The Tragedy of the Commons
By John Stossel
Every year around this time, schoolchildren are taught about that wonderful day when Pilgrims and Native Americans shared the fruits of the harvest. "Isn't sharing wonderful?" say the teachers.
They miss the point.
Because of sharing, the first Thanksgiving in 1623 almost didn't happen.
The failure of Soviet communism is only the latest demonstration that freedom and property rights, not sharing, are essential to prosperity. The earliest European settlers in America had a dramatic demonstration of that lesson, but few people today know it.
When the Pilgrims first settled the Plymouth Colony, they organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share everything equally, work and produce.
They nearly all starved.
Why? When people can get the same return with a small amount of effort as with a large amount, most people will make little effort. Plymouth settlers faked illness rather than working the common property. Some even stole, despite their Puritan convictions. Total production was too meager to support the population, and famine resulted. Some ate rats, dogs, horses and cats. This went on for two years.
"So as it well appeared that famine must still ensue the next year also, if not some way prevented," wrote Gov. William Bradford in his diary. The colonists, he said, "began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length after much debate of things, [I] (with the advice of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. ... And so assigned to every family a parcel of land."
The people of Plymouth moved from socialism to private farming. The results were dramatic.
"This had very good success," Bradford wrote, "for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. ... By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many. ... "
Because of the change, the first Thanksgiving could be held in November 1623.
What Plymouth suffered under communalism was what economists today call the tragedy of the commons. But the problem has been known since ancient Greece. As Aristotle noted, "That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it."
When action is divorced from consequences, no one is happy with the ultimate outcome. If individuals can take from a common pot regardless of how much they put in it, each person has an incentive to be a free rider, to do as little as possible and take as much as possible because what one fails to take will be taken by someone else. Soon, the pot is empty and will not be refilled -- a bad situation even for the earlier takers.
What private property does -- as the Pilgrims discovered -- is connect effort to reward, creating an incentive for people to produce far more. Then, if there's a free market, people will trade their surpluses to others for the things they lack. Mutual exchange for mutual benefit makes the community richer.
Secure property rights are the key. When producers know that their future products are safe from confiscation, they will take risks and invest. But when they fear they will be deprived of the fruits of their labor, they will do as little as possible.
That's the lost lesson of Thanksgiving.
Copyright 2007, Creators Syndicate, Inc.Page Printed from:
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Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Monday, November 19, 2007
The Branch Algorians
Al Gore is like Jim Jones, and we're drinking his Kool-Aid
By PHIL VALENTINE
Professor Roger Gottlieb, a leading proponent of religious environmentalism, spoke at Vanderbilt University this past week. Gottlieb, the author of A Greener Faith, maintains that we are to be caretakers of our planet. I certainly agree.
I'm a big fan of clean air and clean water. But this postmodernist environmental movement Gottlieb finds himself in the middle of bears little resemblance to its forerunner, the ecology movement of the 1960s. Back then, Captain Kangaroo simply told us to never throw trash out the window. Soot-belching factories and straight-pipe waste into rivers were put under the microscope. The government ultimately responded with the EPA, formed in 1970 and tasked with cleaning up the land, air and water that had been abused for so long.
Now, schoolchildren scold their parents because they haven't traded in their incandescent lightbulbs for the depressing yellow light of compact fluorescent bulbs. Environmentalism, which used to simply include anyone concerned about pollution, somehow morphed into radical environmentalism. Gottlieb and others have taken up the banner of global warming under the guise of religious responsibility. Radical environmentalism has become a religion in and of itself. Its heaven is a utopia in which we all give up our modern conveniences and technological advancement for some austere, Amish-type lifestyle.
Al Gore, the Jim Jones of this new religious cult, preaches doom and gloom from his pettifogger pulpit, all the while living the lifestyle of an energy hog. He actually uses twice the amount of electricity in one month at his Nashville home than the average household uses in an entire year. He has two homes in Tennessee, one in Virginia, at least. He flies all over the world on his Magical Hysteria Tour, sucking down resources and belching out tons of carbon, all to tell us we need to conserve. We're trying to make ends meet just to afford gas in our cars while Al Gore has a carbon footprint the size of Sasquatch. And no one seems to care.
The Branch Algorians read from the Gospel of Al and never question a word. The movement's devil is carbon dioxide, an essential component of photosynthesis and the substance we all exhale with every breath. Understand this: CO2 is not a pollutant. However, Gore and the radical environmentalists have been quite successful in convincing people that smog and CO2 are the same. They are not. CO2 has nothing whatsoever to do with the smog or haze we see over our cities. There is absolutely no evidence that CO2 has anything to do with any kind of warming.
The Gore Kool-Aid drinkers will point to "all these scientists" but can't give you one link between CO2 and any kind of climate change. As the founder of The Weather Channel, John Coleman, recently put it, global warming is the greatest scam in history.
When Professor Gottlieb is not writing a guilt-trip treatise on the environment, he's writing about Marxism and how the Soviets just didn't quite get it right.
You see, global warming is the perfect template for Marxism because it's the great equalizer. The wealthier a nation, the more CO2 it produces. To atone for its sins, it must pay carbon offsets. In other words, the producing nations pay the non-producing or under-producing nations in cash for the sin of emitting a harmless gas. It's beautiful.
The global warming movement is a way to not just confiscate money and wealth from the producers, but because of their guilt, they gladly hand it over. If Karl Marx were still alive, he'd be beaming with pride.
By PHIL VALENTINE
Professor Roger Gottlieb, a leading proponent of religious environmentalism, spoke at Vanderbilt University this past week. Gottlieb, the author of A Greener Faith, maintains that we are to be caretakers of our planet. I certainly agree.
I'm a big fan of clean air and clean water. But this postmodernist environmental movement Gottlieb finds himself in the middle of bears little resemblance to its forerunner, the ecology movement of the 1960s. Back then, Captain Kangaroo simply told us to never throw trash out the window. Soot-belching factories and straight-pipe waste into rivers were put under the microscope. The government ultimately responded with the EPA, formed in 1970 and tasked with cleaning up the land, air and water that had been abused for so long.
Now, schoolchildren scold their parents because they haven't traded in their incandescent lightbulbs for the depressing yellow light of compact fluorescent bulbs. Environmentalism, which used to simply include anyone concerned about pollution, somehow morphed into radical environmentalism. Gottlieb and others have taken up the banner of global warming under the guise of religious responsibility. Radical environmentalism has become a religion in and of itself. Its heaven is a utopia in which we all give up our modern conveniences and technological advancement for some austere, Amish-type lifestyle.
Al Gore, the Jim Jones of this new religious cult, preaches doom and gloom from his pettifogger pulpit, all the while living the lifestyle of an energy hog. He actually uses twice the amount of electricity in one month at his Nashville home than the average household uses in an entire year. He has two homes in Tennessee, one in Virginia, at least. He flies all over the world on his Magical Hysteria Tour, sucking down resources and belching out tons of carbon, all to tell us we need to conserve. We're trying to make ends meet just to afford gas in our cars while Al Gore has a carbon footprint the size of Sasquatch. And no one seems to care.
The Branch Algorians read from the Gospel of Al and never question a word. The movement's devil is carbon dioxide, an essential component of photosynthesis and the substance we all exhale with every breath. Understand this: CO2 is not a pollutant. However, Gore and the radical environmentalists have been quite successful in convincing people that smog and CO2 are the same. They are not. CO2 has nothing whatsoever to do with the smog or haze we see over our cities. There is absolutely no evidence that CO2 has anything to do with any kind of warming.
The Gore Kool-Aid drinkers will point to "all these scientists" but can't give you one link between CO2 and any kind of climate change. As the founder of The Weather Channel, John Coleman, recently put it, global warming is the greatest scam in history.
When Professor Gottlieb is not writing a guilt-trip treatise on the environment, he's writing about Marxism and how the Soviets just didn't quite get it right.
You see, global warming is the perfect template for Marxism because it's the great equalizer. The wealthier a nation, the more CO2 it produces. To atone for its sins, it must pay carbon offsets. In other words, the producing nations pay the non-producing or under-producing nations in cash for the sin of emitting a harmless gas. It's beautiful.
The global warming movement is a way to not just confiscate money and wealth from the producers, but because of their guilt, they gladly hand it over. If Karl Marx were still alive, he'd be beaming with pride.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
From The Sunday Times
November 18, 2007
Only one Republican can end this war with honour
Andrew Sullivan
I hate to break the news, but quite what is happening in Iraq is not exactly clear. We know a few things. There is a marked decline in sectarian violence and civilian deaths. The rate of murder and mayhem is now roughly where it was in the first months of 2006. At the same time, before you get too excited, we are at the peak of US troop presence, with some 175,000 now in the country.
Those of us who argued that the fundamental problem with the Iraq occupation was insufficient man-power can take some sliver of solace from this. But perhaps not for long: the troop levels will very soon start to decline and by next spring the sheer metrics of troop redeployment will mean a big withdrawal.
Will the violence resume? Will the civil war take off again? No one knows. What we do seem to know is that the Iraqi leaders, especially the Shi’ite-dominated “government”, have a few months at most to strike a national bargain over the constitution, oil revenues, the military and police force with minority Kurds and Sunnis. From everything we can tell, they won’t. Then what?
This would be a good question for John McCain. He was one of the very few Republicans to pull off a national security hat-trick: he supported the war in Iraq, he subsequently became a ferocious critic of the feckless occupation, and then full-throatedly backed the “surge”. There aren’t many people on the national scene who did all three.
Most observers honest enough to do the first two looked at the troop levels General David Petraeus was proposing and didn’t think it could be done. It’s still unclear, for that matter, what has been done. Is the decline in violence a function of the Anbar tribes’ decision to turn on Al-Qaeda – something they decided before the surge? Is it related to the dramatic ethnic cleansing, separation and exile that have occurred in Iraq these past two years, thus making ethnic friction and violence less necessary? Is it a function of the Shi’ite militias simply waiting the Americans out? Or is it a result of competent counter-insurgency policies enacted for the first time since the invasion? I’d say some as yet undetermined mix of all of the above. But the answer does matter, especially for McCain and the Republicans.
It matters because McCain offers the Republicans a way to support a still unpopular war and maintain a scintilla of credibility on national security. Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson have all punted on the issue of Iraq to some degree or other in the campaign so far. None will directly attack President George Bush, since he is still a semi-religious figure among the Republican base. All support the surge for now, but none has detailed what they would do next year, let alone the first year of their own potential presidency. We know Giuliani wants to bomb Iran. But we know little else.
Which leaves McCain. Yes, he’s still out there. His disappointing past six months have had one beneficial effect: he has stopped being too cautious, resumed his habit of talking nonstop to any hack within hearing range, and put his mother on television to have a go at Romney.
I loved his response to the somewhat staggering news that the Christian right’s Pat Robertson had now joined Giuliani’s campaign: “I’m speechless.” Well, when two oddballs gather together – one who blamed feminists and gays for causing 9/11, the other who hounded ferret owners as mayor of New York City – silence is often golden. McCain has even attacked Senator Hillary Clinton for securing federal funds for a Woodstock museum. It may be 2007, but you can still run against hippies.
McCain, however, looks better not just because he has stuck to his pro-war position while acknowledging painful reality, but because the others have increasingly looked so unnerving. Romney’s plastic demeanour and say-anything style have not caught on outside the first two states where he has poured millions of his own money into blanket television advertising. Thompson has yet to seem a viable president. Giuliani’s bizarre personal quirks and all-purpose, random hawkishness do not calm nerves in a very unstable world. Fellow Republican candidate Mike Huckabee is a jovial inheritor of Bush’s spend-like-Jesus conservatism, but has zero foreign policy experience. And so . . . we come back to McCain.
It’s obviously his turn. He was runner-up in 2000 and a loyal Bushie (through gritted teeth) in 2004. He’s more reliably pro-life than any of the other big names; he is extremely well versed in foreign policy; and his integrity on the detention and interrogation question makes him the sole Republican president who could reassure the world that the US will not continue to torture prisoners. He’s also able to appeal to independents in a way no other Republican can – except Rudy on a very good day.
The polls are beginning to reflect this reality. McCain does better against Clinton in hypothetical match-ups than any of the others. The latest Fox News poll finds 47% think McCain “says what he believes”, while 39% think he says what he thinks will get him elected – an eight-point honesty advantage. Giuliani has a three-point deficit on the same score. And 57% say McCain is “honest and trustworthy” – including half of Democrats and 60% of independents. Among Republicans, McCain has moved into second place nationally for the first time since the summer.
The odds against McCain are still high. But he is not unimaginable as the nominee. It’s worth recalling that in December 2003, at about this time in the primary cycle, John Kerry had a national rating of 4%. If one establishment Vietnam vet can come back from the political dead to win the nomination it can happen again.
McCain’s positions on the war, moreover, even when they have been mistaken, have always been honest and responsible. The New York Times columnist David Brooks summed up his moments of opportunism thus: “There have been occasions when McCain compromised his principles for political gain, but he was so bad at it that it always backfired.”
He is also the sole Republican who candidly believes climate change is real and Americans have a duty to deal with it. Translation: he seems in touch with the reality most Americans now accept.
But to me, what McCain offers is something deeper than any of this: honour. This man knows the price and horror of war and its occasional necessity. If McCain is president, no military prisoner will be tortured, and no debates will be had over the precise terminology of torture either.
If McCain is president, many supporters of the other party will actually listen again to a president with an open mind. If McCain is president, there will be no quarter given to Islamist terrorists, but there will be no denial of reality, false pride or contempt for allies either.
And if McCain is president, it is conceivable that a Republican could end the war in Iraq without dishonour or panic. I don’t think that could currently be said of any of his rivals.
November 18, 2007
Only one Republican can end this war with honour
Andrew Sullivan
I hate to break the news, but quite what is happening in Iraq is not exactly clear. We know a few things. There is a marked decline in sectarian violence and civilian deaths. The rate of murder and mayhem is now roughly where it was in the first months of 2006. At the same time, before you get too excited, we are at the peak of US troop presence, with some 175,000 now in the country.
Those of us who argued that the fundamental problem with the Iraq occupation was insufficient man-power can take some sliver of solace from this. But perhaps not for long: the troop levels will very soon start to decline and by next spring the sheer metrics of troop redeployment will mean a big withdrawal.
Will the violence resume? Will the civil war take off again? No one knows. What we do seem to know is that the Iraqi leaders, especially the Shi’ite-dominated “government”, have a few months at most to strike a national bargain over the constitution, oil revenues, the military and police force with minority Kurds and Sunnis. From everything we can tell, they won’t. Then what?
This would be a good question for John McCain. He was one of the very few Republicans to pull off a national security hat-trick: he supported the war in Iraq, he subsequently became a ferocious critic of the feckless occupation, and then full-throatedly backed the “surge”. There aren’t many people on the national scene who did all three.
Most observers honest enough to do the first two looked at the troop levels General David Petraeus was proposing and didn’t think it could be done. It’s still unclear, for that matter, what has been done. Is the decline in violence a function of the Anbar tribes’ decision to turn on Al-Qaeda – something they decided before the surge? Is it related to the dramatic ethnic cleansing, separation and exile that have occurred in Iraq these past two years, thus making ethnic friction and violence less necessary? Is it a function of the Shi’ite militias simply waiting the Americans out? Or is it a result of competent counter-insurgency policies enacted for the first time since the invasion? I’d say some as yet undetermined mix of all of the above. But the answer does matter, especially for McCain and the Republicans.
It matters because McCain offers the Republicans a way to support a still unpopular war and maintain a scintilla of credibility on national security. Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson have all punted on the issue of Iraq to some degree or other in the campaign so far. None will directly attack President George Bush, since he is still a semi-religious figure among the Republican base. All support the surge for now, but none has detailed what they would do next year, let alone the first year of their own potential presidency. We know Giuliani wants to bomb Iran. But we know little else.
Which leaves McCain. Yes, he’s still out there. His disappointing past six months have had one beneficial effect: he has stopped being too cautious, resumed his habit of talking nonstop to any hack within hearing range, and put his mother on television to have a go at Romney.
I loved his response to the somewhat staggering news that the Christian right’s Pat Robertson had now joined Giuliani’s campaign: “I’m speechless.” Well, when two oddballs gather together – one who blamed feminists and gays for causing 9/11, the other who hounded ferret owners as mayor of New York City – silence is often golden. McCain has even attacked Senator Hillary Clinton for securing federal funds for a Woodstock museum. It may be 2007, but you can still run against hippies.
McCain, however, looks better not just because he has stuck to his pro-war position while acknowledging painful reality, but because the others have increasingly looked so unnerving. Romney’s plastic demeanour and say-anything style have not caught on outside the first two states where he has poured millions of his own money into blanket television advertising. Thompson has yet to seem a viable president. Giuliani’s bizarre personal quirks and all-purpose, random hawkishness do not calm nerves in a very unstable world. Fellow Republican candidate Mike Huckabee is a jovial inheritor of Bush’s spend-like-Jesus conservatism, but has zero foreign policy experience. And so . . . we come back to McCain.
It’s obviously his turn. He was runner-up in 2000 and a loyal Bushie (through gritted teeth) in 2004. He’s more reliably pro-life than any of the other big names; he is extremely well versed in foreign policy; and his integrity on the detention and interrogation question makes him the sole Republican president who could reassure the world that the US will not continue to torture prisoners. He’s also able to appeal to independents in a way no other Republican can – except Rudy on a very good day.
The polls are beginning to reflect this reality. McCain does better against Clinton in hypothetical match-ups than any of the others. The latest Fox News poll finds 47% think McCain “says what he believes”, while 39% think he says what he thinks will get him elected – an eight-point honesty advantage. Giuliani has a three-point deficit on the same score. And 57% say McCain is “honest and trustworthy” – including half of Democrats and 60% of independents. Among Republicans, McCain has moved into second place nationally for the first time since the summer.
The odds against McCain are still high. But he is not unimaginable as the nominee. It’s worth recalling that in December 2003, at about this time in the primary cycle, John Kerry had a national rating of 4%. If one establishment Vietnam vet can come back from the political dead to win the nomination it can happen again.
McCain’s positions on the war, moreover, even when they have been mistaken, have always been honest and responsible. The New York Times columnist David Brooks summed up his moments of opportunism thus: “There have been occasions when McCain compromised his principles for political gain, but he was so bad at it that it always backfired.”
He is also the sole Republican who candidly believes climate change is real and Americans have a duty to deal with it. Translation: he seems in touch with the reality most Americans now accept.
But to me, what McCain offers is something deeper than any of this: honour. This man knows the price and horror of war and its occasional necessity. If McCain is president, no military prisoner will be tortured, and no debates will be had over the precise terminology of torture either.
If McCain is president, many supporters of the other party will actually listen again to a president with an open mind. If McCain is president, there will be no quarter given to Islamist terrorists, but there will be no denial of reality, false pride or contempt for allies either.
And if McCain is president, it is conceivable that a Republican could end the war in Iraq without dishonour or panic. I don’t think that could currently be said of any of his rivals.
An inconvenient truth for the anti-war lobby
November 16, 2007
Good news in Iraq is bad news for the anti-war lobby
IN April, US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared the war in Iraq lost, saying the the extreme violence in the country proved the surge was accomplishing nothing. This week Senator Reid is still engaged in the vain attempt to block funding for the war in the US Senate, refusing to acknowledge the extraordinary success of the surge.
Against all the defeatist expectations of the so-called "anti-war" lobby, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki this week reported that terrorist attacks, including car bombings, in Baghdad had dropped by 77 per cent since last year's peak. The dramatic improvement is directly attributed to the surge of 30,000 US troops, their effective counter-insurgency strategy and to the fact that locals are fed up with al-Qa'ida and other extremists. The good news is not just limited to Baghdad. Anbar, once an al-Qa'ida stronghold, is relatively peaceful thanks to the joint efforts of Sunni sheiks and marines. In the south, those willing Iraq to defeat were gloomily predicting that the withdrawal of British troops from Basra would lead to a brutal domination of the city by Iranian-backed terrorists. That hasn't happened.
On the political front, there are also signs of progress. In September, Iraqi Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni, met with top Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. In October, Ammar al-Hakim, the son of one of the most important Shia leaders, the late Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, met Sunni sheiks in Ramadi, declaring, "Iraq does not belong to the Sunnis or the Shiites alone; nor does it belong to the Arabs or the Kurds and Turkomen. Today we must stand up and declare that Iraq is for all Iraqis." Baghdad Anglican canon Andrew White has organised meetings of Christian, Sunni and Shia clerics calling for nationwide reconciliation.
It is far too early to declare victory but you would think that all Americans and Australians, regardless of whether they supported the war in Iraq or not, would want to stick with a strategy that is delivering peace and security to a people who have suffered not just 4 1/2 years of a brutal insurgency but also three decades of tyranny and war. Yet some Democrats in the US, as with some on the Left in Australia, are still determined to lose the war if possible by withdrawing troops, even when success is starting to appear to be within reach. Undaunted by the fact that there has been an improvement in Iraq, Democratic staffers on Congress's Joint Economic Committee are trying to generate more bad headlines by focusing on the cost of the war, which they calculated would reach $US3.5 trillion by 2017. To arrive at such a massive total, the committee threw in everything they could think of, including their best guesses at the Iraq war's impact on oil prices and other economic factors.
In Australia, despite the fact that its actual policy differences with the Howard Government are small, Labor panders to the anti-war lobby, maintaining that its troops-out-of-Iraq policy is a principled stand against an illegal war. It is determined to maintain the fiction that the Baker Hamilton report, which President George W.Bush rejected when he adopted the surge strategy, got it right. It justifies its policy of a phased withdrawal of troops on that basis. Yet the surge is demonstrably working, and both the British and the Americans are withdrawing their troops not according to a pre-determined timetable, as Baker Hamilton recommended, but in response to the situation on the ground.
The sad fact is that for most of the anti-war Left, the only thing that matters is delivering a defeat to the Bush administration, and in achieving that end the Iraqi people are expendable. John Pilger said in January 2004 that while he didn't like the "terrible civilian atrocities" committed by what he called "the resistance", "the outcome of this resistance is terribly important for the rest of the world" and that only a defeat in Iraq of the US "military machine" and the Bush administration would make our world secure. As Christopher Hitchens wrote despairingly in 2005 of his erstwhile friends on the Left, while there is plenty of support for debt relief and making poverty history in Africa, there isn't a single drop of solidarity and compassion left over for the people of Iraq.
The anti-war, anti-American Left should be ashamed, but precisely for this reason they continue to look away when Iraq doesn't fail in the way they wish. The success of the surge has become their inconvenient truth.
Good news in Iraq is bad news for the anti-war lobby
IN April, US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared the war in Iraq lost, saying the the extreme violence in the country proved the surge was accomplishing nothing. This week Senator Reid is still engaged in the vain attempt to block funding for the war in the US Senate, refusing to acknowledge the extraordinary success of the surge.
Against all the defeatist expectations of the so-called "anti-war" lobby, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki this week reported that terrorist attacks, including car bombings, in Baghdad had dropped by 77 per cent since last year's peak. The dramatic improvement is directly attributed to the surge of 30,000 US troops, their effective counter-insurgency strategy and to the fact that locals are fed up with al-Qa'ida and other extremists. The good news is not just limited to Baghdad. Anbar, once an al-Qa'ida stronghold, is relatively peaceful thanks to the joint efforts of Sunni sheiks and marines. In the south, those willing Iraq to defeat were gloomily predicting that the withdrawal of British troops from Basra would lead to a brutal domination of the city by Iranian-backed terrorists. That hasn't happened.
On the political front, there are also signs of progress. In September, Iraqi Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni, met with top Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. In October, Ammar al-Hakim, the son of one of the most important Shia leaders, the late Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, met Sunni sheiks in Ramadi, declaring, "Iraq does not belong to the Sunnis or the Shiites alone; nor does it belong to the Arabs or the Kurds and Turkomen. Today we must stand up and declare that Iraq is for all Iraqis." Baghdad Anglican canon Andrew White has organised meetings of Christian, Sunni and Shia clerics calling for nationwide reconciliation.
It is far too early to declare victory but you would think that all Americans and Australians, regardless of whether they supported the war in Iraq or not, would want to stick with a strategy that is delivering peace and security to a people who have suffered not just 4 1/2 years of a brutal insurgency but also three decades of tyranny and war. Yet some Democrats in the US, as with some on the Left in Australia, are still determined to lose the war if possible by withdrawing troops, even when success is starting to appear to be within reach. Undaunted by the fact that there has been an improvement in Iraq, Democratic staffers on Congress's Joint Economic Committee are trying to generate more bad headlines by focusing on the cost of the war, which they calculated would reach $US3.5 trillion by 2017. To arrive at such a massive total, the committee threw in everything they could think of, including their best guesses at the Iraq war's impact on oil prices and other economic factors.
In Australia, despite the fact that its actual policy differences with the Howard Government are small, Labor panders to the anti-war lobby, maintaining that its troops-out-of-Iraq policy is a principled stand against an illegal war. It is determined to maintain the fiction that the Baker Hamilton report, which President George W.Bush rejected when he adopted the surge strategy, got it right. It justifies its policy of a phased withdrawal of troops on that basis. Yet the surge is demonstrably working, and both the British and the Americans are withdrawing their troops not according to a pre-determined timetable, as Baker Hamilton recommended, but in response to the situation on the ground.
The sad fact is that for most of the anti-war Left, the only thing that matters is delivering a defeat to the Bush administration, and in achieving that end the Iraqi people are expendable. John Pilger said in January 2004 that while he didn't like the "terrible civilian atrocities" committed by what he called "the resistance", "the outcome of this resistance is terribly important for the rest of the world" and that only a defeat in Iraq of the US "military machine" and the Bush administration would make our world secure. As Christopher Hitchens wrote despairingly in 2005 of his erstwhile friends on the Left, while there is plenty of support for debt relief and making poverty history in Africa, there isn't a single drop of solidarity and compassion left over for the people of Iraq.
The anti-war, anti-American Left should be ashamed, but precisely for this reason they continue to look away when Iraq doesn't fail in the way they wish. The success of the surge has become their inconvenient truth.
A case study of unruly science
By Christopher Caldwell
Published: November 16 2007 19:26 Last updated: November 16 2007 19:26
If, say, William Brown, the school-shirking, mischief-prone hero of Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories, were passing through any school system in the English-speaking world today, he would be drugged to the gills. In the decades since Crompton wrote, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) – the name coined to describe a variety of unproductive and sometimes disruptive childhood behaviours – has become an American obsession. It is now diagnosed in countries other than the US, and in adults as well as children. It has spurred a market for drug treatments that exceeds $3bn annually in the US and could reach £101m ($207m) a year in the UK by 2012, according to recent projections carried out at the University of Heidelberg. A 10th of American boys, by some estimates, take some kind of anti-ADHD drug. “Since ADHD is only treatable, not curable,” ran one report in Medical Marketing and Media last year, “people take drugs for life, equalling a potential boon for pharmaceutical companies”.
The problem is that there is not a clear definition of what ADHD is. There is no test for it. The symptoms laid out in the mental-health diagnostic manual DSM-IV are vague enough (“often does not follow instructions”, “often loses things” etc.) to invite overdiagnosis. Against this will-o’-the-wisp, doctors have deployed the pharmacological equivalent of a howitzer. Most drugs used against ADHD are strong stimulants, either methylphenidates or amphetamines. They have been abused on US college campuses and carry risks of addiction, hallucinations, heart attacks and strokes. The US Food and Drug Administration has occasionally urged stronger warnings for ADHD drugs and, in 2005, Health Canada briefly suspended sale of the market leader (Adderall XR, made by Shire Pharmaceuticals). In the US, pharmaceutical companies have been faulted for aggressive advertising and lobbying. In the early 1990s, Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis) gave $748,000 to Chadd, a sufferers’ advocacy group that was then campaigning to relax regulation of Ciba-Geigy’s drug Ritalin.
So is ADHD a vital discovery or a popular folly? Andrea Bilbow, founder of the British ADHD charity Addiss, takes the first view. “The minute you raise awareness,” she said earlier this year, “you’re going to see an increase in diagnosis and treatment.” Indeed, the US follows this pattern; richer areas, with more knowledge about medical developments, are often more heavily medicated. But Australia – a country where ADHD medicines have been both widely prescribed and strongly resisted – belies it. In Sydney last year, The Daily Telegraph newspaper reported that children in rich neighbourhoods were given medication at one 12th the rate of children from poor ones. One in 300 children gets ADHD drugs in the wealthy north versus 1 in 25 in poorer areas.
The sceptics have lately been getting the better of the argument. This summer, a follow-up to the 1999 Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD (MTA) – which provides the main evidence for the effectiveness of drug therapy – rescinded a number of the study’s earlier conclusions. Gains from drug treatment evaporate after three years, the follow-up showed, and there is evidence that the drugs stunt children’s growth. William Pelham of the University of Buffalo, one of the researchers involved in the MTA study, said on BBC1’s Panorama on Monday that he now favours behavioural therapies because the familiar drug treatments offer “no beneficial effects – none”.
A fascinating neurological study published this week by the US National Institute of Mental Health holds out promise of resolving many controversies. The study looked at the way the right brain cortex, which helps control attention and planning, thickens during childhood. Scientists compared brain scans of hundreds of children diagnosed with ADHD with scans from a non-ADHD group. They found that, for non-ADHD children, the cortices reached maximum thickness at about 7½ years. For the ADHD group, that stage came three years later. But it did arrive eventually, and by puberty, most of the hyperactive kids had normal-looking brains.
This will hearten both those who say ADHD is a silent crisis and those who say it is a loud hoax. The report seems to suggest that ADHD is a neurological reality, but does not establish that it is, in the long term, either abnormal or permanent. This view was reinforced by a long-term behavioural study by a team of psychiatrists and educators, published in the November issue of Developmental Psychology. Attention skills at the time children entered school were found to be “modestly” associated with school achievement years later, but far less so than early maths and language mastery. Indeed, “socio-emotional behaviours” – presumably including the kind of “acting out” often associated with hyperactivity – “were generally insignificant predictors of later academic performance”.
In a time of scientific upheaval, innovations in treatment can outpace innovations in diagnosis. Sometimes the medical establishment is vulnerable to underdiagnosing, leaving people to suffer unnecessarily. But in recent years, there have been too many incentives to overdiagnose ADHD. Some are financial. Most are social and familial. The world has changed to the point where institutions and families lack the authority, inclination and manpower to handle the misbehaviour of any but the most tranquil pre-adolescent.
Is giving stimulants a sensible treatment for a serious disorder? Or is it just a means of controlling unruly children? We shall find out. The research of the NIMH promises a better understanding of ADHD and how to treat it. Whether that understanding will confirm or contradict our own is less clear.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
By Christopher Caldwell
Published: November 16 2007 19:26 Last updated: November 16 2007 19:26
If, say, William Brown, the school-shirking, mischief-prone hero of Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories, were passing through any school system in the English-speaking world today, he would be drugged to the gills. In the decades since Crompton wrote, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) – the name coined to describe a variety of unproductive and sometimes disruptive childhood behaviours – has become an American obsession. It is now diagnosed in countries other than the US, and in adults as well as children. It has spurred a market for drug treatments that exceeds $3bn annually in the US and could reach £101m ($207m) a year in the UK by 2012, according to recent projections carried out at the University of Heidelberg. A 10th of American boys, by some estimates, take some kind of anti-ADHD drug. “Since ADHD is only treatable, not curable,” ran one report in Medical Marketing and Media last year, “people take drugs for life, equalling a potential boon for pharmaceutical companies”.
The problem is that there is not a clear definition of what ADHD is. There is no test for it. The symptoms laid out in the mental-health diagnostic manual DSM-IV are vague enough (“often does not follow instructions”, “often loses things” etc.) to invite overdiagnosis. Against this will-o’-the-wisp, doctors have deployed the pharmacological equivalent of a howitzer. Most drugs used against ADHD are strong stimulants, either methylphenidates or amphetamines. They have been abused on US college campuses and carry risks of addiction, hallucinations, heart attacks and strokes. The US Food and Drug Administration has occasionally urged stronger warnings for ADHD drugs and, in 2005, Health Canada briefly suspended sale of the market leader (Adderall XR, made by Shire Pharmaceuticals). In the US, pharmaceutical companies have been faulted for aggressive advertising and lobbying. In the early 1990s, Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis) gave $748,000 to Chadd, a sufferers’ advocacy group that was then campaigning to relax regulation of Ciba-Geigy’s drug Ritalin.
So is ADHD a vital discovery or a popular folly? Andrea Bilbow, founder of the British ADHD charity Addiss, takes the first view. “The minute you raise awareness,” she said earlier this year, “you’re going to see an increase in diagnosis and treatment.” Indeed, the US follows this pattern; richer areas, with more knowledge about medical developments, are often more heavily medicated. But Australia – a country where ADHD medicines have been both widely prescribed and strongly resisted – belies it. In Sydney last year, The Daily Telegraph newspaper reported that children in rich neighbourhoods were given medication at one 12th the rate of children from poor ones. One in 300 children gets ADHD drugs in the wealthy north versus 1 in 25 in poorer areas.
The sceptics have lately been getting the better of the argument. This summer, a follow-up to the 1999 Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD (MTA) – which provides the main evidence for the effectiveness of drug therapy – rescinded a number of the study’s earlier conclusions. Gains from drug treatment evaporate after three years, the follow-up showed, and there is evidence that the drugs stunt children’s growth. William Pelham of the University of Buffalo, one of the researchers involved in the MTA study, said on BBC1’s Panorama on Monday that he now favours behavioural therapies because the familiar drug treatments offer “no beneficial effects – none”.
A fascinating neurological study published this week by the US National Institute of Mental Health holds out promise of resolving many controversies. The study looked at the way the right brain cortex, which helps control attention and planning, thickens during childhood. Scientists compared brain scans of hundreds of children diagnosed with ADHD with scans from a non-ADHD group. They found that, for non-ADHD children, the cortices reached maximum thickness at about 7½ years. For the ADHD group, that stage came three years later. But it did arrive eventually, and by puberty, most of the hyperactive kids had normal-looking brains.
This will hearten both those who say ADHD is a silent crisis and those who say it is a loud hoax. The report seems to suggest that ADHD is a neurological reality, but does not establish that it is, in the long term, either abnormal or permanent. This view was reinforced by a long-term behavioural study by a team of psychiatrists and educators, published in the November issue of Developmental Psychology. Attention skills at the time children entered school were found to be “modestly” associated with school achievement years later, but far less so than early maths and language mastery. Indeed, “socio-emotional behaviours” – presumably including the kind of “acting out” often associated with hyperactivity – “were generally insignificant predictors of later academic performance”.
In a time of scientific upheaval, innovations in treatment can outpace innovations in diagnosis. Sometimes the medical establishment is vulnerable to underdiagnosing, leaving people to suffer unnecessarily. But in recent years, there have been too many incentives to overdiagnose ADHD. Some are financial. Most are social and familial. The world has changed to the point where institutions and families lack the authority, inclination and manpower to handle the misbehaviour of any but the most tranquil pre-adolescent.
Is giving stimulants a sensible treatment for a serious disorder? Or is it just a means of controlling unruly children? We shall find out. The research of the NIMH promises a better understanding of ADHD and how to treat it. Whether that understanding will confirm or contradict our own is less clear.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Friday, November 16, 2007
Reviled and Isolated Abroad?
November 16, 2007
Reviled and Isolated Abroad?
By Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON -- When the Democratic presidential candidates pause from beating Hillary with a stick, they join in unison to pronounce the Democratic pieties, chief among which is that George Bush has left our alliances in ruins. As Clinton puts it, we have "alienated our friends," must "rebuild our alliances" and "restore our standing in the world." That's mild. The others describe Bush as having a scorched-earth foreign policy that has left us reviled and isolated in the world.
Like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, who insist that nothing of significance has changed in Iraq, the Democrats are living in what Bob Woodward would call a state of denial. Do they not notice anything?
France has a new president who is breaking not just with the anti-Americanism of the Chirac era but with 50 years of Fifth Republic orthodoxy that defined French greatness as operating in counterpoise to America. Nicolas Sarkozy's trip last week to the United States was marked by a highly successful White House visit and a rousing speech to Congress in which he not only called America "the greatest nation in the world" (how many leaders of any country say that about another?) but pledged solidarity with the U.S. on Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, the Middle East and nuclear nonproliferation. This just a few months after he sent his foreign minister to Iraq to signal an openness to cooperation and an end to Chirac's reflexive obstructionism.
That's France. In Germany, Gerhard Schroeder is long gone, voted out of office and into a cozy retirement as Putin's concubine at Gazprom. His successor is the decidedly pro-American Angela Merkel, who concluded an unusually warm visit with Bush this week.
All this, beyond the ken of Democrats, is duly noted by new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who in an interview with Sky News on Sunday noted "the great change that is taking place," namely "that France and Germany and the European Union are also moving more closely with America."
As for our other traditional alliances, relations with Australia are very close, and Canada has shown remarkable steadfastness in taking disproportionate casualties in supporting the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Eastern European nations, traditionally friendly, are taking considerable risks on behalf of their U.S. alliance -- for example, cooperating with us on missile defense in the face of enormous Russian pressure. And ties with Japan have never been stronger, with Tokyo increasingly undertaking military and quasi-military obligations that it had forsworn for the last half-century.
So much for the disarray of our alliances.
The critics will say that all this is simply attributable to the rise of Russia and China causing old allies to turn back to us out of need.
So? I would even add that the looming prospect of a nuclear Iran has caused Arab states -- Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, even Libya -- to rally to us. All true. And it makes the point that the Bush critics have missed for years -- that the strength of alliances is heavily dependent on the objective balance of international forces, and has very little to do with the syntax of the U.S. president or the disdain in which he might be held by a country's cultural elites.
It's classic balance-of-power theory: Weaker nations turn to the great outside power to help them balance a rising regional threat. Allies are not sentimental about their associations. It is not a matter of affection, but of need -- and of the great power's ability to deliver.
What's changed in the last year? Bush's dress and diction remain the same. But he did change generals -- and counterinsurgency strategy -- in Iraq. As a result, Iraq has gone from an apparently lost cause to a winnable one.
The rise of external threats to our allies has concentrated their minds on the need for the American connection. The revival of American fortunes in Iraq -- and the diminished prospect of an American rout -- have significantly increased the value of such a connection. This is particularly true among our moderate Arab allies who see us as their ultimate protection against an Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas axis that openly threatens them all.
It's always uncomfortable for a small power to rely on a hegemon. But a hegemon on the run is even worse. Alliances are always shifting. But one thing we can say with certainty: The event that will have more effect than any other on the strength of our alliances worldwide is not another Karen Hughes outreach to the Muslim world, not an ostentatious embrace of Kyoto, or even the most abject embrace of internationalism from the podium of the UN. It is success or failure in Iraq.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
(c) 2007, The Washington Post Writers GroupPage Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/alliances_strengthened_countri.html at November 16, 2007 - 06:23:20 PM CST
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urchinTracker();
Reviled and Isolated Abroad?
By Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON -- When the Democratic presidential candidates pause from beating Hillary with a stick, they join in unison to pronounce the Democratic pieties, chief among which is that George Bush has left our alliances in ruins. As Clinton puts it, we have "alienated our friends," must "rebuild our alliances" and "restore our standing in the world." That's mild. The others describe Bush as having a scorched-earth foreign policy that has left us reviled and isolated in the world.
Like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, who insist that nothing of significance has changed in Iraq, the Democrats are living in what Bob Woodward would call a state of denial. Do they not notice anything?
France has a new president who is breaking not just with the anti-Americanism of the Chirac era but with 50 years of Fifth Republic orthodoxy that defined French greatness as operating in counterpoise to America. Nicolas Sarkozy's trip last week to the United States was marked by a highly successful White House visit and a rousing speech to Congress in which he not only called America "the greatest nation in the world" (how many leaders of any country say that about another?) but pledged solidarity with the U.S. on Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, the Middle East and nuclear nonproliferation. This just a few months after he sent his foreign minister to Iraq to signal an openness to cooperation and an end to Chirac's reflexive obstructionism.
That's France. In Germany, Gerhard Schroeder is long gone, voted out of office and into a cozy retirement as Putin's concubine at Gazprom. His successor is the decidedly pro-American Angela Merkel, who concluded an unusually warm visit with Bush this week.
All this, beyond the ken of Democrats, is duly noted by new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who in an interview with Sky News on Sunday noted "the great change that is taking place," namely "that France and Germany and the European Union are also moving more closely with America."
As for our other traditional alliances, relations with Australia are very close, and Canada has shown remarkable steadfastness in taking disproportionate casualties in supporting the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Eastern European nations, traditionally friendly, are taking considerable risks on behalf of their U.S. alliance -- for example, cooperating with us on missile defense in the face of enormous Russian pressure. And ties with Japan have never been stronger, with Tokyo increasingly undertaking military and quasi-military obligations that it had forsworn for the last half-century.
So much for the disarray of our alliances.
The critics will say that all this is simply attributable to the rise of Russia and China causing old allies to turn back to us out of need.
So? I would even add that the looming prospect of a nuclear Iran has caused Arab states -- Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, even Libya -- to rally to us. All true. And it makes the point that the Bush critics have missed for years -- that the strength of alliances is heavily dependent on the objective balance of international forces, and has very little to do with the syntax of the U.S. president or the disdain in which he might be held by a country's cultural elites.
It's classic balance-of-power theory: Weaker nations turn to the great outside power to help them balance a rising regional threat. Allies are not sentimental about their associations. It is not a matter of affection, but of need -- and of the great power's ability to deliver.
What's changed in the last year? Bush's dress and diction remain the same. But he did change generals -- and counterinsurgency strategy -- in Iraq. As a result, Iraq has gone from an apparently lost cause to a winnable one.
The rise of external threats to our allies has concentrated their minds on the need for the American connection. The revival of American fortunes in Iraq -- and the diminished prospect of an American rout -- have significantly increased the value of such a connection. This is particularly true among our moderate Arab allies who see us as their ultimate protection against an Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas axis that openly threatens them all.
It's always uncomfortable for a small power to rely on a hegemon. But a hegemon on the run is even worse. Alliances are always shifting. But one thing we can say with certainty: The event that will have more effect than any other on the strength of our alliances worldwide is not another Karen Hughes outreach to the Muslim world, not an ostentatious embrace of Kyoto, or even the most abject embrace of internationalism from the podium of the UN. It is success or failure in Iraq.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
(c) 2007, The Washington Post Writers GroupPage Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/alliances_strengthened_countri.html at November 16, 2007 - 06:23:20 PM CST
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Hook Up Culture Hurts Women
November 16, 2007
Hook Up Culture Hurts Women
By Kathleen Parker
WASHINGTON -- If you're younger than 30 or maybe even 35, you may not recognize the word "date" as a verb. But once upon a time, dating was something men and women did as a prelude to marriage, which -- hold on to your britches -- was a prelude to sex.
By now everyone's heard of the hook-up culture prevalent on college campuses and, increasingly, in high schools and even middle schools. Kids don't date; they just do it (or something close to "it," an activity that a recent president asserted was not actual sex), and then figure out what comes next. If anything.
As one young woman explained "hooking up" to Washington Post writer Laura Sessions Stepp (author of the book "Unhooked"): "First you give a guy oral sex and then you decide if you like him."
This conversation took place in the family room of the girl's home. Immediately after that definition was served, the mother offered Stepp a homemade cookie. And we thought cluelessness was for teenagers.
Too often what follows the hook-up is emotional pain and physical disease, the combination of which has created a mental health crisis on American campuses.
That diagnosis comes from Miriam Grossman, author and psychiatrist at UCLA and one of five women, including Stepp, who spoke recently at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center about sex on campus.
Grossman is most concerned that politically correct ideology has contaminated the health field at great cost to young lives. As Grossman sees it, when the scientific facts contradict what is being promoted as truth, then ideology has trumped reality.
Speaking to a packed room of mostly women, Grossman noted that while some in the audience had attended college during the free-love days, the world is far more dangerous now. Today there are more than two-dozen sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) -- 15 million new cases each year -- some of which are incurable.
The consequences are worse for young women, says Grossman. In her psychiatric practice, she has come to believe that women suffer more from sexual hook-ups than men do and wonders whether the hormone oxytocin is a factor. Oxytocin is released during childbirth and nursing to stimulate milk production and promote maternal attachment. It is also released during sexual activity for both men and women, hence the nickname "love potion."
Feminists don't much like the oxytocin factor, given the explicit suggestion that men and women might be physically and emotionally different. But wouldn't a more truly feminist position seek to recognize those hormonal differences and promote protection for women from the kind of ignorance that causes them harm?
Physically, young women are getting clobbered by STDs with potentially deadly results. If a young woman begins having sex as a freshman in college, there's a 50 percent chance she'll have the human papillomavirus (HPV) by her senior year. While most cases of HPV are harmless, the virus causes nearly every case of cervical cancer, says Grossman.
Stacey, one of the college students featured in Grossman's book "Unprotected," contracted HPV even though a condom was used. But HPV, like herpes, lives on skin that may not be covered by a condom. An HPV expert tells college women, "You'd be wise to simply assume your partner has HPV infection."
Your partner. What happened to your dearly beloved? He -- and she -- disappeared with coed dorms and the triumph of reproductive health ideology. While coed dorms replaced obstacle with opportunity, ideologically driven sex-education programs promoted permissiveness and experimentation.
Because sex ed is based on the assumption that young people are sexually active with multiple partners, kids have been led to believe by mainstream health professionals that casual sex is OK. That's a delusion, says Grossman, because scientific data clearly indicate otherwise. Casual sex is, in fact, a serious health risk.
Rather than spread that word, sex educators have tweaked their message from urging "safe sex" to a more realistic "safer sex," any elaboration of which would defy standards of decency. Interested parents can find out for themselves by visiting one of several university-sponsored sex advice Web sites, such as Columbia's GoAskAlice.com.
To all good and bad, there is an inevitable backlash, and casual sex has lost its allure for many students. Having learned painful lessons from their elders' misguided altruism, they are seeking other expressions of intimacy.
At Duke University recently, Stepp asked how many in her audience of about 250 would like to bring back dating. Four out of every five raised their hands.
It would seem that young people are not hook-up machines, but are human beings who desire real intimacy and emotional connection. Toward that end, parents might buy Grossman's book for their children -- and themselves.
Serve with cookies.
kparker@kparker.com
(c) 2007, Washington Post Writers GroupPage Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/hook_up_culture_hurts_women_sp.html at November 16, 2007 - 06:14:17 PM CST
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urchinTracker();
Hook Up Culture Hurts Women
By Kathleen Parker
WASHINGTON -- If you're younger than 30 or maybe even 35, you may not recognize the word "date" as a verb. But once upon a time, dating was something men and women did as a prelude to marriage, which -- hold on to your britches -- was a prelude to sex.
By now everyone's heard of the hook-up culture prevalent on college campuses and, increasingly, in high schools and even middle schools. Kids don't date; they just do it (or something close to "it," an activity that a recent president asserted was not actual sex), and then figure out what comes next. If anything.
As one young woman explained "hooking up" to Washington Post writer Laura Sessions Stepp (author of the book "Unhooked"): "First you give a guy oral sex and then you decide if you like him."
This conversation took place in the family room of the girl's home. Immediately after that definition was served, the mother offered Stepp a homemade cookie. And we thought cluelessness was for teenagers.
Too often what follows the hook-up is emotional pain and physical disease, the combination of which has created a mental health crisis on American campuses.
That diagnosis comes from Miriam Grossman, author and psychiatrist at UCLA and one of five women, including Stepp, who spoke recently at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center about sex on campus.
Grossman is most concerned that politically correct ideology has contaminated the health field at great cost to young lives. As Grossman sees it, when the scientific facts contradict what is being promoted as truth, then ideology has trumped reality.
Speaking to a packed room of mostly women, Grossman noted that while some in the audience had attended college during the free-love days, the world is far more dangerous now. Today there are more than two-dozen sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) -- 15 million new cases each year -- some of which are incurable.
The consequences are worse for young women, says Grossman. In her psychiatric practice, she has come to believe that women suffer more from sexual hook-ups than men do and wonders whether the hormone oxytocin is a factor. Oxytocin is released during childbirth and nursing to stimulate milk production and promote maternal attachment. It is also released during sexual activity for both men and women, hence the nickname "love potion."
Feminists don't much like the oxytocin factor, given the explicit suggestion that men and women might be physically and emotionally different. But wouldn't a more truly feminist position seek to recognize those hormonal differences and promote protection for women from the kind of ignorance that causes them harm?
Physically, young women are getting clobbered by STDs with potentially deadly results. If a young woman begins having sex as a freshman in college, there's a 50 percent chance she'll have the human papillomavirus (HPV) by her senior year. While most cases of HPV are harmless, the virus causes nearly every case of cervical cancer, says Grossman.
Stacey, one of the college students featured in Grossman's book "Unprotected," contracted HPV even though a condom was used. But HPV, like herpes, lives on skin that may not be covered by a condom. An HPV expert tells college women, "You'd be wise to simply assume your partner has HPV infection."
Your partner. What happened to your dearly beloved? He -- and she -- disappeared with coed dorms and the triumph of reproductive health ideology. While coed dorms replaced obstacle with opportunity, ideologically driven sex-education programs promoted permissiveness and experimentation.
Because sex ed is based on the assumption that young people are sexually active with multiple partners, kids have been led to believe by mainstream health professionals that casual sex is OK. That's a delusion, says Grossman, because scientific data clearly indicate otherwise. Casual sex is, in fact, a serious health risk.
Rather than spread that word, sex educators have tweaked their message from urging "safe sex" to a more realistic "safer sex," any elaboration of which would defy standards of decency. Interested parents can find out for themselves by visiting one of several university-sponsored sex advice Web sites, such as Columbia's GoAskAlice.com.
To all good and bad, there is an inevitable backlash, and casual sex has lost its allure for many students. Having learned painful lessons from their elders' misguided altruism, they are seeking other expressions of intimacy.
At Duke University recently, Stepp asked how many in her audience of about 250 would like to bring back dating. Four out of every five raised their hands.
It would seem that young people are not hook-up machines, but are human beings who desire real intimacy and emotional connection. Toward that end, parents might buy Grossman's book for their children -- and themselves.
Serve with cookies.
kparker@kparker.com
(c) 2007, Washington Post Writers GroupPage Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/hook_up_culture_hurts_women_sp.html at November 16, 2007 - 06:14:17 PM CST
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urchinTracker();
Monday, November 12, 2007
Academia's Pervasive PC Rot
OPENING ARGUMENT Academia's Pervasive PC Rot
By Stuart Taylor Jr., National Journal© National Journal Group Inc.Monday, Nov. 12, 2007
"A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. 'The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture, or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists.' " [emphasis added]
Delaware students have been informed that "white culture is a melting pot of greed, guys, guns, and god."
Such stuff has long been a staple of the totalitarian "diversity" obsessives who pollute -- and often dominate -- political discourse at almost all of our universities, from coast to coast. The University of Delaware recently got a step ahead of its peers by including the all-whites-are-racists dogma in training those who administered a systematic thought-reform program for incoming (and other) students.
The quoted language appears in an August 2007 "diversity facilitation training" program for resident assistants. The RAs were, in turn, assigned to use far-left propaganda such as this in what university documents called the mandatory "treatment" of freshmen and the rest of the 7,000 students in university residence halls.
University President Patrick Harker suspended this particular program two days after an October 30 expose spurred media reports and horrified parents and other citizens. But history suggests that it may well be back in some less obvious form before long. And it provides the latest glimpse into the political correctness rot that infects our universities and a great many secondary schools.
This and dozens of other cases suggest to me that the cancerous spread of ideologically eccentric, intellectually shoddy, phony-diversity-obsessed fanaticism among university faculties and administrators is far, far worse and more inexorable than most alumni, parents, and trustees suspect.
Another hyperbolic, conservative rant about liberals in academia? Perhaps I should confess my biases. I do dislike extremism of the Left and of the Right. But I have never been conservative enough to vote for a Republican presidential nominee. And the academics whose growing power and abuses of power concern me are far to the left of almost all congressional Democrats.
They are also ruthless in blocking appointment of professors whose views they don't like; are eager to censor such views; and in many cases are determined to push their own political views on students, who have few reality checks in their course material and are often too innocent of the world to understand when they are being fed fatuous tripe.
Delaware students have been not only inculcated with the lunatic view that all white Americans are racists (and that "REVERSE RACISM" is a "term ... created and used by white people to deny their white privilege") but also:
* Told to confess their "privilege" or lament their "oppression";
* Informed that "white culture is a melting pot of greed, guys, guns, and god";
* Required to "recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society" and "recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression" (whatever that means);
* Instructed to purge male residents' "resistance to educational efforts" and "concepts of traditional male identity";
* Challenged to "change their daily habits and consumer mentality" for the sake of "sustainability";
* Pushed to display on their dorm doors politically approved decorations proclaiming support for (e.g.) "social equity" (whatever that means);
* Subjected to other "treatments" designed to alter their beliefs and behaviors and inculcate university-approved views on politics, sexuality, moral philosophy, and more;
* Ordered to attend residence-hall training sessions and submit to one-on-one sessions with RAs, who filed reports to their superiors about individual students' "level of change or acceptance" of the thought-reform program.
One such report, for example, classified a young woman as one of the "worst" students in the residence life education program for saying that she was tired of having "diversity shoved down her throat" and responding "none of your damn business" when asked "when did you discover your sexual identity?"
"It seemed like they were trying to convince us we were racist and sexist and were horrible people," Kelsey Lanan, a 19-year-old sophomore, told The Philadelphia Inquirer.
The expose of the Delaware program came not from the media, most of which have (unlike The Inquirer) displayed little interest in the ugly details of campus PC, but from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a Philadelphia-based group that protects the liberties of students from their own universities. FIRE said in an October 29 letter to Harker that the university's approach "represents a distorted idea of 'education' that one would more easily associate with a Soviet prison camp." But although especially egregious, the Delaware program is hardly an isolated example.
"In a nation whose future depends upon an education in freedom, colleges and universities are teaching the values of censorship, self-censorship, and self-righteous abuse of power," FIRE founders Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate asserted, with copious documentation, in their 1998 book, "The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses."
They went on: "Our students are being educated in ... double standards to redress partisan definitions of historical wrongs.... [The norm is] intolerance of dissent from regnant political orthodoxy [and] the belief that universities not only may but should suspend the rights of some in order to transform students, the culture, and the nation according to their ideological vision and desire."
Despite a succession of court decisions striking down university speech codes, they re-emerged thinly disguised as rules to prevent and punish "harassment," defined to include any speech deemed offensive by minorities, women, gays, or other preferred groups.
The PC sickness goes far beyond intolerance of dissent. It also has a pervasive effect on course offerings. History departments, for example, offer fewer and fewer traditional courses such as political and diplomatic history, to make room for courses portraying history as a tale of unrelieved oppression of minorities, women, the poor, gays, and everyone else by privileged white males.
Academia's "diversity" obsession is founded on hostility to diversity of opinion. To most academics, "diversity" is a code word for systematic preference of minorities and women over white males in all walks of life. The preferred groups include many faculty members who are manifestly unqualified for their positions and whose websites read like a "Saturday Night Live" parody of wacky professors.
"At least in the humanities and social sciences," Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein wrote in a 2004 essay, "academics shun conservative values and traditions, so their curricula and hiring practices discourage non-leftists from pursuing academic careers.... The quasi-Marxist outlook of cultural studies rules out those who espouse capitalism. If you disapprove of affirmative action, forget pursuing a degree in African-American studies. If you think that the nuclear family proves the best unit of social well-being, stay away from women's studies."
Over the decades, academic extremists have taken over more and more departments, like cancers metastasizing from organ to organ. For example, the 88 Duke professors who signed a disgraceful April 2006 ad in the school paper spearheading the mob rush to judgment against falsely accused lacrosse players included 80 percent of the African-American studies faculty; 72 percent of the women's studies professors; 60 percent of the cultural anthropology department; and lots of professors in romance studies, literature, English, art, and history.
An organizer and representative member of the Duke 88, Wahneema Lubiano, has labeled herself a "post-structuralist teacher-critic-leftist." Her meager scholarly output includes railing against "Western rationality's hegemony" while making the inconsistent (and racist) claim that "many whites might not ever be persuaded by appeals to reason."
Another 88er, literature professor Grant Farred, has produced such "scholarship" as a monograph styling Houston Rockets center Yao Ming, a native of China, as "the most profound threat to American empire." In the fall of 2006, Farred accused hundreds of Duke students of "secret racism" against "black female bodies" because they had registered to vote! The students were trying to defeat rogue Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong, who was courting the black vote by pressing rape charges against three white lacrosse players in the face of overwhelming public evidence of innocence.
At no point during or since the rape hoax has Duke President Richard Brodhead or board Chairman Robert Steel even hinted at rebuking Lubiano, Farred, or the other unrepentant faculty persecutors of lacrosse players.
Only in American academia could still another elite university -- Cornell -- proudly hire away and tenure a character such as Farred after he had proved himself a malicious buffoon. "We are very enthusiastic about Professor Farred, whose work everyone in this department has long admired," remarked Cornell English Department Chairwoman Molly Hite.
In academia today, a professor who falsely smears his university's students as racists is a hot commodity. And hate means never having to say you're sorry.
-- Stuart Taylor Jr. is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal magazine, where "Opening Argument" appears. His e-mail address is staylor@nationaljournal.com.
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Monday, November 5, 2007
Do foreign service officers in Washington feel no sense of solidarity with their colleagues in Baghdad?
Of Diplomats and Men
Do foreign service officers in Washington feel no sense of solidarity with their colleagues in Baghdad?
by William Kristol and Dean Barnett
11/12/2007, Volume 013, Issue 09
On August 26, Al Qaeda in Iraq tried to abduct four American paratroopers on rooftop surveillance in Samarra. The plan seems to have been to hold the soldiers hostage and then behead them just as General David Petraeus was testifying before Congress. Showing an awareness of the American media that many political consultants would envy, al Qaeda hoped that the operation would become an Iraqi Tet, demoralizing Americans on the home front.
Three of the four soldiers al Qaeda tried to abduct were part of a "Reaper" team of the 82nd Airborne. The fourth was a highly skilled sniper. Their mission was to monitor the roads below and prevent al Qaeda from planting IEDs to ambush their fellow members of Charlie Company as they made their way back from a mission.
According to Jeff Emanuel's report of this episode in the November American Spectator, the four men were alone and isolated on their rooftop. They soon found themselves under attack from nearly 40 al Qaeda fighters. Two of the men, team leader Sergeant Josh Morley and Specialist Tracy Willis, didn't survive the attack. The two who did, Specialists Chris Corriveau and Eric Moser, killed between 10 and 15 al Qaeda in a desperate fight over 10 long minutes. At one point, al Qaeda forces tried to grab Sergeant Morley's body as a trophy. At great peril to himself, Specialist Moser didn't let that happen. At the time of his death, Sergeant Morley was anticipating seeing his newborn daughter for the first time. He was 22 years old. His comrade, Tracy Willis, was 21.
Not long after the Reaper team had its deadly engagement in Iraq, the State Department found itself enmeshed in a surprisingly intense internal dust-up. Not enough career diplomats at Foggy Bottom were volunteering to serve in Baghdad. To remedy this situation, the State Department announced its intention to assign some foreign service officers to Baghdad, whether they volunteered or not. This announcement triggered an urgent State Department "town hall" meeting that took place October 31, where one Jack Croddy, a senior foreign service officer, spoke out. "It's one thing if someone believes in what's going on over there and volunteers, but it's another thing to send someone over there on a forced assignment," Croddy carped. "I'm sorry, but basically that's a potential death sentence and you know it. Who will raise our children if we are dead or seriously wounded?"
It is tempting but perhaps unfair to compare Croddy's "death sentence" remark, and his resolve, with the actions of the men of Sergeant Morley's Reaper Team. As the memorial plaques at the State Department attest, a long line of foreign service officers, from the 18th century down to the present day, have given their lives in service to their country. Croddy doesn't speak for them or, we hope, for very many of his colleagues today.
Still: What has happened to any sense of decency and propriety when a senior foreign service officer can say such a thing in public? Or when the State Department countenances a meeting that invites such a public display of petulance? Do the foreign service officers in Washington feel no sense of solidarity, if not with our soldiers, at least with Ambassador Ryan Crocker and their colleagues serving in Baghdad? Serving in Iraq is hazardous duty. It seems that three State Department employees have died there since 2004, among some 1,500 who have served or are now serving in Iraq.
At the same time, more State Department employees have been killed by al Qaeda and allied groups outside Iraq, in East Africa and Jordan and elsewhere, in recent years. Does their sacrifice count for nothing? Is the State Department not also involved in fighting these brutal terrorists? Are timidity and grievance-mongering appropriate for senior U.S. government officials engaged in the conduct of the nation's foreign policy?
It's certainly the prerogative of government employees not to "believe in what's going on over there." But until they resign, they are still supposed to help carry out U.S. government policy. How many other parts of the executive branch don't believe we're at war or are quietly refusing to help the war effort? We know about the CIA leaks that have gushed from Langley the last few years with the express aim of wounding the administration. We also know that parts of the Pentagon want to abandon Iraq so they can return to their preferred terrain of orderly rotations, procuring new hardware, and preparing for World War Whatever with China or some other great power.
History will someday view President Bush's steadfastness in pursuing an unpopular war, and his courage in (finally) finding the right generals and the right strategy, as an admirable example of presidential leadership. The latest numbers out of Iraq have confirmed the extraordinary progress of recent months--the kind of progress that many, not only in the media and Congress, but also in the State Department and the Pentagon, all but insisted was impossible mere months ago.
Still, it's a blemish on the president's record that he has never been able to get the whole government apparatus to pitch in on the war effort, or even to stop certain factions from undermining it. Last week, he complained that "some in Congress are behaving as if America is not at war." He was not wrong, but he bears some responsibility for this state of affairs. His administration was slow to beef up the military after 9/11, unwilling to revamp our intelligence and diplomatic establishments, and loath to give the American people a constructive way to assist the war effort beyond suggesting that they go shopping.
When George W. Bush is no longer a lightning rod, our nation will be grateful for the determination he showed in continuing the fight in Iraq long after most politicians would have declared victory and retreated. But there's no denying that the management record of our first MBA president leaves much to be desired. The Bush administration failed to insist on efforts throughout the government worthy of Sergeant Morley's team and of all our troops in the field.
The next president will inherit a situation in Iraq that will look much more promising than anyone thought possible a year ago. For this, we owe General Petraeus and hiscomrades-in-arms an enormous debt, as we do Ambassador Crocker and his diplomatic team. What the next president owes them is a government that is organized from top to bottom to support their efforts, to win the war in Iraq and beyond.
--William Kristol and Dean Barnett
© Copyright 2007, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
Do foreign service officers in Washington feel no sense of solidarity with their colleagues in Baghdad?
by William Kristol and Dean Barnett
11/12/2007, Volume 013, Issue 09
On August 26, Al Qaeda in Iraq tried to abduct four American paratroopers on rooftop surveillance in Samarra. The plan seems to have been to hold the soldiers hostage and then behead them just as General David Petraeus was testifying before Congress. Showing an awareness of the American media that many political consultants would envy, al Qaeda hoped that the operation would become an Iraqi Tet, demoralizing Americans on the home front.
Three of the four soldiers al Qaeda tried to abduct were part of a "Reaper" team of the 82nd Airborne. The fourth was a highly skilled sniper. Their mission was to monitor the roads below and prevent al Qaeda from planting IEDs to ambush their fellow members of Charlie Company as they made their way back from a mission.
According to Jeff Emanuel's report of this episode in the November American Spectator, the four men were alone and isolated on their rooftop. They soon found themselves under attack from nearly 40 al Qaeda fighters. Two of the men, team leader Sergeant Josh Morley and Specialist Tracy Willis, didn't survive the attack. The two who did, Specialists Chris Corriveau and Eric Moser, killed between 10 and 15 al Qaeda in a desperate fight over 10 long minutes. At one point, al Qaeda forces tried to grab Sergeant Morley's body as a trophy. At great peril to himself, Specialist Moser didn't let that happen. At the time of his death, Sergeant Morley was anticipating seeing his newborn daughter for the first time. He was 22 years old. His comrade, Tracy Willis, was 21.
Not long after the Reaper team had its deadly engagement in Iraq, the State Department found itself enmeshed in a surprisingly intense internal dust-up. Not enough career diplomats at Foggy Bottom were volunteering to serve in Baghdad. To remedy this situation, the State Department announced its intention to assign some foreign service officers to Baghdad, whether they volunteered or not. This announcement triggered an urgent State Department "town hall" meeting that took place October 31, where one Jack Croddy, a senior foreign service officer, spoke out. "It's one thing if someone believes in what's going on over there and volunteers, but it's another thing to send someone over there on a forced assignment," Croddy carped. "I'm sorry, but basically that's a potential death sentence and you know it. Who will raise our children if we are dead or seriously wounded?"
It is tempting but perhaps unfair to compare Croddy's "death sentence" remark, and his resolve, with the actions of the men of Sergeant Morley's Reaper Team. As the memorial plaques at the State Department attest, a long line of foreign service officers, from the 18th century down to the present day, have given their lives in service to their country. Croddy doesn't speak for them or, we hope, for very many of his colleagues today.
Still: What has happened to any sense of decency and propriety when a senior foreign service officer can say such a thing in public? Or when the State Department countenances a meeting that invites such a public display of petulance? Do the foreign service officers in Washington feel no sense of solidarity, if not with our soldiers, at least with Ambassador Ryan Crocker and their colleagues serving in Baghdad? Serving in Iraq is hazardous duty. It seems that three State Department employees have died there since 2004, among some 1,500 who have served or are now serving in Iraq.
At the same time, more State Department employees have been killed by al Qaeda and allied groups outside Iraq, in East Africa and Jordan and elsewhere, in recent years. Does their sacrifice count for nothing? Is the State Department not also involved in fighting these brutal terrorists? Are timidity and grievance-mongering appropriate for senior U.S. government officials engaged in the conduct of the nation's foreign policy?
It's certainly the prerogative of government employees not to "believe in what's going on over there." But until they resign, they are still supposed to help carry out U.S. government policy. How many other parts of the executive branch don't believe we're at war or are quietly refusing to help the war effort? We know about the CIA leaks that have gushed from Langley the last few years with the express aim of wounding the administration. We also know that parts of the Pentagon want to abandon Iraq so they can return to their preferred terrain of orderly rotations, procuring new hardware, and preparing for World War Whatever with China or some other great power.
History will someday view President Bush's steadfastness in pursuing an unpopular war, and his courage in (finally) finding the right generals and the right strategy, as an admirable example of presidential leadership. The latest numbers out of Iraq have confirmed the extraordinary progress of recent months--the kind of progress that many, not only in the media and Congress, but also in the State Department and the Pentagon, all but insisted was impossible mere months ago.
Still, it's a blemish on the president's record that he has never been able to get the whole government apparatus to pitch in on the war effort, or even to stop certain factions from undermining it. Last week, he complained that "some in Congress are behaving as if America is not at war." He was not wrong, but he bears some responsibility for this state of affairs. His administration was slow to beef up the military after 9/11, unwilling to revamp our intelligence and diplomatic establishments, and loath to give the American people a constructive way to assist the war effort beyond suggesting that they go shopping.
When George W. Bush is no longer a lightning rod, our nation will be grateful for the determination he showed in continuing the fight in Iraq long after most politicians would have declared victory and retreated. But there's no denying that the management record of our first MBA president leaves much to be desired. The Bush administration failed to insist on efforts throughout the government worthy of Sergeant Morley's team and of all our troops in the field.
The next president will inherit a situation in Iraq that will look much more promising than anyone thought possible a year ago. For this, we owe General Petraeus and hiscomrades-in-arms an enormous debt, as we do Ambassador Crocker and his diplomatic team. What the next president owes them is a government that is organized from top to bottom to support their efforts, to win the war in Iraq and beyond.
--William Kristol and Dean Barnett
© Copyright 2007, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
Jihadists aren't in Afghanistan—or Iraq—because we are there.
fighting words
Isolationism Isn't the Answer
Jihadists aren't in Afghanistan—or Iraq—because we are there.
By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, Nov. 5, 2007, at 1:11 PM ET
I call your attention to the front-page report in the Oct. 30 New York Times in which David Rohde, writing from the Afghan town of Gardez, tells of a new influx of especially vicious foreign fighters. Describing it as the largest such infiltration since 2001, Rohde goes on to say, "The foreign fighters are not only bolstering the ranks of the insurgency. They are more violent, uncontrollable and extreme than even their locally bred allies." They also, it seems, favor those Taliban elements who are more explicitly allied with al-Qaida, and bring with them cash and resources with which to sabotage, for example, the opening of schools in the southern provinces around Kandahar.
Now, if this were a report from Iraq, we would be hearing that it was all our own fault and that the Bin Ladenists would not be in that country at all if it were not for the coalition presence. It's practically an article of faith among liberals that only the folly of the intervention made Iraq into a magnet and a training or recruiting ground for our foes. One of the difficulties with this shallow and glib analysis is that it fails to explain Afghanistan and, in fact, fails to explain it twice.
We have fairly convincing evidence that a majority of Afghans do not, at the very least, oppose the presence of NATO forces on their soil. The signs of progress are slight but definite, having mainly to do with the return of millions of refugees and an improvement in the lives of women. There are some outstanding stupidities, such as the attempt to spray the opium poppies, but in general the West has behaved decently, and a huge number of Afghans resent the Taliban and its allies if only on the purely nationalist ground that it represents a renewed attempt to turn Afghanistan into a Pakistani colony, as it was before 2001.
I mention all this because there is no way to argue that the Taliban, either local or imported, is the product of some grievance or injustice or root cause. Its gangs are, instead, primitive fanatics making war on a Muslim society. And they are not there only because "we" are there. We know this because, long before "we" got there, they were in effective control of large parts of the place and had turned a terrorized and stultified land into a springboard and incubator for transnational nihilism. Bad as things may be now, they were infinitely worse when we ourselves were being isolationist.
After all, if the usual peacenik logic were to be pursued, and it was to be assumed that "we" are chiefly responsible for magnetizing "them," then it would follow that if we were to leave, they would either give up or go elsewhere. Is there anybody who can be brought to believe anything so fatuous? Well, then, if this logic is self-evidently false in the case of Afghanistan, why should it be any more persuasive in the case of Iraq?
"No end in sight" is another favorite mantra of the anti-war mentality. And how true that melancholy reflection seems to be. The latest news is of a very nasty Islamic insurgency in southern Thailand, butchering Buddhist villages (remember the Taliban assault on the Buddha statues at Bamiyan?) and making demands for the imposition of sharia law. Perhaps someone will identify for me which Thai and Buddhist—or Western imperialist—crimes have led to this sudden development. Or perhaps it will be admitted, however grudgingly and belatedly, that there is something sui generis about Islamist fanaticism: something that is looking for a confrontation with every non-Muslim society in the world and is determined to pursue it with the utmost violence and cruelty. It is also seeking a confrontation with some Muslim states and societies.
I make the latter point with deliberation. Afghanistan has a constitution that reserves special privileges for Islam. Most Afghan women still cover at least their heads. Even those who fought long and hard against the Taliban and al-Qaida—the Northern Alliance forces, for instance, or the Shiite Hazara—are intensely Muslim by any non-Muslim standard. But that does not suffice to protect them from the attentions of suicide-murderers and throat-cutters, recruited from as far away as Chechnya or even the Muslim areas of China. So, can we hear a bit less about how the jihadists are responding only to those who "target" Muslims or who are "Islamophobic"?
The people of Pakistan are also discovering the cost of "blowback." Their entire state is consecrated to the idea of Islam: It is one of the first countries to have its very nationality defined by religion. But there are those for whom a mere state for Muslims is not enough and who insist on something quite different, which is a purely Muslim state. Gen. Pervez Musharraf used to flirt with these forces, as did Gen. Zia and as did (though she now prefers to forget this) Benazir Bhutto. The groups that used to be Pakistan's proxies in Afghanistan are now waging war on the streets of Pakistan's cities and in the mountains of Pakistan's frontier provinces. They are blowing up Shiite mosques, killing the doctors and nurses who try to administer polio vaccine in rural areas, and forcing women and girls back into the role of chattel. For them, nothing will do but the reimposition of seventh-century mores and the re-establishment of the caliphate. It is idle to think that "we" created this gruesome phenomenon and idler still to imagine that there is any possibility of our compromising with it.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2177482/
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Isolationism Isn't the Answer
Jihadists aren't in Afghanistan—or Iraq—because we are there.
By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, Nov. 5, 2007, at 1:11 PM ET
I call your attention to the front-page report in the Oct. 30 New York Times in which David Rohde, writing from the Afghan town of Gardez, tells of a new influx of especially vicious foreign fighters. Describing it as the largest such infiltration since 2001, Rohde goes on to say, "The foreign fighters are not only bolstering the ranks of the insurgency. They are more violent, uncontrollable and extreme than even their locally bred allies." They also, it seems, favor those Taliban elements who are more explicitly allied with al-Qaida, and bring with them cash and resources with which to sabotage, for example, the opening of schools in the southern provinces around Kandahar.
Now, if this were a report from Iraq, we would be hearing that it was all our own fault and that the Bin Ladenists would not be in that country at all if it were not for the coalition presence. It's practically an article of faith among liberals that only the folly of the intervention made Iraq into a magnet and a training or recruiting ground for our foes. One of the difficulties with this shallow and glib analysis is that it fails to explain Afghanistan and, in fact, fails to explain it twice.
We have fairly convincing evidence that a majority of Afghans do not, at the very least, oppose the presence of NATO forces on their soil. The signs of progress are slight but definite, having mainly to do with the return of millions of refugees and an improvement in the lives of women. There are some outstanding stupidities, such as the attempt to spray the opium poppies, but in general the West has behaved decently, and a huge number of Afghans resent the Taliban and its allies if only on the purely nationalist ground that it represents a renewed attempt to turn Afghanistan into a Pakistani colony, as it was before 2001.
I mention all this because there is no way to argue that the Taliban, either local or imported, is the product of some grievance or injustice or root cause. Its gangs are, instead, primitive fanatics making war on a Muslim society. And they are not there only because "we" are there. We know this because, long before "we" got there, they were in effective control of large parts of the place and had turned a terrorized and stultified land into a springboard and incubator for transnational nihilism. Bad as things may be now, they were infinitely worse when we ourselves were being isolationist.
After all, if the usual peacenik logic were to be pursued, and it was to be assumed that "we" are chiefly responsible for magnetizing "them," then it would follow that if we were to leave, they would either give up or go elsewhere. Is there anybody who can be brought to believe anything so fatuous? Well, then, if this logic is self-evidently false in the case of Afghanistan, why should it be any more persuasive in the case of Iraq?
"No end in sight" is another favorite mantra of the anti-war mentality. And how true that melancholy reflection seems to be. The latest news is of a very nasty Islamic insurgency in southern Thailand, butchering Buddhist villages (remember the Taliban assault on the Buddha statues at Bamiyan?) and making demands for the imposition of sharia law. Perhaps someone will identify for me which Thai and Buddhist—or Western imperialist—crimes have led to this sudden development. Or perhaps it will be admitted, however grudgingly and belatedly, that there is something sui generis about Islamist fanaticism: something that is looking for a confrontation with every non-Muslim society in the world and is determined to pursue it with the utmost violence and cruelty. It is also seeking a confrontation with some Muslim states and societies.
I make the latter point with deliberation. Afghanistan has a constitution that reserves special privileges for Islam. Most Afghan women still cover at least their heads. Even those who fought long and hard against the Taliban and al-Qaida—the Northern Alliance forces, for instance, or the Shiite Hazara—are intensely Muslim by any non-Muslim standard. But that does not suffice to protect them from the attentions of suicide-murderers and throat-cutters, recruited from as far away as Chechnya or even the Muslim areas of China. So, can we hear a bit less about how the jihadists are responding only to those who "target" Muslims or who are "Islamophobic"?
The people of Pakistan are also discovering the cost of "blowback." Their entire state is consecrated to the idea of Islam: It is one of the first countries to have its very nationality defined by religion. But there are those for whom a mere state for Muslims is not enough and who insist on something quite different, which is a purely Muslim state. Gen. Pervez Musharraf used to flirt with these forces, as did Gen. Zia and as did (though she now prefers to forget this) Benazir Bhutto. The groups that used to be Pakistan's proxies in Afghanistan are now waging war on the streets of Pakistan's cities and in the mountains of Pakistan's frontier provinces. They are blowing up Shiite mosques, killing the doctors and nurses who try to administer polio vaccine in rural areas, and forcing women and girls back into the role of chattel. For them, nothing will do but the reimposition of seventh-century mores and the re-establishment of the caliphate. It is idle to think that "we" created this gruesome phenomenon and idler still to imagine that there is any possibility of our compromising with it.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2177482/
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
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