumstantial evidence that it can prolong the suffering of grieving families. That's why Bud Welch, an Oklahoma gas station owner who lost his 23-year-old daughter Julie in the Oklahoma City bombing, says, "George Ryan in Illinois did a tremendous service to the victims' family members, though they don't realize it. Now those people will understand that it's over with and they have to move forward."

For victims' families who oppose the death penalty, as well as for some who support it but derived little comfort from the execution of their loved ones' killers, it's a myth that the death penalty heals. They say the pop-psych media formula, that catharsis equals closure, has been mostly created by a society desperate to believe that even the worst wrongs can be righted.

"It's amazing to me to think that anyone could truly believe that sitting and watching another human being be murdered could heal them, but I did," says Oregon anti-death-penalty activist Aba Gayle. For eight years after Douglas Mickey murdered her 19-year-old daughter Catherine in 1980, "I was in such a state of anger and rage, I was lusting for revenge." It's a lust, she says, that was encouraged by the prosecuting attorney. "The district attorneys are very careful to let you know they're there for you. They tell you, 'We're going to convict him, and when he is executed, everything's going to be OK. It's a magic bullet they're offering to all of these victims' families."

Yet families who've actually been through the tortuously long emotional and legal process from one death to another say there are no magic bullets -- and anyone expecting one is just setting himself up for more pain. Of course, some families celebrate the deaths of their loved ones' killers. But few find relief in it, and often the waiting and the appeals and the eerie anticlimax of an execution can only serve to rekindle the pain.

Bud Welch notes that since the execution of Timothy McVeigh, not one person has told him that the execution helped, while several have told him that it didn't. Victims hope it will help, are encouraged by some prosecutors to believe that it will, may even celebrate on the day of the execution -- but then the pain returns, and there is no longer any hope that a single climactic event will take it away.

It occurred to me in reading this article, how much the short attention span of the press does to feed this beast. When perpetrators of ghastly crimes are tried, we almost always hear the victims' families calls for vengeance. After an execution, family members are trotted out to announce they are happy with the result. And if there is "closure" for anyone at that moment, it seems to be the press -- because that's where the story ends. The only problem is that the victims' families are still left with the pain, and for all the talk of "caring about the victims," once they've achieved their purpose of helping the prosecutor get his conviction and sentence, and helping the press wrap up a neat story of "justice," nobody's terribly interested in them anymore. It would mess up our story if we knew that relief was ephemeral. As everyone, deep down, knows it must be. As Bud Welch says, "God didn't make normal human beings to feel good out of watching another human being take his last breath."

 "I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood." -- Martin Luther King

The Good Stuff
Aziz Poonawalla compares Christian and Muslim fundamentalists.

Jim Capozzola keeps friendship alive.

When Tim Dunlop writes about America, it often makes me proud to be American, but this post makes me wish I was Australian.

Matthew and Sean-Paul debate Orwell.

Avedon Carol on class war and real war.

Jesse, Sam, South Knox Bubba, Hesiod, and Julia on affirmative action (and keep reading down on Julia's site, because she's got a lot more good stuff up that I can't seem to link to).

Yesterday I had the TV on CNN while I was making dinner, and heard a little bit of Crossfire. I wasn't paying much attention, but I heard something I thought I must have misunderstood. It was so strange, I checked the transcript this morning to find out if I heard what I thought I heard.

I would have sworn someone tried to make the argument that legacy admissions were no problem because they also benefit minority students whose parents have "special relationships" with universities. Nobody would try to argue something that silly, right?

PAUL BEGALA: Why is it OK for Yale to let George W. Bush in because his daddy went there, but it's not OK for Michigan to help poor kids who are black or Hispanic?

ALEX CASTELLANOS, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: There are a lot of factors that universities consider. And if someone has a special relationship and heritage and the university means something to him, a lot of universities use that for black and white students.

I think I now understand Bush's plan to increase diversity while killing affirmative action. He's counting on legacy admissions to help the massive numbers of poor black and Hispanic kids whose parents went to Ivy League colleges.

Strange Brew
Sometimes the news just seems to comment on itself:

Human Rights Watch says that because the United States has so much power, when it ignores human rights violations by its allies, and refuses to be held to the same standard it preaches to others, it damages the cause of human rights everywhere. That conduct would be particularly worrisome in the event of war with Iraq, because many of Saddam Hussein's opponents have a history of killing government workers. At some level, the U.S. sets a moral standard.

Turkey has banned the death penalty during peacetime, and China is at least beginning to deal with the issue.

Maryland's new governor announced that he will ignore new study calling into question whether the death penalty is administered fairly in his state and resume executions.

Amnesty International explores the police techniques that manipulate and frighten innocent people into confessing.

Early next month, the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican will try to convince Church officials that a pre-emptive strike on Iraq would constitute a just war -- an ethical argument the Vatican has not been receptive to.

A columnist at National Review Online worried that Bush might try to avoid "the most important ethical issue of his presidency" -- killing affirmative action (not to worry, the president's moral code seems to have held firm.)

Andrew Sullivan takes moral umbrage at sequins, especially on left-wing singers.

The Army Special forces that will be protecting Occidental's pipeline arrive in Colombia this month.

Arms dealers have found a market in Eastern Europe and a sucker to pay for business expenses in the form of U.S. taxpayers.

There's been a slight delay in the war. Don't worry. We'll get back to it.

Republicans stand up and courageously speak out for $50 pizzas they can eat "ethically," and without guilt. It's not the calories they're concerned about.

The budget deficit will exceed $200 billion dollars this fiscal year, and will probably go over $300 billion next year -- a new record. (Somebody call Guinness.)

People at the American Music Awards on Monday say President Bush I was booed by the crowd. The sound of disapproval magically disappeared when ABC broadcast the event.

President Bush was too busy to go to Africa this month, but his video image was, according to the State Department "a big hit." He told African officials that the best way to escape poverty is through free trade, and announced that he will ask Congress to extend the African Growth and Opportunities Act -- a trade agreement introduced two years ago to open up a tariff-free arrangement between the United States and African countries. Crude oil represents 64 percent of the total value of African exports to the U.S.

House and Senate Democrats have urged the president to send more food aid to southern Africa, where more than 30 million people face starvation.

Stephen Lewis, U.N. Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS said, in a press conference, that the world is devoting far too much attention to Iraq, and far too little to Africa, which has been hit by famine, civil war, and an AIDS epidemic. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan added that Iraq and Palestine are ''the only crises in the headlines''.

Andrew Natsios, who heads our foreign aid program, told Newsweek that if the United States were to give any more money to Africa, it would distort their economies.

The Bush administration has found a way to help states deal with rising Medicaid costs -- limit the number of times poor people can go to the emergency room.

President Bush declared January 19th "National Sanctity of Human Life Day."

A Time To Break the Silence
Martin Luther King gave the following speech on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York. More than thirty years later, on what would have been his 74th birthday, it still seems both sadly and inspiringly relevant.

 I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight, because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee is the sentiment of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people? they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.

Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the N.L.F., but rather to my fellow Americans who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the Poverty Program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent. (MORE)

UPDATE: Steve Bates, who has some thoughts on the speech posted at The Yellow Doggerel Democrat, informed me that the site I linked to for the complete text of Dr. King's speech, actually cuts off the final third -- which is especially bad since, as you would expect from Dr. King, the most powerful part of the speech is the ending. I've changed the link to the more complete version of the speech.

Yesterday Kevin Drum took a stab at defending David Brooks' jes' folks elitism (Summary of Brooks: In America, everyone who isn't rich wants to be, so no one will mind if the rich take it all.). I don't think the defense quite works. Brooks' piece was stupid, and a relatively sensible line here or there can't change that.

But Kevin's overall point is a good one. Resentment of the rich and squabbling over who gets what doesn't sell. It isn't the fact that some people have more money that bothers most of us, it's how -- in all too many cases -- they got it. It's not the money, it's the unfairness, the insiders' games, the undeserved advantages, that make people angry. And fortunately for any Democrat trying to sell that message, George Bush is the poster boy for unfair advantages. To everything you already know about Bush's legacy admissions to Andover and Yale, and his Harken dealings, add Kevin Phillips' analysis of the move to end taxation of dividends as one more example of the Bush family motto: "Public service means private opportunity." The Bush family has been in the investment business for four generations. As Phillips says, "When the Bushes start talking about investment, ordinary folks should start circling their Chevrolets." Sort of like when you see "Cheney" and "oil" in the same paragraph. It's "not only unfair, but the policy equivalent of self-dealing." Pretty blatant self-dealing: Bush's tax plan would save him $44,500. To most of us, that looks a whole lot like an annual income. Those figures have an uncanny resemblance to the amount of money we expect to have to work for. It's not fair.

I'd take the argument a little farther. In fact, I don't have to, because someone already did. John Balzar had a great piece in Sunday's LA Times arguing that the biggest problem with the tax-cutting fever is not who gets what, but that it destroys the whole idea of "neighborhood values," and the "understanding that individuals do not prosper apart from the fortune of the nation." Most Americans are genuinely patriotic. They want what's best for their neighborhoods, their cities, their states, and their country. And taxes are our contribution toward making it work. At one time we believed that the more you received from the country (and rich people obviously get enormous benefits from living in this country; if they didn't they wouldn't be here), the more you owed it -- and as a result we had a genuinely progressive income tax. Balzar remembers that time, when tax rates at the highest earning levels were above 90%:

Let's pause and remember that Americans were far less greedy and stressed as a consequence. Our overall standard of living progressed by the years. Along the way we built an interstate highway system. Our public schools were first-rate. Our industries led the world. There was no shortage of innovation or ambition. And we surrounded ourselves with personal comforts. We congratulated ourselves that we were the richest and freest nation on Earth.

Gated communities were not the rage. You never saw lawn signs warning of immediate response by private armed security. And we didn't have to face the unsettling news that two decades of growth in personal income had come to an end.

So what happens to the dwindling middle class in 10 more years? You can guess the answer.

We are fundamentally a middle class society that works together to solve problems. We're not an I-got-mine-and-the-hell-with-the-rest-of-you society.

Don't get me wrong. The Republicans are putting out massive amounts of deliberately misleading "facts" about the "stimulus." That needs to be countered. Lies shouldn't stand. But there's more wrong with their plan than just the fact that it's a "preferential option for the rich." It's also a plan that encourages us all to ask not what we can do for our country, but what it can do for us. It says the hell with what my neighbors and my country need, I want more. And that makes downright unpatriotic.

The comment section is causing too many computer problems -- for me and apparently for other people. And I'd rather spend my time writing than trying to figure out code. So, for now, comments are gone. Sorry.

Hesiod has pulled together a lot of important information about the unfinished war in Afghanistan, which has pretty much disappeared from the American media.

The Guardian notes not only the disappearance of the "liberal" American press, but the complete befuddlement of "ordinary reporters who believe their sole job is to get at the truth." The final paragraph looks to blogs as the last refuge for skeptics.

But Dwight Meredith has noticed that (to quote a different Dylan song) things have changed.

You've got to love a guy who asks questions like these:

Ari, other than Elliot Abrams, how many convicted criminals are on the White House staff?

Ari, what was the President thinking when he appointed an alleged war criminal to investigate a war crime?

Ari, you have said the President wants regime change in Iraq, by which I take it to mean the President wants to overthrow the government in Iraq. Why don't you just say the President wants to overthrow the government in Iraq?

Ari, you said earlier that "Democracy is God-given." Didn't Thomas Jefferson have something to do with it?

and my favorite --

Ari, Ari, wait a second. [The president]'s in favor of the death penalty for individuals generally. Is he in favor of the death penalty for corporations convicted of crimes that result in death?

Since 1980, the Emma Goldman Project, which houses Goldman's papers at UC Berkeley, has sent out annual fund-raising mailers with Goldman quotes, usually related to contemporary issues. This year the university insisted that two of the quotes -- dealing with free speech and opposition to war -- be removed because they were "too political."

Once you get past alternately laughing at and being chilled by the irony of censoring a statement promoting free speech, look at the quote the university found acceptable because it wasn't unduly political:

"The most violent element in society is ignorance"

Not political? That's the best explanation of Bush administration policies I've heard. Come back, Emma Goldman.

Aziz Poonawalla has an interesting suggestion for organizing opposition to Bush.

Natasha has put links to her numerous, and well-researched posts on Venezuela on a single page, and Sean-Paul has done the same with his very insightful posts on Korea.

Another interesting poll on Iraq, this time from the Christian Science Monitor, suggests that Bush is losing the p.r. war. Both the percentage of people who see Saddam Hussein as a threat to the United States and the percentage of people who think it is "very important" for the U.S. to take military action in the near future have declined.

The latest episode of The Story Point and fictional trolls have invaded the comment section!

(Via Rittenhouse Review)

Bill Frist has done important and laudable work in Africa as a doctor, and understands and appears to be genuinely concerned about the health crisis the continent is facing. But according to an aritcle in The New Republic, as a senator, Frist had to choose between his conscience and his political allegiance. Politics won.

I recently linked to a thought-provoking article in The Village Voice on why Africa may soon become as much a magnet for terrorists as much of the Middle East already is. Corruption, poverty, exploitation by Western companies, and Western apathy about African problems, make anti-American arguments resonate with many people. And countries with failed governments, where chaos and violence are endemic, provide perfect nests for terrorists.

I swear, sometimes it looks like Bush and Company are trying to speed up the process.

Yesterday, The Los Angeles Times ran a heart-breaking story on AIDS in Africa. In South Africa, the AIDS crisis is so bad, people are having to make a choice between buying food for themselves or funerals for their children, and cemeteries are running out of space. Undertakers, however, are having a very profitable year. Stephen Lewis, the U.N. envoy for AIDS in Africa, insists that the world has never witnessed anything as horrible as the AIDS plague: "There are no precedents for what is happening in Africa right now. Not the 'Black Death' of the Middle Ages, not the wars of the 20th century -- nothing has prepared us for the catastrophic mixture of AIDS and famine." Lewis recently warned that if U.S. and other leading industrial counties don't immediately increase their contributions to The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, they will be committing "mass murder by complacency." But not only is the United States not increasing its contribution to the Global Fund, it continues to undermine efforts to make antiretroviral medicines cheaper and more widely available in poor countries in order to protect the patent rights of large pharmaceutical companies. That's what you get when apathy meets up with a need to provide goodies for your campaign contributors.

Money for African projects is available -- as long as they're not humanitarian projects. According to a recent story in Mother Jones, Bush, Inc. (relying on a plan developed by -- surprise! -- Dick Cheney) is financing numerous overseas projects for private oil companies. Some of the largest and most politically well-connected oil and gas companies have received millions in government financing in the past year to help develop oil fields and build pipelines. One of the beneficiaries is -- one more big surprise -- a subsidiary of Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton -- which received $135 million dollar loan guarantee last October to expand a natural-gas production facility in Nigeria. The U.S. will spend $500 million this year to help finance a single project -- a pipeline that a consortium of 10 oil companies headed by British petroleum will profit from. By coincidence, $500 million happens to be the total amount the U.S. has pledged to the Global Fund to Fight Aids. To pay its fair share, to equal the European contribution in terms of the size of the economy, the U.S. would need to give $2.5 billion. That's a lot of money. Not as much, however, as the $100 billion in debt that President Bush has authorized the Export-Import Bank to assume in its effort to help the oil companies.

Now keep all that in mind while you read this morning's LA Times article on the Bush administration's increasing interest in African oil, and see if this sentence doesn't make you a little nervous:

The national energy plan drafted by Vice President Dick Cheney's task force spotlighted West Africa as "the fastest-growing source of oil and gas for the American market," and the administration has promised industry officials to do what it can to promote development.

Honestly, that Dick Cheney is one busy and industrious little fellow, isn't he?

Needless to say, in order to get at all that oil we're going to have to do a lot more than hand out massive amounts of money to Dick Cheney's friends. We're going to have to overlook minor matters like the fact many African leaders are using oil money to buy weapons, repress dissent, and live in luxury, without making a dent in the region's poverty. Democracy and human rights are not exactly high on the agenda in many of those countries either.

You could try to make a case, of course, that by "investing" in Africa, the U.S. will be in a better position to encourage accountability and respect for human rights. But as Stanford University political scientist Terry Lynn Karl pointed out, "We don't have a single example of oil leading to long-term positive outcomes in developing countries." And it's not like anybody's making an effort to change that history. The oil companies make deals with corrupt African regimes, but since no one knows exactly what the deals are, it's impossible for citizens to hold their governments accountable. Activists have pressed for measures to force companies to reveal the deals. But the Republican way is to hand out favors to big companies, not ask to behave responsibly.

And by the way -- the LA Times mentions that $135 million dollar loan guarantee for the petroleum plant in Nigeria. They didn't mention that it was the vice-president's old company that got the money. I guess they didn't think it was relevant.

This is my new motto: Mojo is a renewable resource.

Liberal Oasis links to another poll showing support for Bush dropping into the 50s. And while other polls still have him in the low 60s, the trend is definitely downward.

Meanwhile, a Knight-Ridder poll has 83 percent of Americans supporting war with Iraq. That's assuming U.N. approval, support of allies, and unambiguous evidence that Iraq has nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. Without those things, support drops to one-third.

In other words, in the real world, support for war is one-third.

The percentage of people who think Bush has explained the reasons for the war is also dropping.

You have to read pretty far to find the most interesting part of the poll, though:

* Two-thirds of the respondents said they thought they had a good grasp of the issues surrounding the Iraqi crisis.

* Seventeen percent knew that none of the September 11 hiackers were from Iraq. They were outnumbered by the 21 percent who thought the majority of them were Iraqis.

* Respondents who actually did know the facts about Iraq were considerably less hawkish than those who thought they knew, but were wrong.

That pretty much sums up the whole issue, doesn't it? Most of the people who know what they're talking about are against the war. The majority of those who support it don't know what they're talking about. That's been obvious for a long time, but it's nice to have statistics to back it up .

Sean-Paul Kelley and I disagree about Iraq (although he's very smart and honest, and I take his arguments seriously), but his response to a recent Newsday article suggesting that Bush and Company are considering appropriating Iraqi oil to pay for the war and occupation is identical to mine. I don't give the Bush administration credit for much anymore. I'm a fairly trusting soul, but not a complete fool. Still, even I was shocked by that level of cynicism, and I still hope the story is wrong (or, as Kevin Drum suggests, since it seems to have hatched in the incompetent Dick Cheney's office, maybe it will eventually wander away.)

One thing especially struck me about Sean-Paul's post: the grace with which he responded to a reader (Kevin, as a matter of fact) who disagreed with him. It's a perfect model of how an intelligent person deals with criticism. You really should read it, because you won't see that kind of class and thoughtfulness displayed very often in the blogosphere.

I didn't see or hear Governor Ryan's speech yesterday, but reading the transcript, I'm sorry I missed it. It's an extraordinary speech, demonstrating that when you're doing the right thing, the simplest and most straightforward language carries enormous weight.

Reading through, I wondered, how many politicians ever ask themselves Ryan's simple questions -- Is that fair? Is that right? Those questions would make a better plaque than "The buck stops here" to put on the desk in the Oval Office.

And the moral struggle implicit in this passage -- I spent a good deal of time reviewing these death row cases. My staff, many of whom are lawyers, spent busy days and many sleepless nights answering my questions. -- brought to mind George Bush's contrasting refusal to engage in thought, let alone an honest moral reckoning, when he responded to an AP reporter who asked about the possibility of innocent people being executed in Texas: "If you’re asking me whether or not as to the innocence or guilt or if people have had adequate access to the courts in Texas, I believe they have." A report had indicated that the death penalty in Texas was a knot of racial bias and incompetent defense, but Bush didn't even think it was worth looking into the issue. The refusal to bother asking yourself ethical questions must be the worst form of laziness. As Governor Ryan put it, "Many people express the desire to have capital punishment. Few, however, seem prepared to address the tough questions that arise when the system fails. It is easier and more comfortable for politicians to be tough on crime and support the death penalty. It wins votes. But when it comes to admitting that we have a problem, most run for cover." Cowardice, as well as moral sloth.

What struck me most about Ryan's speech, however, was that he dealt with more than just the unfair application of the death penalty. He moved on to question whether the death penalty could ever be just, and even to ask a profoundly difficult question: Does the death penalty really help ease the pain of victims' families? Is the "hope of revenge" the best thing we can offer them? What more could we do for those families if we didn't have the enormous cost -- financial and emotional -- of the death penalty?

But it is cruel and unusual punishment for family members to go through this pain, this legal limbo for 20 years. Perhaps it would be less cruel if we sentenced the killers to TAMS to life, and used our resources to better serve victims.

My heart ached when I heard one grandmother who lost children in an arson fire. She said she could not afford proper grave markers for her grandchildren who died. Why can't the state help families provide a proper burial?

Another crime victim came to our family meetings. He believes an inmate sent to death row for another crime also shot and paralyzed him. The inmate he says gets free health care while the victim is struggling to pay his substantial medical bills and, as a result, he has forgone getting proper medical care to alleviate the physical pain he endures.

What kind of victims services are we providing? Are all of our resources geared toward providing this notion of closure by execution instead of tending to the physical and social service needs of victim families? And what kind of values are we instilling in these wounded families and in the young people? As Gandhi said, an eye for an eye only leaves the whole world blind.

And as if those were not difficult enough questions to ask, Ryan had the audacity to take seriously "the family members of the inmates" -- a group of innocent people whose suffering I can't remember ever hearing a politician mention.

Ryan's speech demonstrates something amazing and wonderful about human beings: Once we start asking simple moral questions -- Is that right? Is that fair? -- it's very hard to stop. We start by trying to deal with one injustice, and the struggle spirals out and we begin to see other injustices growing out of the first. In the end, it's not about victims vs. criminals, but a search for true justice that heals all.

I'm attempting to add a comments board at the moment, but I'm just tinkering and may drop the whole idea if it turns out to be more trouble than its worth. Drop me a line and say hello, if you like. It will help me figure out whether or not the thing is functioning. Don't be offended if I delete your message though. I'm new at this.

The ever-expanding left-wing cocoon

I like Living Small because it's a quiet, well-written blog that deals more with literature and faith than politics. It also has some nice recipes.

Jenn Manley Lee has, without a doubt, the best designed blog I've ever seen. It would be worth adding to the blogroll just for the way it looks -- as inspiration for the rest of us who settle for bland, slightly tweaked Blogger templates. But on top of that it has a lot of good writing, often personal, or exploring where the personal and political come together. As an example, check out Spent all my money on booze and strippers.

The Nitpicker won't be in the running for next year's Koufax Awards for design (why do so many good blogs use the ugliest Blogger template?), but Terry discovers fascinating stuff and has a great bullshit detector.

Late Night Thoughts makes me think. Emma can rant with the best of them, but she's especially good when digging below the surface, and exploring the connections between personal life and political beliefs. I also appreciate a writer who shares my definition of sin.

And then there are the blogs that I've been reading forever through someone else's link and for some reason (laziness wouldn't have anything to do with it, would it?) never got around to adding to my list. Until now.

Roger Ailes

D-Squared Digest

Mark Kleiman

Oliver Willis

I also finally got around to fixing my link to The Poor Man (I could still get there through the old link, it just took an extra step.) He's been especially good lately, but I don't know how he's going to beat this.

After yesterday's important and heartening news that Illinois Governor George Ryan pardoned four men on death row who may have been tortured into confessing, the first site I went to this morning was, of course, Talk Left, where Jeralyn has a succinct explanation of the decision, along with a good round up of articles on the news.

Reading the Los Angeles Times article about the pardons this morning, what struck me most was the victims' families' anger at Ryan's decision, their tenacity in believing the convicted men are guilty, despite the evidence. That feeling is understandable. If you think you've found justice, you'll hold on to it like a child clinging to a blanket, no matter how dirty and ragged it gets. But reading that, I remembered how often I have heard people say that the main reason they support the death penalty is the "comfort" it gives victims families. And I can't help but notice that often victims are so understandably desperate for the pain to be eased that they can take comfort in enormous injustice -- but as a decent society we can't afford to do so.

Which brought to mind Scott Turlow's recent essay in The New Yorker on how he moved from a "death-penalty agnostic" to a still hesitant and unsure opponent of the death penalty. For me, one of Turlow's most compelling arguments against the death penalty was that it is most likely to be imposed in response to the most ghastly and incomprehensible crimes. That sounds right of course, the way it should be. And yet, as Turlow points out, those cases are the ones in which justice is least likely to be found, because the emotions they arouse make all of us -- the public, police, prosecutors, judges, and juries -- feel like victims, who so desperately need "justice" that we're far more willing than we ordinarily would be to settle for a dirty, ragged substitute.

The New York Times has a good article this morning on the decline in the number of death sentences and how, to some extent, it reflects changing public attitudes toward the death penalty. Scott Turlow, in his New Yorker piece notes that most Americans have always had mixed feelings about the death penalty that aren't easily measured by for and against polls. The NYT quotes two poll numbers that suggest that for a significant number of people those "mixed feelings" have reached a strange level. In the past decade, support for the death penalty has dropped from 80 to 70 percent -- still a high percentage of supporters. But between 40 and 50 percent of Americans think the death penalty is unfairly administered. Even if you assume that most people who oppose the death penalty believe it is unfairly administered, that still leaves many people believing that it's unfair, but they support it anyway. A crisis of conscience in the making.

UPDATE: Kevin writes: I think you might be a bit too harsh on the victims' families. In investigations like this, the police and the prosecutors are often in very close contact with the families of the victims. The victims often receive only the prosecution's point of view, since the prosecution and the police can become their main source of information. The first people to provide comfort for the victims are often the police officers delivering the horrible news. Very often, the only people who can give the victims a conduit for escaping their feelings of powerlessness are the police and prosecutors. In many cases, the police and the prosecutors have become as close, or closer, than family in the minds of the victims. I don't think that the victims are taking comfort in an injustice as that they do not understand that an injustice has been done. To believe that, they must believe that people who they have relied upon to get them trough the worse times of their lives betrayed them. And they are often asked to believe that they were betrayed in the face of adamant denials by the police and prosecutors.

That is one of the most disgusting aspects of police and prosecutors who abuse the system or refuse to admit they made mistakes. They leave the victim's with a lifetime of feeling that justice had been ripped from them.

I didn't mean to suggest that victims' families were clinging to an injustice that they recognize as injustice, but only that pain makes it virtually impossible for anyone to see and think clearly. Given similar circumstances, I'm positive I wouldn't be one bit more objective. I also think what you say about police and prosecutors adds a whole other layer to the issue. When I think about police and prosecutors hanging on to what it has become clear is a phony story, my immediate concern is obviously with the person unjustly convicted. I never thought about the effect on the families. Or, if I did, I thought it best to allow them to take comfort in whatever myth eased the pain. But you're right, of course -- encouraging them to believe a lie, in the long run, only increases the pain.

Long story; short pier has a must-read post on the perception and reality of poverty.

U.S. considers seizing revenues to pay for occupation
Bush administration officials are seriously considering proposals that the United States tap Iraq's oil to help pay the cost of a military occupation, a move that likely would prove highly inflammatory in an Arab world already suspicious of U.S. motives in Iraq.

Officially, the White House agrees that oil revenue would play an important role during an occupation period, but only for the benefit of Iraqis, according to a National Security Council spokesman.

Yet there are strong advocates inside the administration, including the White House, for appropriating the oil funds as "spoils of war," according to a source who has been briefed by participants in the dialogue.

"There are people in the White House who take the position that it's all the spoils of war," said the source, who asked not to be further identified. "We [the United States] take all the oil money until there is a new democratic government [in Iraq]."

The source said the Justice Department has urged caution. "The Justice Department has doubts," he said. He said department lawyers are unsure "whether any of it [Iraqi oil funds] can be used or has to all be held in trust for the people of Iraq."

Another source who has worked closely with the office of Vice President Dick Cheney said that a number of officials there too are urging that Iraq's oil funds be used to defray the cost of occupation...

Couldn't you have predicted, as soon as you saw the headline, that if you read far enough into the story, Dick Cheney's name was going to turn up?

Ampersand argues that Josh Marshall's recent piece on Dick Cheney's incompetence was, if anything, too kind. Marshall gives Cheney credit for having been a good Secretary of Defense, but Ampersand finds evidence that even as Secretary of Defense Cheney was "competence-challenged."

Marshall makes a good case (as does Ampersand), but I'm having a hard time shifting mental gears to see Cheney as more incompetent than Machiavellian.

Somewhat (although not entirely) irrelevantly, I have to mention something that recently came to my attention about Cheney. I linked a couple of days ago to a Washington Post article from 1991 in which Pentagon officials admitted that the US deliberately bombed civilian targets, including electrical plants that powered hospitals and water treatment plants, in order to give itself post-war leverage in Iraq, including possibly encouraging the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The article quotes then-Defense Secretary Cheney on this immoral policy: "If I had to do it over again, I would do exactly the same thing."

I've been reading a number of reports recently, particularly from Oxfam about the humanitarian crisis that threatens Iraq. Iraq’s water treatment system has never recovered from the Gulf War bombings that crippled the electrical supply it depends on. More than a decade later, one-third of the national power supply is still down. The water and sanitation system is on the verge of collapse. The past two days, as I've been reading these articles, Cheney's remark -- "If I had to do it over again, I would do exactly the same thing" -- has been haunting me. I don't mean that they will deliberately go after civilian targets again. I can't see that they have anything to gain from doing so this time. But Cheney made it very clear in 1991 that the lives of Iraqi civilians were not a concern. There's every indication that they're considered just as irrelevant this time.

Is there such a thing as an incompetent Machiavellian?

UPDATE: I knew that phrase was ringing a bell. As reader Sylvia Li points out, there's a reason why they're called Mayberry Machiavellis.

The Pope has apparently been reading a few of the nastier warbloggers.

I'm probably revealing my ignorance here (not that anyone who reads this site regularly is under any illusions on that score), but what's going on with Tony Blair? The American press portrays him as American staunchest ally, the British press paints him as Bush's lapdog, and yet his relationship to Bush and his attitude toward war with Iraq seem a lot more complex than what either press suggests. On the one hand, he's obviously gearing up for war. On the other hand, there are rumors that he is pressuring Bush to delay the war until Autumn to give weapons inspectors more time. Blair denied the rumor, through a spokesman, but even while denying it argued that the January 27 deadline for the weapons report isn't that important, and that " the weapons inspectors in Iraq must be given the time and space they need to do their job."

Is this just an attempt to calm anti-war British voters, or does it reflect a real discomfort with Bush's determination to have a war no matter what? The BBC suggests both:

What is clear is the British Government is responding both to the criticism of its own policy and to a more generalised dislike of the Bush administration.

And several other British newspapers see efforts to delay if not stop the war. The Financial Times suggests that Blair's statement was a deliberate effort to "quash expectations" of American hawks.

What I don't know is whether or not this makes any difference whatsoever. Even if Blair is backing off from support for Bush, does it matter? Do doubts expressed by our "staunchest ally" have any effect?

Is there a hope any reasonable person can hang on to that this war won't take place?

UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times takes note of the fact that there are realities even the most arrogant and war-hungry administration has to deal with -- including skittish allies other than Britain -- but quotes a State Department official who says, "Whatever the talk and whatever the timing, it still feels as if the train has left the station."

My daughter has a birthday coming up, so yesterday I went to a party supply store looking for a piñata. While browsing, I noticed a gag gift -- a single condom with a picture of an old man on the front and the words Over the Hill Condoms -- Full Year's Supply." Dumb joke

In Botswana, the average man receives less than one condom per year from international donors. Botswana has the highest rate of HIV infection in the world -- 39 percent of adults. Deadly joke.

When George Bush I was president, the U.S. donated 800 million condoms per year around the world. The number's now down to 300 million.

Part of the problem is that President Bush Jr. owes a few favors to right-wing religious groups who are bizarrely anti-condom -- unlike the many religious groups that do important work combatting AIDS in poor countries. As one conservative Catholic website noted, "The only absolutely guaranteed, permanent contraception is castration." So far there haven't been many takers for that form of birth control and disease prevention. Maybe the president would like to volunteer, just to set a good example.

Bush hasn't completely signed on to the anti-condom cause, but he's made previous unholy alliances with the Christian right over health issues and that makes small moves his administration has made -- demanding that a reference to "consistent condom use" to fights AIDS be removed from an international agreement, removing a fact sheet about condoms from the CDC website -- extremely worrisome.

There is an AIDS epidemic in Africa, which this administration has been extremely cavalier about. Seventy million Africans may die from the disease in the next twenty years. The UN recently warned that the international response to the crisis has been miserly, and as American money and attention flow toward Iraq, little improvement in that situation can be expected. And on top of that, Bush seems ready to endanger more lives as a sop to a few of his crazier religious supporters -- the ones who believe Jesus hated sex and thought death was an appropriate punishment for it.

The third is installment of The Story Point is up.

Yesterday, in the LA Times, I noticed this small article about Republicans, now that they have complete control of the government, undoing their own ethics rules, and it seemed to me a pretty significant story to stick at the bottom of page 10, without any details. But as Sean-Paul, over at The Agonist points out, the LAT wasn't the only memerber of the "liberal media" to miss the point of the story.

I've written many times about religion as a catalyst for change. The Goblin Queen (hearby added to the blogroll) has an interesting exploration of religion as a source of stability.

Now if we could just get George Bush to this church.

In this week's Village Voice, Ta-Nehisi Coates suggests that sub-Saharan Africa may be the next center of terrorism. It has all the requirements -- economic instability, political unrest, corruption, failed governance, and a combination of exploitation by Western corporations, and apathy on the part of American policy makers (following decades of support for corruption and thuggery) that feed anti-Americanism. It also has a long history of religious conflict which most Americans only became aware of during the Miss World riots in Nigeria (and even then understood in very simplistic and ahistorical terms.)

But -- warbloggers beware, cliche-breaker approaching -- Islamic fundamentalism doesn't seem to be a necessity. As the Washington Post reported last month, al Qaeda found lucrative refuge in Liberia -- an authoritarian, but secular country.

What Africa needs is not an attack on religion, it's an attack on the conditions that breed terrorism. And it needs that attention now.

I can never keep up with how many good things Dwight Meredith posts, but do not miss his recent post on how the president has changed his tune on government's role in the economy, nor his post on the heroism of the freedom riders. I would only add, that in addition to the Taylor Branch book that Dwight cites, the autobiography of John Lewis (one of the original freedom riders, and now a Congressman from Georgia), Walking With the Wind is not only a good source of information about that period in our history, but also one of the most inspiring books on the value of religious faith that I've ever read.

It takes a conservative to insult a conservative.

If no one knows, it didn't happen...
In 1991, a Census Bureau demographer estimated that 158,000 Iraqis died during the Persian Gulf War -- three-fourths of them civilians. She was reprimanded, her report was rewritten, and she threatened with losing her job. She challenged the dismissal, but she subsequently received no assignments and was forbidden to speak about Iraq. Despite her treatment, she says, "Nobody has ever said the numbers were wrong."

She has no intention of trying to estimate Iraqi deaths in the approaching war.

U.N. emergency planners estimate that in the early stages of war in Iraq:

* Half a million Iraqis could require medical treatment as a result of serious injuries.

* 4.5 million to 9.5 million Iraqis could quickly need outside food to survive.

* 900,000 Iraqi refugee requiring immediate assistance could be driven into neighboring countries.

* 2 million refugees could be driven from their homes but remain inside Iraq, where access by relief agencies would be problem because of the fighting.

Little has been done to prepare for the looming emergency, and the U.N. fears that if the United States bombs or blockades key roads, rails, bridges and ports, delivering relief to Iraqis may be impossible. War could also lead to the outbreak of diseases, including cholera and dysentery, in "epidemic if not pandemic proportions."

Ari Fleischer is comfortable with that. I mean, it's not like they're Americans or anything:

Q: Would the President attack innocent Iraqi lives?

MR. FLEISCHER: The President wants to make certain that he can defend our country, defend our interests, defend the region, and make certain that American lives are not lost.

For sci-fi fans: Kevin has posted the second installment of The Story Point.

From the e-mail box:

On the Iraqi sanctionsGlad to see your post on the sanctions, but one point you didn't mention -- if you read a report by Barton Gellman in the Washington Post, it turns out the US deliberately destroyed the Iraqi water treatment system, knowing it couldn't be repaired under sanctions. The Pentagon officials told Gellman that the idea behind this was that by making the civilian population suffer, Saddam would be pressured to cave in to UN disarmament demands, or better yet, his regime might be overthrown.

The NYT ran a story (October 6, 2002) about possible modifications to the Geneva convention. One area of interest is whether facilities such as water treatment plants should be explicitly declared off limits for military attacks. The NYT didn't mention in this story that the US had done this during the Gulf War.

I think the Washington Post article from 1991 shows beyond doubt that the US was deliberately targeting civilians back then. I don't think the case is quite so clearcut later in the decade, mainly because it is extremely rare to find American government officials naive enough to openly tell reporters that they were trying to make civilians suffer. But all this pretense in the mainstream press that civilian suffering from the sanctions is unintentional on our part and that the suffering is 100 percent the fault of Saddam is a deliberate lie. They know better.

Incidentally, the NYT reporting of John Burns has been disgraceful on this issue -- he has gone out of his way to put all the blame on Saddam. I haven't checked your LA Times weblink, but it is probably very similar to what Burns has been writing. -- Donald Johnson

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On Mother Teresa
"Mother Teresa's view of charity. It's a view with a strong appeal for powerful people who want to feel good, but don't want to see any real change. The canonization of Mother Teresa contains a political message as well as a spiritual one ..."

This struck me as analogous to the pedophilia scandal ... on the one hand you have the institutional church, "powerful people who want to feel good, but don't want to see any real change" struggling to deny the existence very real spiritual and physical crimes in order to maintain the hierarchy and difference by which they have accumulated power. It's the ugly underside of the Church that some of us struggle with endlessly .... how to ignore the Powerful Institution, with which we disagree so wholeheartedly, an Institution willing to chuck it's own rules to rush the canonization of Mother Teresa (while simultaneously telling us all to obey the rules or we'll be exiled). That the Church is willing to overlook/deny M.T's close relationship with really evil dictators seems to me connected to the same Church being willing to overlook/deny the deep-seated sexual dysfunction that has corrupted the clergy (or by which the Church, in its insistence on celibacy and on the inherent evil of all sexual pleasure has corrupted its own clergy). If sex itself is always evil, then the difference between abusing a child and healthy marital relations is only one of degree, right?

All I can do is pray that the receding tide of post-Vatican II Catholicism, the Catholicism of social conscience will somehow rise again ... but it looks for now like it's going to be a long wait. In the meantime, what's one to do? Take refuge in a local parish? Try to find local means to practice the radical Catholicism of those like Romero? Or just take refuge in the Mass itself? I don't know ... I've been unable even to go to Mass for months, because if it is the sacrament I believe it to be, how can I take it from the hands of a priesthood that as a corporate body is so soiled with sins against children? So it's just been me at home with my little altar and my beloved Virgin of Guadalupe ... -- Charlotte
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It would be fine for people to be inspired by Mother Teresa's reputation for holiness if she had settled for leading by example (hell, it would have been holy of her to do it that way).

Unfortunately, she leveraged her image into the support of a great many ugly things that served whatever she imagined her larger purpose was (campaigning against first-world support for family planning in the third world springs to mind - should babies have to starve to death, or die of AIDS, on behalf of religion, let alone someone else's? - and playing pattycake with some really noisome people, as long as they would give her large money in return for a few minutes toasting in the penumbra of her "holiness").

The difference between her use of religion and Pat Robertson's escapes me. -- Julia

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On Independent vs. Corporate Bookstores
This is more than a matter of large corporate bookstores driving out small local bookstores. It is also a matter of what books get published, and, indirectly, what books get written in the first place. Publishers, especially smaller ones, but even large ones to some extent, must publish works they can sell through Barnes and Noble, Borders, etc. If a book, however well-written and attractive to readers, has no chance of being sold to a large outlet, it may well not be published at all. Authors who make their living writing books are aware of this, and tailor their books accordingly. Of course there are myriad exceptions to this simplification, but in principle, the hegemony of large corporate bookstores actually reduces the range of content available to the reader through any bookstore whatsoever, no matter how physically large a store's shelf stock may be.

Yes, to my dismay, I do shop at Barnes and Noble, though I buy from the few remaining local independents whenever I can.

I draw the line at Amazon, not because of their practices as booksellers but because they have allegedly in the past shown a very cavalier attitude toward privacy issues involving the information you give them when you purchase books. But then again, I may be more sensitive than most to such issues: these days, I purchase stridently liberal or antiwar political books with cash rather than a card, and I no longer check such things out of the public library at all. -- Steve Bates

In defense of Mother Teresa.

And another from the e-mail box:

The "role-model" value of Mother Teresa doesn't depend on what she actually did; what matters is what people think she did. That, in my opinion, is what is being canonized in her case: her public image.

This isn't entirely a bad thing; if people are awed by the thought of someone sacrificing everything to care for the utterly wretched, some of them may behave more charitably than they otherwise would have, which is a good thing. The principal drawback to canonizing the public image of a modern-day figure is that such an image can be debunked, and then everyone is worse off than before, and there goes another chunk of the Church's credibility. -- Sylvia Li

Today's gems:
Hesiod on Cheney (and I've got to read that Josh Marshall article)

Kevin on affirmative action.

Seeing The Forest on taxes (okay, it's Sunday's gem -- I'm a little behind.)

Natasha on the slippery meaning of patriotism.

I live in a fairly small college town that, a decade ago, had three bookstores (not counting the two used bookstores and the campus store). There was a little, undistinguished independent; a big independent with great selection in every area I was interested in (good literary fiction, poetry, history, and politics), besides being a cozy, inviting place to browse; and the best children's bookstore I've ever been in (and I never going anywhere without visiting the local children's bookstore.)

Then Barnes and Noble opened up downtown. The big independent, which unfortunately had just moved to a larger store across the street, putting it in a precarious financial position, was out of business within a year. So was the children's bookstore. The little independent, with not much going for it other than a pretty store front on a pretty main street that draws a lot of tourists, is still around. The owners have been trying to play on local guilt since Barnes and Noble opened (If you don't shop here, the big nasty corporations win!) but while liberal guilt trips and anti-corporate sentiment usually work very well on me, it's no sale here. I can go to Barnes and Noble, which has a wide selection, and feel guilty about feeding the corporate beast, or I can go to a little card and gift shop with a few shelves of novels, and nothing else I'm interested in (I have enough cookbooks, thanks.) The book lover in me beats the liberal every time.

Or it used to. When Barnes and Noble opened, I hated it because it was big chain, and a year later I hated it because it because it put two good stores out of business. The children's bookstore was truly irreplaceable. Barnes and Noble has a decent selection of children's books, although not nearly as good as the specialized store it drove out. But it doesn't have an owner who knows and loves children's books and is always ready to make suggestions for customers she gets to know. More importantly, what Barnes and Noble does have is a way of displaying the junkiest books (and the toys that go with them), so that my daughter and I have to plow through aisles of garbage that screams Buy me! to a seven-year-old in order to get to the real books. And every time I shop, there are more Captain Underpants and fewer real books.

And the same thing has happened with adult books. At first, to be honest, as frustrated as I was about losing my favorite bookstore, I had to admit that Barnes and Noble's selection of literary fiction was, if anything, better than the local independent's. And the books were displayed at the front of the store, so I could always see what new novels (and, amazingly, even books of short fiction) had just come out. Little by little, those books have moved to the back of the store, replaced by computer books and right-wing screeds, and they must be ordering fewer because more often than not I end up at Amazon now. Did people really suddenly stop reading real books and start reading Ann Coulter, or is something else going on?

That's one of those questions I don't have an answer to.

What brought all this to mind was a fascinating post on bookstores over at Electrolite, followed by a fuller exploration of the topic by readers (this is what comments boards were made for!)

There has always seemed to me to be something deeply dishonest about conservatives citing Dr. King's dream of color-blind society in their attacks on affirmative action, but I could never explain why. Ampersand explains why.

News from abroad that it would be nice to see in this country

Lula to use defence funds in famine fight
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who took office as Brazil's president this week, on Friday postponed a US$750m defence programme by a year to finance emergency social spending. José Viegas, the new defence minister, said the purchase of 12 fighter aircraft would be delayed and funds used in hunger eradication projects...

According to a new book, "High and Mighty," SUV drivers "don't care about anyone else's kids but their own, are very concerned with how other people see them rather than with what's practical, and they tend to want to control or have control over the people around them." They are also "willing to endanger other motorists so as to achieve small improvements in their personal safety," and are too dumb to notice that those safety gains are illusory. They don't like minivans because they're driven by "nice" people who volunteer for their churches and carpool other people's kids, and they don't want anyone to think they are "nice."

I know...duh!

But while reading this, it occurred to me that SUVs are not only the symbolic vehicle of the coming war because of the enormous amounts of gas they consume, but because of the personality traits they legitimize and encourage. Once you've bought an unsafe car because it makes you feel big, important and a little dangerous (and if you're big, you must be safe, right?) and have convinced yourself that it doesn't matter that you're endangering other people's lives because you feel safer, and that's all that really counts, it's not a big deal to go to war because you might be in danger, even though a glance at the facts would tell you that going to war won't make you one bit safer. After all, other people's kids don't matter, do they?

An example: To illustrate the kind of selfishness that marks some SUV drivers, Bradsher finds people who rave about how they've survived accidents with barely a scratch, yet neglected to mention that the people in the other car were all killed. (One such woman confesses rather chillingly to Bradsher that her first response after killing another driver was to go out and get an even bigger SUV.)

It must have been a very traumatic experience. I'm sure she'll feel better after invading Iraq.

When was the last time you heard a rational person on talk radio? Go visit skippy and he'll tell you what to do about it.

The poor give us so much more than we give them." -- Mother Teresa

"When the church hears the cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises." -- Archbishop Oscar Romero

Surprisingly, I didn't get a single angry letter about my agreeing with Christopher Hitchen's attack on Mother Teresa. (Tentatively agreeing -- I'm still open to anyone really defending Mother Teresa, something beyond how "everyone knows" what good work she did.) My three conservative Catholic readers must have taken the weekend off. I did, however, get several letters from people who agreed, and said they'd been frustrated for a long time with the difference between popular image and reality in Mother Teresa's case.

Matthew Yglesias wonders if "some little thing like so-and-so should be a saint" really matters. Obviously it matters to millions of Catholics, and to millions more non-Catholic Christians who look up to her as a model of a life of faith. But I think it should matter even to an atheist like Matt.

A saint's life offers an example of how to live, and defines holiness for Catholics. But some saints have cross-over appeal, and Mother Teresa, with her long and deep hold on the popular imagination clearly falls into that category. Ask most Americans, of any religion, to name an irreproachable person, someone who embodied goodness, and I suspect the first name that will come to the vast majority of minds is Mother Teresa's.

But Teresa represented a particular -- and political -- notion of faith and holiness. Although she was associated with the poor of Calcutta, Teresa's deepest alliance was with the rich and powerful -- sometimes the relatively benign rich like Princess Diana, and sometimes thugs like the Duvaliers. Her ministry was primarily to them -- she offered them a way to save their souls, by giving money to ameliorate the lives of the poor without questioning why the poor were poor. And, as Hitchens documented in Missionary Position, his book on Mother Teresa, that amelioration was far less than most people believe. For Mother Teresa, poverty was necessary, for if it didn't exist, how could the rich demonstrate their goodness?

Think of President Bush, whose policies have done so much to harm the poor, doing a photo op at a food bank and encouraging Americans (presumably the poor don't count as Americans) to give more to their suffering fellow citizens, and you have a red, white and blue version of Mother Teresa's view of charity. It's a view with a strong appeal for powerful people who want to feel good, but don't want to see any real change. The canonization of Mother Teresa contains a political message as well as a spiritual one. As Hitchens notes, the speeded up canonization process for Mother Teresa is odd, and suggests that the Vatican is anxious to send that particular political and spiritual message.

Another Catholic associated with the poorest of the poor is on a slower track to sainthood. Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador who was murdered in 1980 while celebrating Mass, could not have been more different from Mother Teresa. His real allegiance was with the poor. At the time he became Archbishop in 1977, small groups of poor Catholics were banding together to worship and study the gospels and their implications for society. Uneducated peasants organizing, choosing leaders and speaking of social justice in the name of Christianity made landowners uneasy. Death squads roamed the country, killing the leaders and the priests and nuns who worked with them. Archbishop Romero, who before he became Archbishop was considered a moderate conservative, cast his lot with the poor and with the fight for social justice. He didn't tell the powerful that they could go on oppressing the poor as long as they threw them a few crumbs from time to time. He told them that the Church "says to the rich: do not sin by misusing your money. It says to the powerful: do not misuse your political influence. Do not misuse your weaponry. Do not misuse your power. It says to the sinful torturers: do not torture. You are sinning. You are doing wrong. You are establishing the reign of hell on earth."

It remains to be seen whether the Church really does say those things to the powerful. The canonization of Mother Teresa would say exactly the opposite.

Mother Teresa and Archbishop Romero represent two very different views of what it means to care for the poor. The offer polar opposite models to follow. Mother Teresa was honored by the powerful, Oscar Romero was killed by them. And that's one of the reasons it matters which one first becomes a saint.

A survey done at St. Louis University, paid for in part by several orders of Catholic nuns, found that about 40% of nuns in the United States have been victims of some form of sexual abuse or harassment, in a significant number of cases by priests. The researchers believe that the numbers probably underestimate the prevalence of sexual abuse because many nuns feel shame and guilt, and fear speaking out.

What's especially disturbing about the story is that the study was done in 1996, and published in two small circulation religious research journals in 1998, but the findings were never reported in the mainstream press -- not even in a year in which sexual scandals in the Catholic Church received wide coverage.

Many people in and out of the Church have felt that over time the pedophilia scandal developed into a witch hunt directed at gay priests. Sexually abused nuns didn't fit the storyline. Does that have anything to do with why we haven't heard about them until now? And will we stop hearing suggestions that if the Church just eliminated gay priests, the problem would go away?

I suppose I should be grateful to the Los Angeles Times for at least mentioning the fact that the sanctions imposed on Iraq do more harm to ordinary Iraqis than to Saddam Hussein, even if the mention comes in an article this stupid. But honestly, this is just plain offensive. It's never been possible for the media to mention sanctions without rushing to add that there would be no sanctions if Saddam would just behave, which, while undeniably true, is also beside the point. Saddam was just as greedy, just as monstrous a dozen years ago, when there were no sanctions and Iraq was a relatively wealthy country. It gives no credit to Saddam to admit the sanctions are not doing what they were designed to do. They aren't touching Saddam; they are killing ordinary Iraqis.

This LA Times piece, though, carries the argument to the highest levels of nonsense. They start by affirming that the sanctions keep Iraqis from getting needed medicines, and move on to point out that obviously it's all Saddam's fault, because he has plenty of money and material to build mosques.

Run that one by me again? If someone needs antibiotics, bricks and mortar don't make ideal substitutes. I'm sure Saddam, the old secularist, is laying down mosques at record rates to try to paint himself as a good Muslim and distract people from their misery. Of course it's an enormous con job. But that doesn't mean that if he stopped pulling that con he could use the money to buy medicine for Iraqis. Under the sanctions, Iraq can't spend its oil revenues on domestically produced medicines. And Iraq is not allowed to buy certain medicines from other countries. Just last week the UN Security Council placed tighter limits on doses of antibiotics that can be sent to Iraq. It doesn't make any difference how much money you have if you're forbidden to buy what you need.

In 1999, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer did a series on the effect of the sanctions called Life and Death in Iraq. They updated it late last year. Read it. We're on the verge of war with a country where the population has been devastated by sanctions, and for a number of reasons there has been virtually no preparation for what almost everyone recognizes is an approaching humanitarian disaster. The LA Times ends their article with a little sanctions humor. But if you read the whole story, it's pretty hard to find anything to laugh at.

"The more you examine the religion [Islam], the more militaristic it seems. After all, its founder, Mohammed, was a warrior, not a peace advocate like Jesus." -- Kenneth Adelmen

I've read dozens of variations on that statement, and every time the logic, or lack of it, drives me mad. Never mind mentioning that Christianity has its own militaristic streak, does it make any sense whatsoever to argue that Islam is violent because Mohammed was a warrior, and Christianity is peaceful because Jesus was a peace advocate, and therefore, as followers of Jesus we must attack?

I know I'm setting myself up for angry mail here, but I think Christopher Hitchens makes a good case against sainthood for Mother Teresa.

Can you do fiction on a blog? I'm primarily a fiction writer -- or I used to be, before this blog started consuming my writing time -- and I've often wondered about that, and considered trying it. Kevin Raybould, who's already proven his ability to write clear and well-reasoned political commentary at Lean Left, has taken up the challenge with a science fiction novel he has begun serializing at The Story Point. If you're interested in fiction, especially sci-fi, you might want to go over, take a look, offer some encouragement, or even make suggestions. Or just read and enjoy.

Gene Healy has pulled together the strongest case I've seen against the national security argument for invading Iraq. (You might also be interested in reader comments on the essay posted at STAND DOWN). My only quibble with the piece is that Gene early on dismisses both the humanitarian argument for war and the notion that "venal or frivolous motives lie behind the administration's push for war." I think focusing primarily on the national security argument is the right approach, both because that is the argument the administration has emphasized, and because it is the one with the most resonance for ordinary Americans. If Americans support war with Iraq, it will not be because they are concerned with the human rights of Iraqis, but because they fear the possibility of a nuclear attack on the United States, and believe that is a genuine threat.

Nevertheless, I don't think it's fair or wise to completely dismiss the humanitarian argument. A concern for human rights may not move the majority of Americans, but many liberals take it seriously. I take it seriously. And it is the crowd-pleaser Bush is using to rally the troops, telling them that we will be "liberating" the Iraqi people. And while it's possible to make a case against humanitarian intervention without mentioning the administration's venal motives, its history of hypocrisy, corporate bootlicking, lack of concern for human rights, failure to follow through on reconstruction in Afghanistan, and just plain, old-fashioned lying, drive a stake through the heart of the most compelling human rights argument for invasion.

Eve Tushnet has just completed a long and interesting series of posts on race. It begins here and ends here, and in between, you're on your own, but it's worth tracking down the pieces. There's much I agree with, and a few things I disagree with, but they're thought-provoking posts, and well worth your time.

By now you've read skippy's talk radio rant, I'm sure, but don't miss the follow-up, not to mention, in a related vein Digby on Michael Jackson (the other Michael Jackson).

And by the way, Sisyphus says that The Washington Post would like to know what you think of Little Green Footballs?

Oink.

The most interesting takes I've read on the proposal to bring back the draft have come from Kevin Drum and Jeralyn Merritt -- and Jeralyn's also includes interesting comments from readers.

I don't think the draft is likely to return, and I think there are more good arguments against it than for it -- from both a moral and a practical standpoint. But I agree with Kevin that far too many Americans have a great sense of entitlement, and I would add a lack of interest in anything that doesn't effect them personally. Jeralyn mentions being in college in the late sixties and seeing young men's lives ruined by the draft. She's certainly right. But I remember being in college a few years later, trying to help organize opposition to the resumed bombing of North Vietnam and the mining of Haiphong Harbor in 1972 (in supposedly radical Berkeley) and being met with a who cares, let's party response from the majority of students I talked to. There were large demonstrations in Berkeley that spring. But activists who had been there a few years told me that the response was not what they expected, and they chalked it up to the fact that because of the change to a lottery system, more students felt comfortable that the draft wouldn't touch them. It only got worse when the draft was eliminated in 1973.

A draft, whether for military or other national service, makes me very uncomfortable for a lot of reasons. But I'd love to hear some better alternatives for making Americans pay attention to the rest of the world and realize that there are human costs to pay for our government's actions.

UPDATE: Max has more on the topic. But, hey, I liked Country Joe.

Yesterday I mentioned that the Department of Labor had decided to stop publishing information about factory closings . Today Sam Heldman and Nathan Newman explain why it is important, and how the decision demonstrates not only the administration's love of secrecy, but its profoundly anti-labor agenda.

George Bush's addiction to secrecy -- and his ability to get others to feed his addiction -- stuns even those of us old enough to remember Richard Nixon. Adam Clymer has a noteworthy article in today's New York Times about that addiction, which is so extreme even Republicans are objecting.

Clymer seemed to miss one important issue, though. He recalls the administration's fight to keep records from Ronald Reagan's presidency from being made public:

On March 23, 2001, Mr. Gonzales, the White House counsel, ordered the National Archives not to release to the public 68,000 pages of records from Ronald Reagan's presidency that scholars had requested and archivists had determined posed no threat to national security or personal privacy. Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the documents were to become available after Jan. 20, 2001, twelve years after Mr. Reagan left office. Mr. Reagan's administration was the first covered by the 1978 law.

The directive, which also covered the papers of Mr. Reagan's vice president and the president's father, George Bush, was to last 90 days. When Mr. Gonzales extended the sealing period for an additional 90 days, historians like Hugh Davis Graham of Vanderbilt University attacked the delays, saying they were designed to prevent embarrassment and would nullify the records law's presumption of public access to those documents.

On Nov. 1, 2001, President Bush issued an even more sweeping order under which former presidents and vice presidents like his father, or representatives designated by them or by their surviving families, could bar release of documents by claiming one of a variety of privileges: "military, diplomatic, or national security secrets, presidential communications, legal advice, legal work or the deliberative processes of the president and the president's advisers," according to the order.

Before the order, the Archivist of the United States could reject a former president's claim of privilege. Now he cannot.

The order was promptly attacked in court and on Capitol Hill. Scott L. Nelson of the Public Interest Litigation Group sued on behalf of historians and reporters, maintaining that the new order allowed unlimited delays in releasing documents and created new privileges to bar release.

House Republicans were among the order's sharpest critics. Representative Steve Horn of California called a hearing within a few days, and Representative Doug Ose, another Californian, said the order "undercuts the public's right to be fully informed about how its government operated in the past." The order, Mr. Horn said, improperly "gives the former and incumbent presidents veto power over the release of the records."

On Dec. 20, the White House sought to silence the complaints by announcing that nearly all the 68,000 pages of the Reagan records were being released. Legislation introduced to undo the order never made it to the House floor, where leaders had no interest in embarrassing the president. And a lawsuit challenging the order languishes in Federal District Court before Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.

In other words, the administration played a little game with the records: By releasing most of the papers, they took off the pressure to release all of them -- still managing to keep control of what would and would not be released.

Clymer notes that the administration's control of information could effect how history is written. He might have added that it effects how journalism is written as well. The Washington Post recently published a stunning article on US complicity in Saddam Hussein's war crimes, focusing especially on Donald Rumsfeld's role. The Post's information came from Reagan-era declassified documents. But at least one significant piece of the puzzle is missing:

The U.S. tilt toward Iraq was enshrined in National Security Decision Directive 114 of Nov. 26, 1983, one of the few important Reagan era foreign policy decisions that still remains classified. According to former U.S. officials, the directive stated that the United States would do "whatever was necessary and legal" to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran... Secret talking points prepared for the first Rumsfeld visit to Baghdad enshrined some of the language from NSDD 114, including the statement that the United States would regard "any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West."

In essence, the Washington Post can't tell the whole story because Bush has managed to keep the document describing Reagan's policy toward Iraq classified. That's convenient for Bush, but it's an outrage for the rest of us.

Hey thanks, guys and gals -- although, personally, I'd vote for Jim. And I hope everyone goes over to thank Dwight for coming up with the idea and putting in a lot of work. Next year we have to come up with a way to do this so that PLA gets included in the nominations.

 I had one of the first Barbies, back in the early '6Os. The one with the narrow, evil eyes. (Think George Bush with a lot of mascara.) The one in the knitted zebra-striped bathing suit. Unfortunately my Barbie never had a wardrobe beyond that impractical bathing suit, because poor girls get poor Barbies, and Goodwill didn't yet have a Barbie collection.

And in many ways, that was an advantage. I never got Malibu Barbie or Dr. Barbie, but I had fabric scraps Barbie, toilet paper Barbie, and -- best of all -- aluminum foil Barbie. The fabric scraps came from a brown dress my mother tried to sew for me when I was in second grade. My mother could not sew if her life depended on it. Believe me, Goodwill was an improvement. Thank God I wore a Catholic school uniform five days a week and only had to put up with that ugly brown dress on Sundays. But the scraps that were left over, draped over my angry-eyed Barbie, had a fringed-leather look, which I decided made my Barbie an Indian. I also had a cowboy doll, which Barbie regularly beat up. Her stilettos were lethal. In my world, Barbie the Indian princess defeated all the cowboys.

Wrapped in toilet paper, Barbie was an Egyptian queen. She had absolute power. No one would dare defy her or she would send them away to build pyramids. She also defeated the cowboys.

And if your imagination was stifled by a Barbie with all the accoutrements, you may not realize that aluminum foil makes perfectly believable armor. Think of the pen name I use to write this blog, and you can probably guess who aluminum foil-clad Barbie was. She defeated the cowboys as well.

All of this came flooding back to mind when I read Max's Barbie post, particularly about his concern with finding "professional" looking dolls. Doctor Barbie rather than cheerleader Barbie. I admit, I do the same thing when I choose dolls for my daughter. The last one I bought was Pilot Barbie (she came with a suitcase and a passport, but no gun). But when I think about it, I realize Max and I can probably both relax. As long as there have been Barbies, those dolls have led more interesting, heroic lives, and shaped girls' values in more eccentric ways, than most people realize. Forty years later, I'm still determined to defeat the cowboys.

Gimme shelter
Reconstruction of Afghanistan apparently doesn't include homes. Half a million refugees in Afghan cities are homeless, and will spend the Afghan winter in tents, ruins, and half-built structures.

For women, the problem of homelessness is compounded by misogyny. RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) operates shelters for women in Afghanistan and for Afghan refugees in Pakistan, not just for those fleeing abuse, but for unmarried and abandoned women, and former prostitutes, who desperately need the literacy training and work skills RAWA offers. But the shelters have to operate secretly, out of fear of resurgent fundamentalists. RAWA is not even allowed to run overnight shelters. If women need a place to stay, they're taken over the border to Pakistan. Last June, the first Afghan minister for women's affairs, Sima Simar, a powerful advocate for women's rights, was driven out of her job, in part by death threats from fundamentalists who view any protection for women as a threat to their power. The current women's affairs minister insists that Afghanistan has no need for women's shelters, since any problems women can be dealt with by the women's families.

This article cuts to the heart of the Bush administration's approach to bad news: Factories are closing, what should we do? Let's keep it a secret.

Devra has some interesting thoughts on the continuing appeal of Bill Clinton

I'm sure you already know this, but the most eagerly awaited blog arrived yesterday and it's already so good I feel like I can just stop writing now (you notice I didn't post anything yesterday -- you think that was a coincidence?). Drop by and visit Hullabaloo. The name, unfortunately, brings to mind a really dumb music tv show from my childhood back in the Middle Ages (otherwise known as the '60s). Now Shindig would have been a good name...