The Debate McCain Must Force
By Dick Morris
Have you noticed a change in Barack Obama's campaign? Instead of avoiding controversies over values, religion and race, he seems to welcome them and wade into the debates with an increasing enthusiasm.
Characterizing how the Republicans will attack him, he predicted that they would criticize his "funny name" and add "and by the way, did you notice that he's black?"
Obama used to go out of his way to avoid this kind of reference, but now he brings it on. Deliberately.
Why?
Obama and the conservative right are mutually trying to keep the debate about his candidacy on the existential level -- is he the hope for America's future or a Manchurian Candidate, a kind of sleeper agent sent to destroy our democracy? That debate, which pits Obama's rhetoric against the Rev. Wright's rantings, is a contest that could go on all day, and Obama would win it. It is simply a bridge too far to believe that Obama is that evil and that invidious.
But the more the debate covers such fundamental questions, the more it ignores the details -- details which could bring Obama down.
Quite simply, Obama would rather address his religious views and his optimism about America and his embrace of diversity than talk about his plans to raise taxes, let gasoline prices soar and socialize healthcare.
In our new book, Fleeced, we try to bring the debate back down to earth, focusing on the specific plans that Obama has announced during his presidential primary campaign and discussing the consequences. This is the debate Barack Obama hopes he can avoid.
Consider his proposals:
• In effect, he would legislate a 60 percent tax bracket for upper-income Americans, killing all initiative and innovation. He'd raise the top bracket to 40 percent. He'd apply FICA taxes to all income, not just that under $100,000 as at present. So add 40 percent plus FICA's 12.5 percent plus Medicare's 2 percent plus state and local taxes averaging, after deduction, at 5-6 percent, and you have a 60 percent bracket.
• He would double the capital gains tax, saddling the 50 percent of Americans who own stock with dramatically higher taxes.
• He'd double the dividend tax, hitting elderly coupon-clippers now retired and depending on fixed incomes.
• He wants to cover 12 million illegal immigrants with federally subsidized health insurance, dramatically driving up costs and forcing federal rationing of healthcare. As in the U.K. and Canada, you will not be permitted certain medical procedures if the bureaucrats decide you are not worth it.
• He proposes requiring Homeland Security operatives to notify terror suspects that they are under investigation within seven days of starting the investigation.
• He says that unless they can establish that there is "probable cause to believe that a certain individual is linked to a specific terrorist group," Homeland Security cannot seize his documents and search his business. The current standard is only that the search be "relevant" to a terror investigation.
He does not oppose $5-per-gallon gasoline but only says that he wishes there had been a more "gradual adjustment" to the higher prices.
Obama can talk about the Rev. Wright and flag lapel pins and his wife's love of America all day long. But what he resists is a specific discussion of his own plans for our country. That's the discussion he fears and he avoids. And it's the discussion John McCain must force upon him if he is to have any realistic chance of winning the election.
Morris, a former political adviser to Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and President Bill Clinton, is the author of “Outrage.” To get all of Dick Morris’s and Eileen McGann’s columns for free by email, go to www.dickmorris.com.
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Saturday, June 28, 2008
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Disabled Babies Have Rights, Too
Down Syndrome Babies Have Rights, Too
By Father Jonathan Morris
FOX News Religion Contributor
Imagine a world free of Down syndrome. Now imagine a world free of babies who already have Down syndrome. There’s a difference in these two scenarios, but you would never know it by reading newspapers in the United Kingdom. For these reporters and for the researchers they quote, Down babies are not babies—they are a disease.
No matter your stance on abortion, the following story should be appalling.
Without exception, the major papers in the U.K. today are praising as “risk-free” a new procedure being developed in Hong Kong that will detect in the mother’s bloodstream a Down syndrome pregnancy. This simple blood test would replace the current “risky” method of inserting a needle into the mother’s womb to extract amniotic fluid near the fetus, a procedure that takes place sometime after the 14th week of pregnancy and sometimes results in miscarriage.
The “risk” the papers all reference is the possibility of harming a non-Down baby.
Listen to the twisted logic of the lead researcher, Professor Dennis Lo, from the Chinese University of Hong Kong: “I think the major impact of our test would be to make prenatal testing safer for the fetuses.” And then he goes on, “It would have the positive effect of saving normal fetuses from invasive and potentially dangerous procedures such as amniocentesis. This would also alleviate the stress of pregnant women going through prenatal testing.”
I can hardly believe so many journalists allowed Professor Lo to get away with suggesting prenatal testing for Down syndrome is all about looking out for the wellbeing of the fetuses! Is a Down fetus not a fetus, or is its wellbeing not important? Neither of these tests can be good for him or her.
Which reminds me… The abortion debate today is in transition. Roe vs. Wade framed the conversation in terms of a woman’s constitutional right to privacy. Pro-life political wrangling has done little to change this. But today, science—and ultra-sound technology in particular—is calling into question the relevance of the court’s ruling.
Even if there is a right to privacy in the Constitution (not easily found), we know we have that right not because we are women or men, but rather because we are human beings. Today, as never before, when parents go to the doctor’s office and see live video of their child, they come to know with both their hearts and minds they are looking at another human being. If parents have rights because they are human, and if doctors show us the child, too, is human, it follows that babies, too, have rights.
It’s no wonder, then, that more than seventy-five percent of mothers considering an abortion who see an ultra-sound image of the fetus, and hear its heartbeat, decide to keep the child.
Science—not religion and not pro-life politics—will transform the way we think about abortion.
Unless, of course, we decide some human beings (the healthy, for example) have more rights than others.
God bless,
Father Jonathan
P.S. I look forward to all of your comments, especially those from people, like me, who are blessed to have very happy Down syndrome relatives.
By Father Jonathan Morris
FOX News Religion Contributor
Imagine a world free of Down syndrome. Now imagine a world free of babies who already have Down syndrome. There’s a difference in these two scenarios, but you would never know it by reading newspapers in the United Kingdom. For these reporters and for the researchers they quote, Down babies are not babies—they are a disease.
No matter your stance on abortion, the following story should be appalling.
Without exception, the major papers in the U.K. today are praising as “risk-free” a new procedure being developed in Hong Kong that will detect in the mother’s bloodstream a Down syndrome pregnancy. This simple blood test would replace the current “risky” method of inserting a needle into the mother’s womb to extract amniotic fluid near the fetus, a procedure that takes place sometime after the 14th week of pregnancy and sometimes results in miscarriage.
The “risk” the papers all reference is the possibility of harming a non-Down baby.
Listen to the twisted logic of the lead researcher, Professor Dennis Lo, from the Chinese University of Hong Kong: “I think the major impact of our test would be to make prenatal testing safer for the fetuses.” And then he goes on, “It would have the positive effect of saving normal fetuses from invasive and potentially dangerous procedures such as amniocentesis. This would also alleviate the stress of pregnant women going through prenatal testing.”
I can hardly believe so many journalists allowed Professor Lo to get away with suggesting prenatal testing for Down syndrome is all about looking out for the wellbeing of the fetuses! Is a Down fetus not a fetus, or is its wellbeing not important? Neither of these tests can be good for him or her.
Which reminds me… The abortion debate today is in transition. Roe vs. Wade framed the conversation in terms of a woman’s constitutional right to privacy. Pro-life political wrangling has done little to change this. But today, science—and ultra-sound technology in particular—is calling into question the relevance of the court’s ruling.
Even if there is a right to privacy in the Constitution (not easily found), we know we have that right not because we are women or men, but rather because we are human beings. Today, as never before, when parents go to the doctor’s office and see live video of their child, they come to know with both their hearts and minds they are looking at another human being. If parents have rights because they are human, and if doctors show us the child, too, is human, it follows that babies, too, have rights.
It’s no wonder, then, that more than seventy-five percent of mothers considering an abortion who see an ultra-sound image of the fetus, and hear its heartbeat, decide to keep the child.
Science—not religion and not pro-life politics—will transform the way we think about abortion.
Unless, of course, we decide some human beings (the healthy, for example) have more rights than others.
God bless,
Father Jonathan
P.S. I look forward to all of your comments, especially those from people, like me, who are blessed to have very happy Down syndrome relatives.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
10 Concerns about Barack Obama (only 10?)
10 Concerns about Barack Obama
It's policy.
By William J. Bennett & Seth Leibsohn
1. Barack Obama’s foreign policy is dangerous, naïve, and betrays a profound misreading of history. For at least the past five years, Democrats and liberals have said our standing in the international community has suffered from a “cowboy” or “go-it-alone” foreign policy. While politicians with favorable views of our president have been elected in Germany, Italy, France, and elsewhere, Barack Obama is giving cause to make our allies even more nervous.
This past Sunday’s Washington Post reported, “European officials are increasingly concerned that Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign pledge to begin direct talks with Iran on its nuclear program without preconditions could potentially rupture U.S. relations with key European allies early in a potential Obama administration.”
Barack Obama’s stance toward Iran is as troubling as it is dangerous. By stating and maintaining that he would negotiate with Iran, “without preconditions,” and within his first year of office, he will give credibility to, and reward for his intransigence, the head of state of the world’s chief sponsor of terrorism. Such a meeting will also undermine and send the exact wrong signal to Iranian dissidents.
And, he will lower the prestige of the office of the president: In his own words he stated, “If we think that meeting with the president is a privilege that has to be earned, I think that reinforces the sense that we stand above the rest of the world at this point in time.” Not only has his stance toward Iran caused concern among our allies in Europe, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton called it, “Irresponsible and frankly naïve.”Barack Obama’s position on negotiating with U.S. enemies betrays a profound misreading of history. In justifying his position that he would meet with Iran without precondition and in his first year of office, Barack Obama has said, “That is what Kennedy did with Khrushchev; that’s what Nixon did with Mao; what Reagan did with Gorbachev.”
In reverse order, Ronald Reagan met with no Soviet leader during the entirety of his first term in office, not (ever) with Brezhnev, not (ever) with Andropov, not (ever) with Chernenko. He met only with Gorbachev, and after he was assured Gorbachev was a different kind of Soviet leader — and after Perestroika, not before.
If Barack Obama wants to affiliate with Richard Nixon, that’s certainly his call. But one question: Was Taiwan’s expulsion from the U.N. worth “Nixon to China”? That was the price of that meeting.
As for the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit of 1961, Kennedy himself said “He beat the hell out of me.” As two experts recently wrote in the New York Times: “Paul Nitze, the assistant secretary of defense, said the meeting was ‘just a disaster.’ Khrushchev’s aide, after the first day, said the American president seemed ‘very inexperienced, even immature.’ Khrushchev agreed, noting that the youthful Kennedy was ‘too intelligent and too weak.’ The Soviet leader left Vienna elated — and with a very low opinion of the leader of the free world.” So successful was the summit that the Berlin Wall was erected later that year and the Cuban Missile Crisis, with Soviets deploying nuclear missiles in Cuba, commenced the following year.
2. Barack Obama’s Iraq policy will hand al-Qaeda a victory and undercut our entire position in the Middle East, while at the same time put a huge source of oil in the hands of terrorists. Barack Obama brags on his website that “In January 2007, he introduced legislation in the Senate to remove all of our combat troops from Iraq by March 2008.” His website further states that “Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months.” This, at the very time our greatest successes in Iraq have taken place. And yet, as Gen. David Petraeus has stated (along with other military experts from Michael O’Hanlon at the Brookings Institution to members of the U.S. military), our progress in Iraq is “fragile and reversible.”
Obama’s post-invasion analysis of Iraq is anything but credible or consistent, leading one to even greater doubt about his strategy as commander-in-chief. When President Bush announced the surge strategy in January 2007, Barack Obama opposed it, saying it “would not prove to be one that changes the dynamics significantly,” and that “the President’s strategy will not work.” Of course, the surge is one of the greatest achievements in Iraq since the initial months of the invasion, and is has reversed much of the loss suffered since the invasion.
Beyond these miscalculations and poor judgment on Iraq strategy, Obama has been anything but consistent on Iraq. For example, the same year (2007) he stated it would be a good idea to bring home the U.S. troops from Iraq within March of 2008, three months later he stated, we should bring them home “immediately…. Not in six months or one year — now.”
3. Barack Obama has sent mixed, confusing, and inconsistent messages on his policy toward Israel. Earlier this month, Barack Obama told an audience at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” The next day, Obama backtracked, stating: “Obviously, it’s [Jerusalem] going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues…And Jerusalem will be part of the negotiations.” Later, Obama’s Middle East adviser tried to explain the flipping of positions on Jerusalem by stating Obama did not understand what he was saying to AIPAC: “[h]e used a word to represent what he did not want to see again, and then realized afterwards that that word is a code word in the Middle East.”Such quick switches of policy may stem from mere inexperience or they may stem from a general tone-deafness on the meaning of words and policy when it comes to the Middle East. After all, earlier this year, a leading Hamas official endorsed Barack Obama stating, “I do believe [Obama] is like John Kennedy, a great man with a great principle. And he has a vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community, but not with humiliation and arrogance.” Rather than immediately renouncing such an endorsement, Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod, embraced the endorsement, saying “We all agree that John Kennedy was a great president, and it’s flattering when anybody says that Barack Obama would follow in his footsteps.” Given Barack Obama’s long-standing ties to Palestinian activists in the U.S., one has good cause to wonder.
4. While his Mideast policy may have been the quickest turnaround or flip-flop on a major issue, it is not the only one. In the primary campaign, Barack Obama consistently campaigned against NAFTA, but has now changed his tune, as he has with other issues. During the primary, Obama sent out a campaign flier that said “Only Barack Obama consistently opposed NAFTA,” and called it a “bad trade deal.” He also said NAFTA was “devastating,” “a big mistake,” and in what the Washington Post labeled as a unilateral threat to withdraw from NAFTA, Obama said “I think we should use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage.”No longer. Recently, Barack Obama backtracked on NAFTA and said, “I’m not a big believer in doing things unilaterally.” “I’m a big believer in opening up a dialogue and figuring out how we can make this work for all people.” He explained his primary campaign opposition this way: “Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified.”
This is of a piece with his further change of position on public campaign financing. As a primary candidate, he touted his support for the public financing of presidential campaigns, but then witnessing his own fundraising prowess, as a general election candidate he has gone the unique route of forswearing the system.
As David Brooks put it in the New York Times:
Barack Obama has worked on political reform more than any other issue. He aspires to be to political reform what Bono is to fighting disease in Africa. He’s spent much of his career talking about how much he believes in public financing. In January 2007, he told Larry King that the public-financing system works. In February 2007, he challenged Republicans to limit their spending and vowed to do so along with them if he were the nominee. In February 2008, he said he would aggressively pursue spending limits. He answered a Midwest Democracy Network questionnaire by reminding everyone that he has been a longtime advocate of the public-financing system. But Thursday, at the first breath of political inconvenience, Fast Eddie Obama threw public financing under the truck.
5. Barack Obama’s judgment about personal and professional affiliations is more than troubling. On March 18, after several clips of sermons by his longtime friend and pastor Jeremiah Wright surfaced (showing Wright condemning the United States with vitriolic comparisons and denunciations), Obama defended his friend stating: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.” After Rev. Wright delivered two more talks along the same lines as the clips that led to the March 18 speech, Sen. Obama finally denounced Wright the following month, stating: “His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate, and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church.” “They certainly don’t portray accurately my values and beliefs,” he said.
It strained credulity to believe Obama was unaware of Wright’s previous rants — especially after a 20-year membership in Wright’s church, especially when in February of last year Obama asked Wright not to attend his campaign announcement because he “could get kind of rough in sermons,” and especially when his church’s magazine honored on its front cover such a man as Louis Farrakhan. Nonetheless, once he ceased being a political asset and turned into a political liability, Obama dumped him.Jeremiah Wright is, of course, not the only person close to Barack Obama who holds vitriolic anti-American views. Bill Ayers was a founding member of the Weather Underground.
According to his own memoir, Ayers participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972. As recently as 2001, Ayers said “I don’t regret setting bombs….I feel we didn’t do enough.’’ When asked if he would engage in such terrorism again, Ayers responded: “I don’t want to discount the possibility.” When confronted with his friendship with Bill Ayers, Barack Obama dismissed the negative connections saying he is also friendly with abortion opponent U.S. Senator Tom Coburn. While Obama has never, himself, discussed his relationship with Ayers, what we do know is that Ayers hosted a fundraiser for Obama in his home and, according to the Los Angeles Times:
Obama and Ayers moved in some of the same political and social circles in the leafy liberal enclave of Hyde Park, where they lived several blocks apart. In the mid-1990s, when Obama was running for the Illinois Senate, Ayers introduced Obama during a political event at his home, according to Obama’s aides….Obama and Ayers met a dozen times as members of the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, a local grant-making foundation, according to the group’s president. They appeared together to discuss juvenile justice on a 1997 panel sponsored by the University of Chicago, records show. They appeared again in 2002 at an academic panel co-sponsored by the Chicago Public Library.
6. Obama is simply out of step with how terrorists should be handled; he would turn back the clock on how we fight terrorism, using the failed strategy of the 1990s as opposed to the post-9/11 strategy that has kept us safe. The most recent example is his support for the Supreme Court decision granting habeas-corpus rights to terrorists, including — theoretically — Osama bin Laden. When the 5-4 Supreme Court decision was delivered, Obama said, “I think the Supreme Court was right.” His campaign advisers held a conference call where they claimed the Supreme Court decision was “no big deal” according to ABC News, even if applied to Osama bin Laden, because a judge would find that the U.S. has “ample grounds to hold him.”In a recent interview, Obama stated: “What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks — for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated. And the fact that the administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of these folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law all around the world, and given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, ‘Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims.’”Ask the legal officials during the 1990s just how cowed terrorists were by our continued indictments against them. Or, witness the bombings at the African embassies, the attack on the USS Cole, or the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Now, ask yourself why we have not been attacked since 9/11, and, even more specifically, why there have been no successful attacks against American civilian interests abroad since 2004.7. Barack Obama’s economic policies would hurt the economy. As Kimberly Strassel recently put it in the Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Obama is hawking a tax policy that would take the nation back to the effective marginal tax rates of the Carter days. He wants to further tax income, payroll, capital gains, dividends and death. His philosophy is pure redistribution.” When Barack Obama speaks of taxing only the wealthy, keep in mind this could have a devastating effect on new small businesses. As Irwin Stelzer has written: “Taxes change behavior. By raising rates on upper income payers, Obama is reducing their incentive to work and take risks. The income tax increase is not all that he has in mind for them. He plans to increase their payroll taxes, the taxes they pay on dividends received and capital gains earned, and on any transfers they might have in mind to their kith and kin when they shuffle off this mortal coil. If the aggregate of these additional taxes substantially diminishes incentives to set up a small business of the sort that has created most of the new jobs in recent decades, the $1,000 tax rebate will be more than offset by the consequences of reduced growth and new business formation.”
8. Barack Obama opposes drilling on and offshore to reduce gas and oil prices. While Barack Obama has opposed off-shore drilling and a gas-tax holiday (as supported by John McCain or Hillary Clinton), his solution to our energy crisis does include additional tax burdens on oil company profits, taxes we can only imagine will be passed on to the consumer, thus causing an even more expensive trip to the gas station. As the New York Times recently detailed, ethanol subsidies are a major plank in Barack Obama’s view of energy independence and national security; the “Obama Camp is Closely Linked with Ethanol,” and “Mr. Obama…favors [ethanol] subsidies, some of which end up in the hands of the same oil companies he says should be subjected to a windfall profits tax.”
9. Barack Obama is to the left of Hillary Clinton and NARAL on the issue of life. As a state senator in Illinois, Barack Obama voted against the Induced Infant Liability Act, a law that would have protected babies if they survived an attempted abortion and were delivered alive. When a similar bill was proposed in the United States Senate, it passed unanimously and even the National Abortion Rights Action League issued a statement saying they did not oppose the law.
10. Barack Obama is actually to the left of every member of the U.S. Senate.
According to the National Journal, “Sen. Barack Obama…was the most liberal senator in 2007.” As the magazine reported: “The ratings system — devised in 1981 under the direction of William Schneider, a political analyst and commentator, and a contributing editor to National Journal — also assigns ‘composite’ scores, an average of the members’ issue-based scores. In 2007, Obama’s composite liberal score of 95.5 was the highest in the Senate. Rounding out the top five most liberal senators last year were Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.), with a composite liberal score of 94.3; Joseph Biden (D., Del.), with a 94.2; Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), with a 93.7; and Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), with a 92.8.”
Whom will a man this far left appoint to the Supreme Court?
William J. Bennett is the host of the nationally syndicated radio show Bill Bennett’s Morning in America. Seth Leibsohn is the show’s producer.
It's policy.
By William J. Bennett & Seth Leibsohn
1. Barack Obama’s foreign policy is dangerous, naïve, and betrays a profound misreading of history. For at least the past five years, Democrats and liberals have said our standing in the international community has suffered from a “cowboy” or “go-it-alone” foreign policy. While politicians with favorable views of our president have been elected in Germany, Italy, France, and elsewhere, Barack Obama is giving cause to make our allies even more nervous.
This past Sunday’s Washington Post reported, “European officials are increasingly concerned that Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign pledge to begin direct talks with Iran on its nuclear program without preconditions could potentially rupture U.S. relations with key European allies early in a potential Obama administration.”
Barack Obama’s stance toward Iran is as troubling as it is dangerous. By stating and maintaining that he would negotiate with Iran, “without preconditions,” and within his first year of office, he will give credibility to, and reward for his intransigence, the head of state of the world’s chief sponsor of terrorism. Such a meeting will also undermine and send the exact wrong signal to Iranian dissidents.
And, he will lower the prestige of the office of the president: In his own words he stated, “If we think that meeting with the president is a privilege that has to be earned, I think that reinforces the sense that we stand above the rest of the world at this point in time.” Not only has his stance toward Iran caused concern among our allies in Europe, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton called it, “Irresponsible and frankly naïve.”Barack Obama’s position on negotiating with U.S. enemies betrays a profound misreading of history. In justifying his position that he would meet with Iran without precondition and in his first year of office, Barack Obama has said, “That is what Kennedy did with Khrushchev; that’s what Nixon did with Mao; what Reagan did with Gorbachev.”
In reverse order, Ronald Reagan met with no Soviet leader during the entirety of his first term in office, not (ever) with Brezhnev, not (ever) with Andropov, not (ever) with Chernenko. He met only with Gorbachev, and after he was assured Gorbachev was a different kind of Soviet leader — and after Perestroika, not before.
If Barack Obama wants to affiliate with Richard Nixon, that’s certainly his call. But one question: Was Taiwan’s expulsion from the U.N. worth “Nixon to China”? That was the price of that meeting.
As for the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit of 1961, Kennedy himself said “He beat the hell out of me.” As two experts recently wrote in the New York Times: “Paul Nitze, the assistant secretary of defense, said the meeting was ‘just a disaster.’ Khrushchev’s aide, after the first day, said the American president seemed ‘very inexperienced, even immature.’ Khrushchev agreed, noting that the youthful Kennedy was ‘too intelligent and too weak.’ The Soviet leader left Vienna elated — and with a very low opinion of the leader of the free world.” So successful was the summit that the Berlin Wall was erected later that year and the Cuban Missile Crisis, with Soviets deploying nuclear missiles in Cuba, commenced the following year.
2. Barack Obama’s Iraq policy will hand al-Qaeda a victory and undercut our entire position in the Middle East, while at the same time put a huge source of oil in the hands of terrorists. Barack Obama brags on his website that “In January 2007, he introduced legislation in the Senate to remove all of our combat troops from Iraq by March 2008.” His website further states that “Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months.” This, at the very time our greatest successes in Iraq have taken place. And yet, as Gen. David Petraeus has stated (along with other military experts from Michael O’Hanlon at the Brookings Institution to members of the U.S. military), our progress in Iraq is “fragile and reversible.”
Obama’s post-invasion analysis of Iraq is anything but credible or consistent, leading one to even greater doubt about his strategy as commander-in-chief. When President Bush announced the surge strategy in January 2007, Barack Obama opposed it, saying it “would not prove to be one that changes the dynamics significantly,” and that “the President’s strategy will not work.” Of course, the surge is one of the greatest achievements in Iraq since the initial months of the invasion, and is has reversed much of the loss suffered since the invasion.
Beyond these miscalculations and poor judgment on Iraq strategy, Obama has been anything but consistent on Iraq. For example, the same year (2007) he stated it would be a good idea to bring home the U.S. troops from Iraq within March of 2008, three months later he stated, we should bring them home “immediately…. Not in six months or one year — now.”
3. Barack Obama has sent mixed, confusing, and inconsistent messages on his policy toward Israel. Earlier this month, Barack Obama told an audience at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” The next day, Obama backtracked, stating: “Obviously, it’s [Jerusalem] going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues…And Jerusalem will be part of the negotiations.” Later, Obama’s Middle East adviser tried to explain the flipping of positions on Jerusalem by stating Obama did not understand what he was saying to AIPAC: “[h]e used a word to represent what he did not want to see again, and then realized afterwards that that word is a code word in the Middle East.”Such quick switches of policy may stem from mere inexperience or they may stem from a general tone-deafness on the meaning of words and policy when it comes to the Middle East. After all, earlier this year, a leading Hamas official endorsed Barack Obama stating, “I do believe [Obama] is like John Kennedy, a great man with a great principle. And he has a vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community, but not with humiliation and arrogance.” Rather than immediately renouncing such an endorsement, Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod, embraced the endorsement, saying “We all agree that John Kennedy was a great president, and it’s flattering when anybody says that Barack Obama would follow in his footsteps.” Given Barack Obama’s long-standing ties to Palestinian activists in the U.S., one has good cause to wonder.
4. While his Mideast policy may have been the quickest turnaround or flip-flop on a major issue, it is not the only one. In the primary campaign, Barack Obama consistently campaigned against NAFTA, but has now changed his tune, as he has with other issues. During the primary, Obama sent out a campaign flier that said “Only Barack Obama consistently opposed NAFTA,” and called it a “bad trade deal.” He also said NAFTA was “devastating,” “a big mistake,” and in what the Washington Post labeled as a unilateral threat to withdraw from NAFTA, Obama said “I think we should use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage.”No longer. Recently, Barack Obama backtracked on NAFTA and said, “I’m not a big believer in doing things unilaterally.” “I’m a big believer in opening up a dialogue and figuring out how we can make this work for all people.” He explained his primary campaign opposition this way: “Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified.”
This is of a piece with his further change of position on public campaign financing. As a primary candidate, he touted his support for the public financing of presidential campaigns, but then witnessing his own fundraising prowess, as a general election candidate he has gone the unique route of forswearing the system.
As David Brooks put it in the New York Times:
Barack Obama has worked on political reform more than any other issue. He aspires to be to political reform what Bono is to fighting disease in Africa. He’s spent much of his career talking about how much he believes in public financing. In January 2007, he told Larry King that the public-financing system works. In February 2007, he challenged Republicans to limit their spending and vowed to do so along with them if he were the nominee. In February 2008, he said he would aggressively pursue spending limits. He answered a Midwest Democracy Network questionnaire by reminding everyone that he has been a longtime advocate of the public-financing system. But Thursday, at the first breath of political inconvenience, Fast Eddie Obama threw public financing under the truck.
5. Barack Obama’s judgment about personal and professional affiliations is more than troubling. On March 18, after several clips of sermons by his longtime friend and pastor Jeremiah Wright surfaced (showing Wright condemning the United States with vitriolic comparisons and denunciations), Obama defended his friend stating: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.” After Rev. Wright delivered two more talks along the same lines as the clips that led to the March 18 speech, Sen. Obama finally denounced Wright the following month, stating: “His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate, and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church.” “They certainly don’t portray accurately my values and beliefs,” he said.
It strained credulity to believe Obama was unaware of Wright’s previous rants — especially after a 20-year membership in Wright’s church, especially when in February of last year Obama asked Wright not to attend his campaign announcement because he “could get kind of rough in sermons,” and especially when his church’s magazine honored on its front cover such a man as Louis Farrakhan. Nonetheless, once he ceased being a political asset and turned into a political liability, Obama dumped him.Jeremiah Wright is, of course, not the only person close to Barack Obama who holds vitriolic anti-American views. Bill Ayers was a founding member of the Weather Underground.
According to his own memoir, Ayers participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972. As recently as 2001, Ayers said “I don’t regret setting bombs….I feel we didn’t do enough.’’ When asked if he would engage in such terrorism again, Ayers responded: “I don’t want to discount the possibility.” When confronted with his friendship with Bill Ayers, Barack Obama dismissed the negative connections saying he is also friendly with abortion opponent U.S. Senator Tom Coburn. While Obama has never, himself, discussed his relationship with Ayers, what we do know is that Ayers hosted a fundraiser for Obama in his home and, according to the Los Angeles Times:
Obama and Ayers moved in some of the same political and social circles in the leafy liberal enclave of Hyde Park, where they lived several blocks apart. In the mid-1990s, when Obama was running for the Illinois Senate, Ayers introduced Obama during a political event at his home, according to Obama’s aides….Obama and Ayers met a dozen times as members of the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, a local grant-making foundation, according to the group’s president. They appeared together to discuss juvenile justice on a 1997 panel sponsored by the University of Chicago, records show. They appeared again in 2002 at an academic panel co-sponsored by the Chicago Public Library.
6. Obama is simply out of step with how terrorists should be handled; he would turn back the clock on how we fight terrorism, using the failed strategy of the 1990s as opposed to the post-9/11 strategy that has kept us safe. The most recent example is his support for the Supreme Court decision granting habeas-corpus rights to terrorists, including — theoretically — Osama bin Laden. When the 5-4 Supreme Court decision was delivered, Obama said, “I think the Supreme Court was right.” His campaign advisers held a conference call where they claimed the Supreme Court decision was “no big deal” according to ABC News, even if applied to Osama bin Laden, because a judge would find that the U.S. has “ample grounds to hold him.”In a recent interview, Obama stated: “What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks — for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated. And the fact that the administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of these folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law all around the world, and given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, ‘Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims.’”Ask the legal officials during the 1990s just how cowed terrorists were by our continued indictments against them. Or, witness the bombings at the African embassies, the attack on the USS Cole, or the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Now, ask yourself why we have not been attacked since 9/11, and, even more specifically, why there have been no successful attacks against American civilian interests abroad since 2004.7. Barack Obama’s economic policies would hurt the economy. As Kimberly Strassel recently put it in the Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Obama is hawking a tax policy that would take the nation back to the effective marginal tax rates of the Carter days. He wants to further tax income, payroll, capital gains, dividends and death. His philosophy is pure redistribution.” When Barack Obama speaks of taxing only the wealthy, keep in mind this could have a devastating effect on new small businesses. As Irwin Stelzer has written: “Taxes change behavior. By raising rates on upper income payers, Obama is reducing their incentive to work and take risks. The income tax increase is not all that he has in mind for them. He plans to increase their payroll taxes, the taxes they pay on dividends received and capital gains earned, and on any transfers they might have in mind to their kith and kin when they shuffle off this mortal coil. If the aggregate of these additional taxes substantially diminishes incentives to set up a small business of the sort that has created most of the new jobs in recent decades, the $1,000 tax rebate will be more than offset by the consequences of reduced growth and new business formation.”
8. Barack Obama opposes drilling on and offshore to reduce gas and oil prices. While Barack Obama has opposed off-shore drilling and a gas-tax holiday (as supported by John McCain or Hillary Clinton), his solution to our energy crisis does include additional tax burdens on oil company profits, taxes we can only imagine will be passed on to the consumer, thus causing an even more expensive trip to the gas station. As the New York Times recently detailed, ethanol subsidies are a major plank in Barack Obama’s view of energy independence and national security; the “Obama Camp is Closely Linked with Ethanol,” and “Mr. Obama…favors [ethanol] subsidies, some of which end up in the hands of the same oil companies he says should be subjected to a windfall profits tax.”
9. Barack Obama is to the left of Hillary Clinton and NARAL on the issue of life. As a state senator in Illinois, Barack Obama voted against the Induced Infant Liability Act, a law that would have protected babies if they survived an attempted abortion and were delivered alive. When a similar bill was proposed in the United States Senate, it passed unanimously and even the National Abortion Rights Action League issued a statement saying they did not oppose the law.
10. Barack Obama is actually to the left of every member of the U.S. Senate.
According to the National Journal, “Sen. Barack Obama…was the most liberal senator in 2007.” As the magazine reported: “The ratings system — devised in 1981 under the direction of William Schneider, a political analyst and commentator, and a contributing editor to National Journal — also assigns ‘composite’ scores, an average of the members’ issue-based scores. In 2007, Obama’s composite liberal score of 95.5 was the highest in the Senate. Rounding out the top five most liberal senators last year were Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.), with a composite liberal score of 94.3; Joseph Biden (D., Del.), with a 94.2; Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), with a 93.7; and Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), with a 92.8.”
Whom will a man this far left appoint to the Supreme Court?
William J. Bennett is the host of the nationally syndicated radio show Bill Bennett’s Morning in America. Seth Leibsohn is the show’s producer.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Obama's childish foreign policy
Obama's Pooh-bah
A childish foreign policy.
by William Kristol
06/30/2008, Volume 013, Issue 40
"Winnie-the-Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security."--former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, one of Barack Obama's key foreign policy advisers, June 11
The gathering of oh-so-sober pro-Obama foreign policy experts was drowning in solemnity and earnestness. Speaker after speaker had laboriously dilated on the important distinction--unappreciated by the oh-so-stupid-and-bad Bush administration--between soft power and hard power. And this is to say nothing of the synthesis of soft and hard in ... smart power!
Richard Danzig, the luncheon speaker, hoped to wake the slumberers from their torpor. So he took A.A. Milne rather than Joseph Nye as his fundamental text. As the basis of his criticism of the Bush administration, he read the famous opening sentences of Winnie-the-Pooh:
Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump on the back of his head behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming down stairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping a minute and think about it.
The earnest Washington foreign policy types were dazzled by Danzig's daringly outside-the-box citation. How clever! And how true! If only Bush had stopped to think that there was "another way" to pursue our national security goals, rather than staying the course in Iraq, or detaining terrorists without habeas corpus at home. Alas! And really, isn't Bush also "a Bear of Very Little Brain"?
Or is he? Richard Danzig is an intelligent and well-read man. He's a graduate of Bronx High School of Science and Reed College, with a law degree from Yale and a Ph.D. from Oxford. He was a Supreme Court law clerk. He is well aware that, outside the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, al Qaeda has failed to launch successful attacks on Americans since 9/11. Couldn't Bush have been doing something right?
Indeed, Danzig served as Bill Clinton's secretary of the Navy from November 1998 to the end of that administration. During that time the U.S.S. Cole was attacked by al Qaeda, with 17 sailors killed and 39 wounded. So Danzig saw firsthand the insufficiency of the Clinton administration's efforts to prosecute the war on terror through the criminal justice system.
He therefore must know how foolish it is to say, as Barack Obama did last week, "I have confidence that our system of justice is strong enough to deal with terrorists." The lesson of the Cole, as of 9/11, was that "our system of justice" can't deal with terrorists as well as our military and intelligence services. And he must know that there really isn't a pain-free way to fight the war on terror very different from the way the Bush administration has chosen.
As for the war in Iraq, well ... there Bush did find another way. In January 2007, he changed commanders and strategy. The new strategy, backed by a surge of troops, worked. Violence is way down, political reconciliation is proceeding, the additional troops are almost all back home--and progress has exceeded the hopes even of those who strongly supported the surge. Danzig is well aware that Obama's stated policy would snatch defeat in Iraq out of the jaws of victory.
But he's ostensibly an Obama adviser. What's the man to do? First proclaim the indispensability of Winnie-the-Pooh as a text on national security, in order subtly to indicate how childish Obama's foreign policy is. Second, quote the first paragraph of the book--but do so incompletely. Here's the sentence that follows the passage Danzig quoted: "And then he feels that perhaps there isn't [another way]."
In other words: What Danzig is indicating, by his quotation, and his purposeful and suggestive omission of the very next sentence, is that there isn't another way than Bush's. Richard Danzig is said to be a leading candidate to be national security adviser if Obama should win. How selfless and patriotic of him to indicate to discerning listeners why Obama shouldn't become president!
--William Kristol
© Copyright 2008, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
A childish foreign policy.
by William Kristol
06/30/2008, Volume 013, Issue 40
"Winnie-the-Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security."--former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, one of Barack Obama's key foreign policy advisers, June 11
The gathering of oh-so-sober pro-Obama foreign policy experts was drowning in solemnity and earnestness. Speaker after speaker had laboriously dilated on the important distinction--unappreciated by the oh-so-stupid-and-bad Bush administration--between soft power and hard power. And this is to say nothing of the synthesis of soft and hard in ... smart power!
Richard Danzig, the luncheon speaker, hoped to wake the slumberers from their torpor. So he took A.A. Milne rather than Joseph Nye as his fundamental text. As the basis of his criticism of the Bush administration, he read the famous opening sentences of Winnie-the-Pooh:
Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump on the back of his head behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming down stairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping a minute and think about it.
The earnest Washington foreign policy types were dazzled by Danzig's daringly outside-the-box citation. How clever! And how true! If only Bush had stopped to think that there was "another way" to pursue our national security goals, rather than staying the course in Iraq, or detaining terrorists without habeas corpus at home. Alas! And really, isn't Bush also "a Bear of Very Little Brain"?
Or is he? Richard Danzig is an intelligent and well-read man. He's a graduate of Bronx High School of Science and Reed College, with a law degree from Yale and a Ph.D. from Oxford. He was a Supreme Court law clerk. He is well aware that, outside the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, al Qaeda has failed to launch successful attacks on Americans since 9/11. Couldn't Bush have been doing something right?
Indeed, Danzig served as Bill Clinton's secretary of the Navy from November 1998 to the end of that administration. During that time the U.S.S. Cole was attacked by al Qaeda, with 17 sailors killed and 39 wounded. So Danzig saw firsthand the insufficiency of the Clinton administration's efforts to prosecute the war on terror through the criminal justice system.
He therefore must know how foolish it is to say, as Barack Obama did last week, "I have confidence that our system of justice is strong enough to deal with terrorists." The lesson of the Cole, as of 9/11, was that "our system of justice" can't deal with terrorists as well as our military and intelligence services. And he must know that there really isn't a pain-free way to fight the war on terror very different from the way the Bush administration has chosen.
As for the war in Iraq, well ... there Bush did find another way. In January 2007, he changed commanders and strategy. The new strategy, backed by a surge of troops, worked. Violence is way down, political reconciliation is proceeding, the additional troops are almost all back home--and progress has exceeded the hopes even of those who strongly supported the surge. Danzig is well aware that Obama's stated policy would snatch defeat in Iraq out of the jaws of victory.
But he's ostensibly an Obama adviser. What's the man to do? First proclaim the indispensability of Winnie-the-Pooh as a text on national security, in order subtly to indicate how childish Obama's foreign policy is. Second, quote the first paragraph of the book--but do so incompletely. Here's the sentence that follows the passage Danzig quoted: "And then he feels that perhaps there isn't [another way]."
In other words: What Danzig is indicating, by his quotation, and his purposeful and suggestive omission of the very next sentence, is that there isn't another way than Bush's. Richard Danzig is said to be a leading candidate to be national security adviser if Obama should win. How selfless and patriotic of him to indicate to discerning listeners why Obama shouldn't become president!
--William Kristol
© Copyright 2008, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
The acquittals and dismissals continue.
Justice?Haditha again.
By Mackubin Thomas Owens
In November 2005, the Marine Corps reported that a number of civilians had been killed in Haditha by an improvised explosive device (IED) that also killed Marine Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, and that eight insurgents were killed in the ensuing firefight.
But in March of 2006, Time ran a story, “Collateral Damage or Civilian Massacre in Haditha?” which claimed, based on interviews with locals, that the Marines had killed 24 civilians in cold blood in retaliation for Terrazas’s death. In May, the Marine Corps charged a number of Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, with killing the civilians, and a number of officers for covering up the alleged killings. Although the investigation had hardly begun, opponents of the war pounced. The press, especially Time and the New York Times, presumed the Marines guilty. Rep. John Murtha (D., Pa.) piled on, claiming that “there was no firefight, there was no IED that killed these innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood.” This incident, said Murtha, “shows the tremendous pressure that these guys are under every day when they’re out in combat.”
Appearing on This Week on ABC, Murtha also contended that the shootings in Hadithah had been covered up. “Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long? We don’t know how far it goes. It goes right up the chain of command.” When Alan Colmes asked Barack Obama about Murtha’s charge in June of 2006, Senator Obama replied, “I would never second-guess John Murtha . . . I think he’s somebody who knows of which he speaks.”
But a strange thing happened on the way to the lynching. The case against the Marines began to fall apart, and a deafening media silence ensued. Eight Marines were originally charged with offenses ranging from murder to dereliction of duty, but charges against six have been dismissed, and one has been acquitted. The case began to unravel in 2007, when then-Lt. Gen. James Mattis, Commanding General of the First Marine Expeditionary Force (IMEF), accepted the recommendations of the Article 32 investigating officer and dropped charges against two of the Marines charged with murder and an officer charged with dereliction of duty. In the case of Lance Corporal Justin Sharratt, one of four enlisted Marines charged with murder in the Hadithah incident, General Mattis wrote that Sharratt:
has served as a Marine infantryman in Iraq where our nation is fighting a shadowy enemy who hides among the innocent people, does not comply with any aspect of the law of war, and routinely targets and intentionally draws fire toward civilians.With the dismissal of these charges, LCpl Sharratt may fairly conclude that he did his best to live up to the standards, followed by U.S. fighting men throughout our many wars, in the face of life or death decisions made in a matter of seconds in combat. And as he has always remained cloaked in the presumption of innocence, with this dismissal of charges, he remains in the eyes of the law — and in my eyes — innocent.
The acquittals and dismissals continue. Earlier this month, First Lt. Andrew Grayson, a Marine intelligence officer, was acquitted of contributing to the Haditha “cover up” by having a military photographer erase digital photos of the dead Iraqis. Grayson had turned down a plea deal to face charges on five counts that could have led to a maximum of 20 years in prison. The military judge in the case had previously dismissed an obstruction-of-justice charge against Grayson.And now, a military judge has dismissed charges of dereliction of duty against the battalion commander at the time of the incident, Lt. Col. Jeffery Chessani, for failure to investigate the killings. The issue in Chessani’s case was undue “command influence.” The military judge in the case, Col. Steven Folsom, observed that "unlawful command influence is the mortal enemy of military justice." The one Marine remaining under indictment is Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, who faces nine counts of involuntary manslaughter, charges that were earlier reduced from unpremeditated murder. Wuterich was the squad leader of the unit involved in the Haditha incident. His court martial was postponed at the end of February and has not been rescheduled. Let me be clear. If Wuterich and his Marines had killed civilians in Haditha in revenge for the IED attack, he and they would be guilty of a war crime. But as the complete story has emerged, it seems to be the case that the killings, though a tragedy, did not rise to the level of war crime or atrocity. There was a great deal of wisdom in the observations by Lt. Col. Paul Ware, the Article 32 investigating officer in the case of Sharratt (whose charges Mattis dismissed). Ware wrote that “the government version is unsupported by independent evidence. . . . To believe the government version of facts is to disregard clear and convincing evidence to the contrary.” Ware continued, “whether this was a brave act of combat against the enemy or tragedy of misperception born out of conducting combat with an enemy that hides among innocents, Lance Corporal Sharratt's actions were in accord with the rules of engagement and use of force.” He concluded that further prosecution of Sharratt could set a “dangerous precedent that . . . may encourage others to bear false witness against Marines as a tactic to erode public support of the Marine Corps and its mission in Iraq. . . . Even more dangerous is the potential that a Marine may hesitate at the critical moment when facing the enemy.” These observations apply as well in the case of Wuterich.
In September of 2007, Wuterich told 60 Minutes, “What I did that day, the decisions that I made, I would make those decisions today. What I’m talking about is the tactical decisions. It doesn’t sit well with me that women and children died that day. There is nothing that I can possibly say to make up or make well the deaths of those women and children and I am absolutely sorry that that happened that day.
”What can we say about Haditha? As I have observed previously, our opponents in Iraq have chosen to deny us the ability to fight the sort of conventional war we would prefer and forced us to fight the one they want — an insurgency. Insurgents blend in with the people, making it hard to distinguish between combatant and noncombatant. A counterinsurgency always has to negotiate a fine line between too much and too little force. Indeed, it suits the insurgents’ goal when too much force is applied. For insurgents, there is no more powerful propaganda tool than the claim that their adversaries are employing force in an indiscriminate manner. It is even better for the insurgents’ cause if they can credibly charge the forces of the counterinsurgency with the targeted killing of noncombatants. For many people even today, the entire Americans enterprise in Vietnam is discredited by the belief that the U.S. military committed atrocities on a regular basis and as a matter of official policy — even though, as Jim Webb has noted, stories of atrocious conduct, e.g. My Lai, “represented not the typical experience of the American soldier, but its ugly extreme.” Under the circumstances, what is most remarkable is not that incidents such as Haditha have occurred, but that there have been so few of them. As the Wall Street Journal observed in an editorial published on October 19, 2007:
While some violent crimes have been visited on civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, overall the highly disciplined U.S. military has conducted itself in an exemplary fashion. When there have been aberrations, the services have typically held themselves accountable. The same cannot be said of the political and media classes. Many, including Members of Congress, were looking for another moral bonfire to discredit the cause in Iraq, and they found a pretext in Haditha. The critics rushed to judgment; facts and evidence were discarded to fit the antiwar template. Most despicably, they created and stoked a political atmosphere that exposes American soldiers in the line of duty, risking and often losing their lives, to criminal liability for the chaos of war. This is the deepest shame of Haditha, and the one for which apologies ought to be made.
I expect that we will be waiting for these apologies for some time. As Field Marshal Slim noted, it is so much easier to twist, misinterpret, falsify, or invent facts to slander the soldier as “an inhuman monster wallowing in innocent blood.”
— Mackubin Thomas Owens is an associate dean of academics and a professor of national-security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. and editor of Orbis, the journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
By Mackubin Thomas Owens
In November 2005, the Marine Corps reported that a number of civilians had been killed in Haditha by an improvised explosive device (IED) that also killed Marine Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, and that eight insurgents were killed in the ensuing firefight.
But in March of 2006, Time ran a story, “Collateral Damage or Civilian Massacre in Haditha?” which claimed, based on interviews with locals, that the Marines had killed 24 civilians in cold blood in retaliation for Terrazas’s death. In May, the Marine Corps charged a number of Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, with killing the civilians, and a number of officers for covering up the alleged killings. Although the investigation had hardly begun, opponents of the war pounced. The press, especially Time and the New York Times, presumed the Marines guilty. Rep. John Murtha (D., Pa.) piled on, claiming that “there was no firefight, there was no IED that killed these innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood.” This incident, said Murtha, “shows the tremendous pressure that these guys are under every day when they’re out in combat.”
Appearing on This Week on ABC, Murtha also contended that the shootings in Hadithah had been covered up. “Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long? We don’t know how far it goes. It goes right up the chain of command.” When Alan Colmes asked Barack Obama about Murtha’s charge in June of 2006, Senator Obama replied, “I would never second-guess John Murtha . . . I think he’s somebody who knows of which he speaks.”
But a strange thing happened on the way to the lynching. The case against the Marines began to fall apart, and a deafening media silence ensued. Eight Marines were originally charged with offenses ranging from murder to dereliction of duty, but charges against six have been dismissed, and one has been acquitted. The case began to unravel in 2007, when then-Lt. Gen. James Mattis, Commanding General of the First Marine Expeditionary Force (IMEF), accepted the recommendations of the Article 32 investigating officer and dropped charges against two of the Marines charged with murder and an officer charged with dereliction of duty. In the case of Lance Corporal Justin Sharratt, one of four enlisted Marines charged with murder in the Hadithah incident, General Mattis wrote that Sharratt:
has served as a Marine infantryman in Iraq where our nation is fighting a shadowy enemy who hides among the innocent people, does not comply with any aspect of the law of war, and routinely targets and intentionally draws fire toward civilians.With the dismissal of these charges, LCpl Sharratt may fairly conclude that he did his best to live up to the standards, followed by U.S. fighting men throughout our many wars, in the face of life or death decisions made in a matter of seconds in combat. And as he has always remained cloaked in the presumption of innocence, with this dismissal of charges, he remains in the eyes of the law — and in my eyes — innocent.
The acquittals and dismissals continue. Earlier this month, First Lt. Andrew Grayson, a Marine intelligence officer, was acquitted of contributing to the Haditha “cover up” by having a military photographer erase digital photos of the dead Iraqis. Grayson had turned down a plea deal to face charges on five counts that could have led to a maximum of 20 years in prison. The military judge in the case had previously dismissed an obstruction-of-justice charge against Grayson.And now, a military judge has dismissed charges of dereliction of duty against the battalion commander at the time of the incident, Lt. Col. Jeffery Chessani, for failure to investigate the killings. The issue in Chessani’s case was undue “command influence.” The military judge in the case, Col. Steven Folsom, observed that "unlawful command influence is the mortal enemy of military justice." The one Marine remaining under indictment is Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, who faces nine counts of involuntary manslaughter, charges that were earlier reduced from unpremeditated murder. Wuterich was the squad leader of the unit involved in the Haditha incident. His court martial was postponed at the end of February and has not been rescheduled. Let me be clear. If Wuterich and his Marines had killed civilians in Haditha in revenge for the IED attack, he and they would be guilty of a war crime. But as the complete story has emerged, it seems to be the case that the killings, though a tragedy, did not rise to the level of war crime or atrocity. There was a great deal of wisdom in the observations by Lt. Col. Paul Ware, the Article 32 investigating officer in the case of Sharratt (whose charges Mattis dismissed). Ware wrote that “the government version is unsupported by independent evidence. . . . To believe the government version of facts is to disregard clear and convincing evidence to the contrary.” Ware continued, “whether this was a brave act of combat against the enemy or tragedy of misperception born out of conducting combat with an enemy that hides among innocents, Lance Corporal Sharratt's actions were in accord with the rules of engagement and use of force.” He concluded that further prosecution of Sharratt could set a “dangerous precedent that . . . may encourage others to bear false witness against Marines as a tactic to erode public support of the Marine Corps and its mission in Iraq. . . . Even more dangerous is the potential that a Marine may hesitate at the critical moment when facing the enemy.” These observations apply as well in the case of Wuterich.
In September of 2007, Wuterich told 60 Minutes, “What I did that day, the decisions that I made, I would make those decisions today. What I’m talking about is the tactical decisions. It doesn’t sit well with me that women and children died that day. There is nothing that I can possibly say to make up or make well the deaths of those women and children and I am absolutely sorry that that happened that day.
”What can we say about Haditha? As I have observed previously, our opponents in Iraq have chosen to deny us the ability to fight the sort of conventional war we would prefer and forced us to fight the one they want — an insurgency. Insurgents blend in with the people, making it hard to distinguish between combatant and noncombatant. A counterinsurgency always has to negotiate a fine line between too much and too little force. Indeed, it suits the insurgents’ goal when too much force is applied. For insurgents, there is no more powerful propaganda tool than the claim that their adversaries are employing force in an indiscriminate manner. It is even better for the insurgents’ cause if they can credibly charge the forces of the counterinsurgency with the targeted killing of noncombatants. For many people even today, the entire Americans enterprise in Vietnam is discredited by the belief that the U.S. military committed atrocities on a regular basis and as a matter of official policy — even though, as Jim Webb has noted, stories of atrocious conduct, e.g. My Lai, “represented not the typical experience of the American soldier, but its ugly extreme.” Under the circumstances, what is most remarkable is not that incidents such as Haditha have occurred, but that there have been so few of them. As the Wall Street Journal observed in an editorial published on October 19, 2007:
While some violent crimes have been visited on civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, overall the highly disciplined U.S. military has conducted itself in an exemplary fashion. When there have been aberrations, the services have typically held themselves accountable. The same cannot be said of the political and media classes. Many, including Members of Congress, were looking for another moral bonfire to discredit the cause in Iraq, and they found a pretext in Haditha. The critics rushed to judgment; facts and evidence were discarded to fit the antiwar template. Most despicably, they created and stoked a political atmosphere that exposes American soldiers in the line of duty, risking and often losing their lives, to criminal liability for the chaos of war. This is the deepest shame of Haditha, and the one for which apologies ought to be made.
I expect that we will be waiting for these apologies for some time. As Field Marshal Slim noted, it is so much easier to twist, misinterpret, falsify, or invent facts to slander the soldier as “an inhuman monster wallowing in innocent blood.”
— Mackubin Thomas Owens is an associate dean of academics and a professor of national-security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. and editor of Orbis, the journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Washington’s successful voucher experiment
Many a child left behind
By David Keene
Posted: 06/16/08 05:19 PM [ET]
The news that the District’s representative in Congress has joined with organized labor and liberals within the Democratic Party to demand an end to Washington’s successful voucher experiment shouldn’t come as much of a shock.
Voucher programs and public charter schools are under attack all over the country by the very people who like to justify more federal programs than I can possibly list here as needed “for the children.” The problem is that in the liberal ideological and political world, the interests of the “children” almost always take a back seat to their belief that every interest must be serviced through government and unionized government workers or not at all.
The liberal mindset sees this insistence on denying children, and particularly minority children, access to any institutions other than traditional public schools as evidence of some ethereal goodness and insists that anyone who seeks to change the educational status quo is an enemy of education itself. It seems not to matter a whit to most of these people that many of the schools they would force children to attend don’t work.
The answer, they tell us, is not competition or innovation, but money. It is their belief that if government at all levels will simply dump enough money into the existing system, all will be well, though the evidence suggests otherwise. With one of the most expensive per-student expenditures in the country, the problem in the District of Columbia certainly isn’t money, but an educational, administrative and municipal bureaucracy that is bloated and largely incompetent. The best teachers are ground down and forced to become little more than babysitters or to seek more rewarding employment elsewhere as quickly as possible.
That schools in the District and many other areas of the country are broken is no secret, yet most everyone within the existing system continues to spend more energy blaming others for the problem than trying to fix it. When they aren’t blaming the tax system, the taxpayer or Congress, in fact, they tend to blame parents for sending them children who are unruly or ill-prepared. The one thing they know is that it isn’t their fault. The result is that we are turning out class after class of young adults who are finding it harder and harder to compete in a global economy against workers from nations that actually take education seriously.
The rise of the charter and voucher movements, along with the skyrocketing number of parents choosing to home-school their children rather than entrust them to a system that doesn’t work, represent a rational response to the problem. Union representatives and elected officials like Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) claim that rather than giving up on traditional public schools, these parents should stick with them and help fix them.
What she is really asking, of course, is for parents to accept the fact of an ugly and unacceptable status quo. The District’s schools have been a disaster for decades and have helped keep the children of District residents from achieving their dreams or the success every parent wishes for his or her children. What Ms. Norton and her cohorts are telling those who have found a better way is that the greater good dictates that they sacrifice the hopes and dreams of their children to the ideological and political demands of those who have failed and continue to fail.
That’s the ugly truth in Washington and elsewhere. Charter schools and private schools are under attack around the country today, not because they don’t work, but because they do. The fact that the victims of these attacks are often those poor and minority kids who most need a good education seems of little concern to folks like Ms. Norton.
Charter schools and vouchers were originally seen by many as a means not only of providing a way out for children trapped in failing schools that weren’t being fixed, but as a way to inject competitive pressure into a monopolistic structure and thus force the traditional public school systems to change and improve. Unfortunately, however, the existing system is responding to competition like most monopolies — by trying to close down its competitors rather than improve what it has to offer.
Barack Obama, like John McCain, claims to be interested in educational innovation and in actually finding solutions to the educational mess in which the country finds itself.
Perhaps he ought to give Ms. Norton a call and tell her it’s about the children, not the bureaucrats.Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, can be reached at
By David Keene
Posted: 06/16/08 05:19 PM [ET]
The news that the District’s representative in Congress has joined with organized labor and liberals within the Democratic Party to demand an end to Washington’s successful voucher experiment shouldn’t come as much of a shock.
Voucher programs and public charter schools are under attack all over the country by the very people who like to justify more federal programs than I can possibly list here as needed “for the children.” The problem is that in the liberal ideological and political world, the interests of the “children” almost always take a back seat to their belief that every interest must be serviced through government and unionized government workers or not at all.
The liberal mindset sees this insistence on denying children, and particularly minority children, access to any institutions other than traditional public schools as evidence of some ethereal goodness and insists that anyone who seeks to change the educational status quo is an enemy of education itself. It seems not to matter a whit to most of these people that many of the schools they would force children to attend don’t work.
The answer, they tell us, is not competition or innovation, but money. It is their belief that if government at all levels will simply dump enough money into the existing system, all will be well, though the evidence suggests otherwise. With one of the most expensive per-student expenditures in the country, the problem in the District of Columbia certainly isn’t money, but an educational, administrative and municipal bureaucracy that is bloated and largely incompetent. The best teachers are ground down and forced to become little more than babysitters or to seek more rewarding employment elsewhere as quickly as possible.
That schools in the District and many other areas of the country are broken is no secret, yet most everyone within the existing system continues to spend more energy blaming others for the problem than trying to fix it. When they aren’t blaming the tax system, the taxpayer or Congress, in fact, they tend to blame parents for sending them children who are unruly or ill-prepared. The one thing they know is that it isn’t their fault. The result is that we are turning out class after class of young adults who are finding it harder and harder to compete in a global economy against workers from nations that actually take education seriously.
The rise of the charter and voucher movements, along with the skyrocketing number of parents choosing to home-school their children rather than entrust them to a system that doesn’t work, represent a rational response to the problem. Union representatives and elected officials like Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) claim that rather than giving up on traditional public schools, these parents should stick with them and help fix them.
What she is really asking, of course, is for parents to accept the fact of an ugly and unacceptable status quo. The District’s schools have been a disaster for decades and have helped keep the children of District residents from achieving their dreams or the success every parent wishes for his or her children. What Ms. Norton and her cohorts are telling those who have found a better way is that the greater good dictates that they sacrifice the hopes and dreams of their children to the ideological and political demands of those who have failed and continue to fail.
That’s the ugly truth in Washington and elsewhere. Charter schools and private schools are under attack around the country today, not because they don’t work, but because they do. The fact that the victims of these attacks are often those poor and minority kids who most need a good education seems of little concern to folks like Ms. Norton.
Charter schools and vouchers were originally seen by many as a means not only of providing a way out for children trapped in failing schools that weren’t being fixed, but as a way to inject competitive pressure into a monopolistic structure and thus force the traditional public school systems to change and improve. Unfortunately, however, the existing system is responding to competition like most monopolies — by trying to close down its competitors rather than improve what it has to offer.
Barack Obama, like John McCain, claims to be interested in educational innovation and in actually finding solutions to the educational mess in which the country finds itself.
Perhaps he ought to give Ms. Norton a call and tell her it’s about the children, not the bureaucrats.Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, can be reached at
Will gay rights trample religious freedom?
Will gay rights trample religious freedom?
By Marc D. Stern
June 17, 2008
Early this morning, gay and lesbian couples were surely lining up at county clerk's offices across the state to exercise their new right to marry, bestowed on them last month by the California Supreme Court.
In its controversial decision, the court insisted that these same-sex marriages would not "diminish any other person's constitutional rights" or "impinge upon the religious freedom of any religious organization, official or any other person." Religious liberty would be unaffected, the chief justice wrote, because no member of the clergy would be compelled to officiate at a same-sex ceremony and no church could be compelled to change its policies or practices.
And yet there is substantial reason to believe that these assurances about the safety of religious liberty are either wrong or reflect a cramped view of religion.
The case for same-sex marriage, reduced to its essentials, is an attractive one. It is that the government in a liberal democracy ought not to impose any one moral vision on its citizens; moral decisions ought to be, as much as possible, a matter of private choice and not law.
But it should not follow that having allowed same-sex couples to come out of the closet, as it were, that religious people should in turn be confined to the sanctuary.
In the same-sex marriage decision, the state Supreme Court suggests that all will be well and good as long as the "official" activities of the clergy aren't affected. But that excludes religion entirely from a broad range of social welfare and other activities, despite the fact that the California Constitution declares: "Free exercise and enjoyment of religion without discrimination or preference are guaranteed."
Evidence from previous and pending cases indicates that the court tends to take an extremely narrow view of people's "free exercise and enjoyment of religion" when they clash with another group's need for equal protection. This would seem particularly true following the In re Marriage Cases ruling, in which the majority equated the ban on same-sex marriage to the now discredited (and unconstitutional) ban on interracial marriages.
Religious liberty claims rarely, if ever, have prevailed in the face of complaints about racial discrimination. Conflicts about the rights of gays and those of religious believers demonstrate that these are not hypothetical fears. Consider the following:
* A San Diego County fertility doctor was sued for refusing to perform artificial insemination for one partner of a lesbian couple for religious reasons. The doctor referred the patient to a colleague, promised there would be no extra cost and offered to care for her during her subsequent pregnancy. The case is now before the California Supreme Court, and justices seemed hostile to the doctor's defense during oral arguments last month.
* Catholic Charities in Boston and San Francisco ended adoption services altogether rather than be compelled by anti-discrimination laws to place children with same-sex couples. In the Boston case, Catholic Charities was prepared to refer same-sex couples seeking to adopt to other providers, but that was not sufficient.
* A Lutheran school in Riverside County was sued in 2005 under California's Unruh Act (which forbids discrimination by businesses) for expelling two students who allegedly were having a lesbian relationship, in contravention of the religious views of the school. The case was thrown out in Superior Court in January, but the students have appealed.
* Public school officials in Poway, Calif., so far have successfully barred students from wearing T-shirts that register their opposition to homosexuality on campus. One lawsuit made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court before being dismissed (as moot, because the students had graduated), but another federal lawsuit is pending.
In each of these cases, and other similar ones, the government has acted in some way to forbid gays and lesbians from being demeaned. But allowing same-sex couples to force religious individuals or organizations to act out of accord with their faith is not cost-free either. Their dignity is no less affected. Unless claims rooted in equal protection under the law are to sweep away claims rooted in freedom of religion, a more sensitive balancing approach is essential.
This is particularly true in California. The state Supreme Court has treated such clashes as all-or-nothing propositions, and it seems to believe that once outside the church or synagogue doors, equality is always more important than religious liberty. California's high court, for example, denied a landlord's religion-based refusal to rent an apartment to an unmarried heterosexual couple, but Massachusetts' high court was willing to sanction such a refusal in cases in which alternative housing was readily available.
Given the array of church views on homosexuality, and the number of secular organizations offering social services to same-sex couples, allowing religious groups opposed to same-sex marriage to put that opposition into practice beyond the sanctuary is not likely to often seriously impede anyone.
Concurring in the May 15 California marriage judgment, Justice Joyce L. Kennard observed that the court's most important role was to preserve constitutional rights "from obliteration by the majority."
If past rulings are any guide, it is religious rights that are likely to be "obliterated" by an emerging popular majority supporting same-sex relationships -- and it seems unlikely that the California courts will intervene. That's a shame.
Marc D. Stern is general counsel of the American Jewish Congress and a contributor to a forthcoming book, "Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty."
By Marc D. Stern
June 17, 2008
Early this morning, gay and lesbian couples were surely lining up at county clerk's offices across the state to exercise their new right to marry, bestowed on them last month by the California Supreme Court.
In its controversial decision, the court insisted that these same-sex marriages would not "diminish any other person's constitutional rights" or "impinge upon the religious freedom of any religious organization, official or any other person." Religious liberty would be unaffected, the chief justice wrote, because no member of the clergy would be compelled to officiate at a same-sex ceremony and no church could be compelled to change its policies or practices.
And yet there is substantial reason to believe that these assurances about the safety of religious liberty are either wrong or reflect a cramped view of religion.
The case for same-sex marriage, reduced to its essentials, is an attractive one. It is that the government in a liberal democracy ought not to impose any one moral vision on its citizens; moral decisions ought to be, as much as possible, a matter of private choice and not law.
But it should not follow that having allowed same-sex couples to come out of the closet, as it were, that religious people should in turn be confined to the sanctuary.
In the same-sex marriage decision, the state Supreme Court suggests that all will be well and good as long as the "official" activities of the clergy aren't affected. But that excludes religion entirely from a broad range of social welfare and other activities, despite the fact that the California Constitution declares: "Free exercise and enjoyment of religion without discrimination or preference are guaranteed."
Evidence from previous and pending cases indicates that the court tends to take an extremely narrow view of people's "free exercise and enjoyment of religion" when they clash with another group's need for equal protection. This would seem particularly true following the In re Marriage Cases ruling, in which the majority equated the ban on same-sex marriage to the now discredited (and unconstitutional) ban on interracial marriages.
Religious liberty claims rarely, if ever, have prevailed in the face of complaints about racial discrimination. Conflicts about the rights of gays and those of religious believers demonstrate that these are not hypothetical fears. Consider the following:
* A San Diego County fertility doctor was sued for refusing to perform artificial insemination for one partner of a lesbian couple for religious reasons. The doctor referred the patient to a colleague, promised there would be no extra cost and offered to care for her during her subsequent pregnancy. The case is now before the California Supreme Court, and justices seemed hostile to the doctor's defense during oral arguments last month.
* Catholic Charities in Boston and San Francisco ended adoption services altogether rather than be compelled by anti-discrimination laws to place children with same-sex couples. In the Boston case, Catholic Charities was prepared to refer same-sex couples seeking to adopt to other providers, but that was not sufficient.
* A Lutheran school in Riverside County was sued in 2005 under California's Unruh Act (which forbids discrimination by businesses) for expelling two students who allegedly were having a lesbian relationship, in contravention of the religious views of the school. The case was thrown out in Superior Court in January, but the students have appealed.
* Public school officials in Poway, Calif., so far have successfully barred students from wearing T-shirts that register their opposition to homosexuality on campus. One lawsuit made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court before being dismissed (as moot, because the students had graduated), but another federal lawsuit is pending.
In each of these cases, and other similar ones, the government has acted in some way to forbid gays and lesbians from being demeaned. But allowing same-sex couples to force religious individuals or organizations to act out of accord with their faith is not cost-free either. Their dignity is no less affected. Unless claims rooted in equal protection under the law are to sweep away claims rooted in freedom of religion, a more sensitive balancing approach is essential.
This is particularly true in California. The state Supreme Court has treated such clashes as all-or-nothing propositions, and it seems to believe that once outside the church or synagogue doors, equality is always more important than religious liberty. California's high court, for example, denied a landlord's religion-based refusal to rent an apartment to an unmarried heterosexual couple, but Massachusetts' high court was willing to sanction such a refusal in cases in which alternative housing was readily available.
Given the array of church views on homosexuality, and the number of secular organizations offering social services to same-sex couples, allowing religious groups opposed to same-sex marriage to put that opposition into practice beyond the sanctuary is not likely to often seriously impede anyone.
Concurring in the May 15 California marriage judgment, Justice Joyce L. Kennard observed that the court's most important role was to preserve constitutional rights "from obliteration by the majority."
If past rulings are any guide, it is religious rights that are likely to be "obliterated" by an emerging popular majority supporting same-sex relationships -- and it seems unlikely that the California courts will intervene. That's a shame.
Marc D. Stern is general counsel of the American Jewish Congress and a contributor to a forthcoming book, "Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty."
The Supreme Court Goes to War
The Supreme Court Goes to War
By JOHN YOOJune 17, 2008; Page A23
Last week's Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush has been painted as a stinging rebuke of the administration's antiterrorism policies. From the celebrations on most U.S. editorial pages, one might think that the court had stopped a dictator from trampling civil liberties. Boumediene did anything but. The 5-4 ruling is judicial imperialism of the highest order.
Boumediene should finally put to rest the popular myth that right-wing conservatives dominate the Supreme Court. Academics used to complain about the Rehnquist Court's "activism" for striking down minor federal laws on issues such as whether states are immune from damage lawsuits, or if Congress could ban handguns in school. Justice Anthony Kennedy -- joined by the liberal bloc of Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer -- saves his claims of judicial supremacy for the truly momentous: striking down a wartime statute, agreed upon by the president and large majorities of Congress, while hostilities are ongoing, no less.
First out the window went precedent. Under the writ of habeas corpus, Americans (and aliens on our territory) can challenge the legality of their detentions before a federal judge. Until Boumediene, the Supreme Court had never allowed an alien who was captured fighting against the U.S. to use our courts to challenge his detention.
In World War II, no civilian court reviewed the thousands of German prisoners housed in the U.S. Federal judges never heard cases from the Confederate prisoners of war held during the Civil War. In a trilogy of cases decided at the end of World War II, the Supreme Court agreed that the writ did not benefit enemy aliens held outside the U.S. In the months after the 9/11 attacks, we in the Justice Department relied on the Supreme Court's word when we evaluated Guantanamo Bay as a place to hold al Qaeda terrorists.
The Boumediene five also ignored the Constitution's structure, which grants all war decisions to the president and Congress. In 2004 and 2006, the Court tried to extend its reach to al Qaeda terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay. It was overruled twice by Congress, which has the power to define the jurisdiction of the federal courts. Congress established its own procedures for the appeal of detentions.
Incredibly, these five Justices have now defied the considered judgment of the president and Congress for a third time, all to grant captured al Qaeda terrorists the exact same rights as American citizens to a day in civilian court.
Judicial modesty, respect for the executive and legislative branches, and pure common sense weren't concerns here either. The Court refused to wait and see how Congress's 2006 procedures for the review of enemy combatant cases work. Congress gave Guantanamo Bay prisoners more rights than any prisoners of war, in any war, ever. The justices violated the classic rule of self-restraint by deciding an issue not yet before them.
Judicial micromanagement will now intrude into the conduct of war. Federal courts will jury-rig a process whose every rule second-guesses our soldiers and intelligence agents in the field. A judge's view on how much "proof" is needed to find that a "suspect" is a terrorist will become the standard applied on the battlefield. Soldiers will have to gather "evidence," which will have to be safeguarded until a court hearing, take statements from "witnesses," and probably provide some kind of Miranda-style warning upon capture. No doubt lawyers will swarm to provide representation for new prisoners.
So our fighting men and women now must add C.S.I. duties to that of capturing or killing the enemy. Nor will this be the end of it. Under Boumediene's claim of judicial supremacy, it is only a hop, skip and a jump from judges second-guessing whether someone is an enemy to second-guessing whether a soldier should have aimed and fired at him.
President Bush has declared, rightly, that the government will abide by the decision. No American lives are yet imperiled, as the courts will have to wrestle with the cases for months, if not years. But the upshot of Boumediene is that courts will release detainees from Guantanamo Bay, or the Defense Department will do so voluntarily, in the near future.
Just as there is always the chance of a mistaken detention, there is also the probability that we will release the wrong man. As Justice Antonin Scalia's dissenting opinion notes, at least 30 detainees released from Guantanamo Bay -- with the military, not the courts, making the call -- have returned to Afghanistan and Iraq battlefields.
The Boumediene majority has two hopes for getting away with its brazen power grab. It assumes that we have accepted judicial control over virtually every important policy in our society, from abortion and affirmative action to religion. Boumediene simply adds war to the list. The justices act like we are no longer really at war. Our homeland has not suffered another 9/11 attack for seven years, and our military and intelligence agencies have killed or captured much of al Qaeda's original leadership. What's left is on the run, due to the very terrorism policies under judicial attack.
Justice Kennedy and his majority assume that terrorism is some long-term social problem, like crime, so the standard methods of law enforcement can be used to deal with al Qaeda. Boumediene reflects a judicial desire to return to the comfortable, business-as-usual attitude that characterized U.S. antiterrorism policy up to Sept. 10, 2001.
The only real hope of returning the Supreme Court to its normal wartime role rests in the November elections. Sometimes it is difficult to tell Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain apart on issues like campaign finance or global warming. But they have real differences on Supreme Court appointments. Mr. Obama had nothing but praise for Boumediene, while Mr. McCain attacked it and promised to choose judges like Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, both dissenters.
Because of the advancing age of several justices (Justice Stevens is 88, and several others are above 70), the next president will be in a position to appoint a new Court that can reverse the damage done to the nation's security.
Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He was an official in the Justice Department from 2001-03.
By JOHN YOOJune 17, 2008; Page A23
Last week's Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush has been painted as a stinging rebuke of the administration's antiterrorism policies. From the celebrations on most U.S. editorial pages, one might think that the court had stopped a dictator from trampling civil liberties. Boumediene did anything but. The 5-4 ruling is judicial imperialism of the highest order.
Boumediene should finally put to rest the popular myth that right-wing conservatives dominate the Supreme Court. Academics used to complain about the Rehnquist Court's "activism" for striking down minor federal laws on issues such as whether states are immune from damage lawsuits, or if Congress could ban handguns in school. Justice Anthony Kennedy -- joined by the liberal bloc of Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer -- saves his claims of judicial supremacy for the truly momentous: striking down a wartime statute, agreed upon by the president and large majorities of Congress, while hostilities are ongoing, no less.
First out the window went precedent. Under the writ of habeas corpus, Americans (and aliens on our territory) can challenge the legality of their detentions before a federal judge. Until Boumediene, the Supreme Court had never allowed an alien who was captured fighting against the U.S. to use our courts to challenge his detention.
In World War II, no civilian court reviewed the thousands of German prisoners housed in the U.S. Federal judges never heard cases from the Confederate prisoners of war held during the Civil War. In a trilogy of cases decided at the end of World War II, the Supreme Court agreed that the writ did not benefit enemy aliens held outside the U.S. In the months after the 9/11 attacks, we in the Justice Department relied on the Supreme Court's word when we evaluated Guantanamo Bay as a place to hold al Qaeda terrorists.
The Boumediene five also ignored the Constitution's structure, which grants all war decisions to the president and Congress. In 2004 and 2006, the Court tried to extend its reach to al Qaeda terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay. It was overruled twice by Congress, which has the power to define the jurisdiction of the federal courts. Congress established its own procedures for the appeal of detentions.
Incredibly, these five Justices have now defied the considered judgment of the president and Congress for a third time, all to grant captured al Qaeda terrorists the exact same rights as American citizens to a day in civilian court.
Judicial modesty, respect for the executive and legislative branches, and pure common sense weren't concerns here either. The Court refused to wait and see how Congress's 2006 procedures for the review of enemy combatant cases work. Congress gave Guantanamo Bay prisoners more rights than any prisoners of war, in any war, ever. The justices violated the classic rule of self-restraint by deciding an issue not yet before them.
Judicial micromanagement will now intrude into the conduct of war. Federal courts will jury-rig a process whose every rule second-guesses our soldiers and intelligence agents in the field. A judge's view on how much "proof" is needed to find that a "suspect" is a terrorist will become the standard applied on the battlefield. Soldiers will have to gather "evidence," which will have to be safeguarded until a court hearing, take statements from "witnesses," and probably provide some kind of Miranda-style warning upon capture. No doubt lawyers will swarm to provide representation for new prisoners.
So our fighting men and women now must add C.S.I. duties to that of capturing or killing the enemy. Nor will this be the end of it. Under Boumediene's claim of judicial supremacy, it is only a hop, skip and a jump from judges second-guessing whether someone is an enemy to second-guessing whether a soldier should have aimed and fired at him.
President Bush has declared, rightly, that the government will abide by the decision. No American lives are yet imperiled, as the courts will have to wrestle with the cases for months, if not years. But the upshot of Boumediene is that courts will release detainees from Guantanamo Bay, or the Defense Department will do so voluntarily, in the near future.
Just as there is always the chance of a mistaken detention, there is also the probability that we will release the wrong man. As Justice Antonin Scalia's dissenting opinion notes, at least 30 detainees released from Guantanamo Bay -- with the military, not the courts, making the call -- have returned to Afghanistan and Iraq battlefields.
The Boumediene majority has two hopes for getting away with its brazen power grab. It assumes that we have accepted judicial control over virtually every important policy in our society, from abortion and affirmative action to religion. Boumediene simply adds war to the list. The justices act like we are no longer really at war. Our homeland has not suffered another 9/11 attack for seven years, and our military and intelligence agencies have killed or captured much of al Qaeda's original leadership. What's left is on the run, due to the very terrorism policies under judicial attack.
Justice Kennedy and his majority assume that terrorism is some long-term social problem, like crime, so the standard methods of law enforcement can be used to deal with al Qaeda. Boumediene reflects a judicial desire to return to the comfortable, business-as-usual attitude that characterized U.S. antiterrorism policy up to Sept. 10, 2001.
The only real hope of returning the Supreme Court to its normal wartime role rests in the November elections. Sometimes it is difficult to tell Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain apart on issues like campaign finance or global warming. But they have real differences on Supreme Court appointments. Mr. Obama had nothing but praise for Boumediene, while Mr. McCain attacked it and promised to choose judges like Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, both dissenters.
Because of the advancing age of several justices (Justice Stevens is 88, and several others are above 70), the next president will be in a position to appoint a new Court that can reverse the damage done to the nation's security.
Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He was an official in the Justice Department from 2001-03.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
A blind eye to Mugabe's reign of terror
A blind eye to Mugabe's reign of terror
By Jeff Jacoby June 15, 2008
THE AGONIES being inflicted on Zimbabwe by its corrupt and brutal president are worsening. Earlier this month, the government of Robert Mugabe ordered international aid agencies to put a halt to the operations that have been keeping hundreds of thousands of Zimbabwe's people alive. With most of the country's population out of work and in dire poverty, the food and other humanitarian assistance provided by groups like CARE and Save the Children are more desperately needed than ever. By shutting them down, Mugabe and his henchmen were knowingly condemning countless vulnerable Zimbabweans to death.
Mugabe claimed, preposterously, that the humanitarian agencies were trying "to cripple Zimbabwe's economy" and bring about "illegal regime change."
Actually, it his own demented and dictatorial misrule that has destroyed the country, turning what was once a prosperous land into the world's most rapidly collapsing economy. And it is his determination to cling to power by any means - including starving and terrorizing voters who support a change in government - that has filled Zimbabwe not just with hunger and sickness but with savagery and bloodshed as well.
Less than two weeks remain until the presidential election runoff between Mugabe, Zimbabwe's autocratic president for the last 28 years, and the popular opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who leads the Movement for Democratic Change. Tsvangirai and the MDC won the first round of elections in March, and supporters of Mugabe and his ZANU-PF ruling party have been waging a vicious campaign of intimidation and violence against them ever since.
Opposition rallies have been obstructed by police, and Tsvangirai has repeatedly been detained for hours at a time. On Thursday, the MDC's secretary general, Tendai Biti, was arrested and charged with treason. Thousands of opposition supporters have been attacked, arrested, or forced to flee for their lives. Homes have been torched; scores of people have been killed.
International aid workers say they were shut down to keep them from witnessing the government's increasingly lethal crackdown.
The depravity of those attacks is suggested by UNICEF, which has said that 10,000 children have been driven from their homes by the violence, and that schools taken over by progovernment forces are being used as torture centers. Peter Osborne, in a dispatch from Zimbabwe for The Mail on Sunday, a British newspaper, itemizes the methods of abuse favored by Mugabe's men: pouring boiling plastic on victims' backs, burning their extremities, and administering whippings violent enough to transform an adult's buttocks into a horrifying "mess of raw flesh."
The latest description of Zimbabwe's reign of terror comes from Human Rights Watch, which in a new report documents numerous cases of brutal repression by Mugabe supporters.
"ZANU-PF and its allies have . . . established torture camps and organized abusive 're-education' meetings around the country to compel MDC supporters into voting for Mugabe," the report says. Hundreds of voters have been flogged with sticks, whips, bicycle chains, and metal bars. In one "re-education" meeting May 5, "ZANU-PF officials and 'war veterans' beat six men to death and tortured another 70 men and women, including a 76-year-old woman publicly thrashed in front of assembled villagers."
In other meetings, military officers have threatened to kill anyone who votes for the opposition. "Each villager would be given a bullet to hold in their hands. Then a soldier would say, 'If you vote for MDC in the presidential runoff election, you have seen the bullets, we have enough for each one of you, so beware.' "
Mugabe's savage onslaught is likely to achieve its goal. Faced with starvation, dispossession, and threats of revenge, how many Zimbabweans will muster the courage to stand against him?
But why do the rest of us do nothing? Why is the free world so indifferent to the enormities committed by Mugabe and his bullies? Where are the worldwide demonstrations outside Zimbabwe's embassies? Where are the international boycotts, the UN resolutions, the presidential and papal condemnations? Where is the International Criminal Court indictment of Mugabe for his long career of murder, torture, and other crimes against humanity?
Let us be honest: If the people of Zimbabwe were being terrorized by a white despot - if it were a white ruling party whose goons were beating them and burning their homes - the whole world would be aroused on their behalf. Surely they deserve no less just because their oppressor is black.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.
By Jeff Jacoby June 15, 2008
THE AGONIES being inflicted on Zimbabwe by its corrupt and brutal president are worsening. Earlier this month, the government of Robert Mugabe ordered international aid agencies to put a halt to the operations that have been keeping hundreds of thousands of Zimbabwe's people alive. With most of the country's population out of work and in dire poverty, the food and other humanitarian assistance provided by groups like CARE and Save the Children are more desperately needed than ever. By shutting them down, Mugabe and his henchmen were knowingly condemning countless vulnerable Zimbabweans to death.
Mugabe claimed, preposterously, that the humanitarian agencies were trying "to cripple Zimbabwe's economy" and bring about "illegal regime change."
Actually, it his own demented and dictatorial misrule that has destroyed the country, turning what was once a prosperous land into the world's most rapidly collapsing economy. And it is his determination to cling to power by any means - including starving and terrorizing voters who support a change in government - that has filled Zimbabwe not just with hunger and sickness but with savagery and bloodshed as well.
Less than two weeks remain until the presidential election runoff between Mugabe, Zimbabwe's autocratic president for the last 28 years, and the popular opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who leads the Movement for Democratic Change. Tsvangirai and the MDC won the first round of elections in March, and supporters of Mugabe and his ZANU-PF ruling party have been waging a vicious campaign of intimidation and violence against them ever since.
Opposition rallies have been obstructed by police, and Tsvangirai has repeatedly been detained for hours at a time. On Thursday, the MDC's secretary general, Tendai Biti, was arrested and charged with treason. Thousands of opposition supporters have been attacked, arrested, or forced to flee for their lives. Homes have been torched; scores of people have been killed.
International aid workers say they were shut down to keep them from witnessing the government's increasingly lethal crackdown.
The depravity of those attacks is suggested by UNICEF, which has said that 10,000 children have been driven from their homes by the violence, and that schools taken over by progovernment forces are being used as torture centers. Peter Osborne, in a dispatch from Zimbabwe for The Mail on Sunday, a British newspaper, itemizes the methods of abuse favored by Mugabe's men: pouring boiling plastic on victims' backs, burning their extremities, and administering whippings violent enough to transform an adult's buttocks into a horrifying "mess of raw flesh."
The latest description of Zimbabwe's reign of terror comes from Human Rights Watch, which in a new report documents numerous cases of brutal repression by Mugabe supporters.
"ZANU-PF and its allies have . . . established torture camps and organized abusive 're-education' meetings around the country to compel MDC supporters into voting for Mugabe," the report says. Hundreds of voters have been flogged with sticks, whips, bicycle chains, and metal bars. In one "re-education" meeting May 5, "ZANU-PF officials and 'war veterans' beat six men to death and tortured another 70 men and women, including a 76-year-old woman publicly thrashed in front of assembled villagers."
In other meetings, military officers have threatened to kill anyone who votes for the opposition. "Each villager would be given a bullet to hold in their hands. Then a soldier would say, 'If you vote for MDC in the presidential runoff election, you have seen the bullets, we have enough for each one of you, so beware.' "
Mugabe's savage onslaught is likely to achieve its goal. Faced with starvation, dispossession, and threats of revenge, how many Zimbabweans will muster the courage to stand against him?
But why do the rest of us do nothing? Why is the free world so indifferent to the enormities committed by Mugabe and his bullies? Where are the worldwide demonstrations outside Zimbabwe's embassies? Where are the international boycotts, the UN resolutions, the presidential and papal condemnations? Where is the International Criminal Court indictment of Mugabe for his long career of murder, torture, and other crimes against humanity?
Let us be honest: If the people of Zimbabwe were being terrorized by a white despot - if it were a white ruling party whose goons were beating them and burning their homes - the whole world would be aroused on their behalf. Surely they deserve no less just because their oppressor is black.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.
World War II was unnecessary??? WRONG!!!
I must ask, is there any one who does not believe Pat Buchanan is a moronic idiot?
A War Worth Fighting
Revisionists say that World War II was unnecessary. They're wrong.
Christopher Hitchens
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 3:36 PM ET Jun 14, 2008
Is there any one shared principle or assumption on which our political consensus rests, any value judgment on which we are all essentially agreed? Apart from abstractions such as a general belief in democracy, one would probably get the widest measure of agreement for the proposition that the second world war was a "good war" and one well worth fighting. And if we possess one indelible image of political immorality and cowardice, it is surely the dismal tap-tap-tap of Neville Chamberlain's umbrella as he turned from signing the Czechs away to Adolf Hitler at Munich. He hoped by this humiliation to avert war, but he was fated to bring his countrymen war on top of humiliation. To the conventional wisdom add the titanic figure of Winston Churchill as the emblem of oratorical defiance and the Horatius who, until American power could be mobilized and deployed, alone barred the bridge to the forces of unalloyed evil. When those forces lay finally defeated, their ghastly handiwork was uncovered to a world that mistakenly thought it had already "supped full of horrors." The stark evidence of the Final Solution has ever since been enough to dispel most doubts about, say, the wisdom or morality of carpet-bombing German cities.
Historical scholarship has nevertheless offered various sorts of revisionist interpretation of all this. Niall Ferguson, for one, has proposed looking at the two world wars as a single conflict, punctuated only by a long and ominous armistice. British conservative historians like Alan Clark and John Charmley have criticized Churchill for building his career on war, for ignoring openings to peace and for eventually allowing the British Empire to be squandered and broken up. But Pat Buchanan, twice a candidate for the Republican nomination and in 2000 the standard-bearer for the Reform Party who ignited a memorable "chad" row in Florida, has now condensed all the antiwar arguments into one. His case, made in his recently released "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War," is as follows:
That Germany was faced with encirclement and injustice in both 1914 and 1939.
Britain in both years ought to have stayed out of quarrels on the European mainland.
That Winston Churchill was the principal British warmonger on both occasions.
The United States was needlessly dragged into war on both occasions.
That the principal beneficiaries of this were Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.
That the Holocaust of European Jewry was as much the consequence of an avoidable war as it was of Nazi racism.
Buchanan does not need to close his book with an invocation of a dying West, as if to summarize this long recital of Spenglerian doomsaying. He's already opened with the statement, "All about us we can see clearly now that the West is passing away." The tropes are familiar—a loss of will and confidence, a collapse of the desire to reproduce with sufficient vigor, a preference for hedonism over the stern tasks of rulership and dominion and pre-eminence. It all sounds oddly … Churchillian. The old lion himself never tired of striking notes like these, and was quite unembarrassed by invocations of race and nation and blood. Yet he is the object of Buchanan's especial dislike and contempt, because he had a fondness for "wars of choice."
This term has enjoyed a recent vogue because of the opposition to the war in Iraq, an opposition in which Buchanan has played a vigorous role. Descending as he does from the tradition of Charles Lindbergh's America First movement, which looked for (and claimed to have found) a certain cosmopolitan lobby behind FDR's willingness to involve the United States in global war, Buchanan is the most trenchant critic of what he considers our fondest national illusion, and his book has the feel and stamp of a work that he has been readying all his life.
But he faces an insuperable difficulty, or rather difficulties. If you want to demonstrate that Germany was more the victim than the aggressor in 1914, then you must confine your account (as Buchanan does) to the very minor legal question of Belgian neutrality and of whether Britain absolutely had to go to war on the Belgian side. (For what it may be worth, I think that Britain wasn't obliged to do so and should not have done.) But the rest of the kaiser's policy, most of it completely omitted by Buchanan, shows that Germany was looking for a chance for war all over the globe, and was increasingly the prisoner of a militaristic ruling caste at home. The kaiser picked a fight with Britain by backing the white Dutch Afrikaner rebels in South Africa and by butchering the Ovambo people of what is now Namibia. He looked for trouble with the French by abruptly sending warships to Agadir in French Morocco, which nearly started the first world war in 1905, and with Russia by backing Austria-Hungary's insane ultimatum to the Serbs after the June 1914 assassinations in Sarajevo. Moreover, and never mentioned by Buchanan at all, the kaiser visited Damascus and paid for the rebuilding of the tomb of Saladin, announced himself a sympathizer of Islam and a friend of jihad, commissioned a Berlin-to-Baghdad railroad for the projection of German arms into the Middle East and Asia and generally ranged himself on the side of an aggressive Ottoman imperialism, which later declared a "holy war" against Britain. To suggest that he felt unjustly hemmed in by the Royal Navy's domination of the North Sea while he was conducting such statecraft is absurd.
And maybe a little worse than absurd, as when Buchanan writes: "From 1871 to 1914, the Germans under Bismarck and the Kaiser did not fight a single war. While Britain, Russia, Italy, Turkey, Japan, Spain, and the United States were all involved in wars, Germany and Austria had clean records." I am bound to say that I find this creepy. The start of the "clean record" has to be in 1871, because that's the year that Prussia humbled France in the hideous Franco-Prussian War that actually annexed two French provinces to Germany. In the intervening time until 1914, Germany was seizing colonies in Africa and the Pacific, cementing secret alliances with Austria and trying to build up a naval fleet that could take on the British one. No wonder the kaiser wanted a breathing space.
Now, this is not to say that Buchanan doesn't make some sound points about the secret diplomacy of Old Europe that was so much to offend Woodrow Wilson. And he is excellent on the calamitous Treaty of Versailles that succeeded only—as was noted by John Maynard Keynes at the time—in creating the conditions for another world war, or for part two of the first one. He wears his isolationism proudly: "The Senate never did a better day's work than when it rejected the Treaty of Versailles and refused to enter a League of Nations where American soldiers would be required to give their lives enforcing the terms of so dishonorable and disastrous a peace."
Actually, no soldier of any nation ever lost so much as a fingernail in the service of the League, which was in any case doomed by American abstention, and it's exactly that consideration which invalidates the second half of Buchanan's argument, which is that a conflict with Hitler's Germany both could and should have been averted. (There is a third Buchanan sub-argument, mostly made by implication, which is that the democratic West should have allied itself with Hitler, at least passively, until he had destroyed the Soviet Union.) Again, in order to believe his thesis one has to be prepared to argue that Hitler was a rational actor with intelligible and negotiable demands, whose declared, demented ambitions in "Mein Kampf" were presumably to be disregarded as mere propaganda. In case after case Buchanan shows the abysmal bungling of British and French diplomacy—making promises to Czechoslovakia that could never have been kept and then, adding injury to insult, breaking those promises at the first opportunity. Or offering a guarantee to Poland (a country that had gleefully taken part in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia) that Hitler well knew was not backed by any credible military force.
Buchanan is at his best here, often causing one to whistle at the sheer cynicism and stupidity of the British Tories. In the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of June 1935, for example, they astounded the French and Italians and Russians by unilaterally agreeing to permit Hitler to build a fleet one third the size of the Royal Navy and a submarine fleet of the same size as the British! Not only was this handing the Third Reich the weapon it would soon press to Britain's throat, it was convincing all Britain's potential allies that they would be much better off making their own bilateral deals with Berlin. Which is essentially what happened.
But Buchanan keeps forgetting that this criminal foolishness is exactly the sort of policy that he elsewhere recommends. In his view, after all, Germany had been terribly wronged by Versailles and it would have been correct to redraw the frontiers in Germany's favor and soothe its hurt feelings (which is what the word "appeasement" originally meant). Meanwhile we should have encouraged Hitler's hostility to Bolshevism and discreetly rearmed in case he should also need to be contained. This might perhaps have worked if Germany had been governed by a right-wing nationalist party that had won a democratic vote. However, in point of fact Germany was governed by an ultra-rightist, homicidal, paranoid maniac who had begun by demolishing democracy in Germany itself, who believed that his fellow countrymen were a superior race and who attributed all the evils in the world to a Jewish conspiracy. It is possible to read whole chapters of Buchanan's book without having to bear these salient points in mind. (I should say that I intend this observation as a criticism.) As with his discussion of pre-1914 Germany, he commits important sins of omission that can only be the outcome of an ideological bias. Barely mentioned except in passing is the Spanish Civil War, for example, where for three whole years between 1936 and 1939 Germany and Italy lent troops and weapons in a Fascist invasion of a sovereign European nation that had never threatened or "encircled" them in any way. Buchanan's own political past includes overt sympathy with General Franco, which makes this skating-over even less forgivable than it might otherwise be.
On the one occasion where Spain does get a serious mention, it illustrates the opposite point to the one Buchanan thinks he's making. The British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Neville Henderson, is explaining why Hitler didn't believe that Britain and France would fight over Prague: "[Hitler] argued as follows: Would the German nation willingly go to war for General Franco in Spain, if France intervened on the side of the Republican government? The answer that he gave himself is that it would not, and he was consequently convinced that no democratic French government would be strong enough to lead the French nation to war for the Czechs."
In this instance, it must be admitted, Hitler was being a rational actor. And his admission—which Buchanan in his haste to indict Anglo-French policy completely fails to notice—is that if he himself had been resisted earlier and more determinedly, he would have been compelled to give ground. Thus the whole and complete lesson is not that the second world war was an avoidable "war of choice." It is that the Nazis could and should have been confronted before they had fully rearmed and had begun to steal the factories and oilfields and coal mines and workers of neighboring countries. As Gen. Douglas MacArthur once put it, all military defeats can be summarized in the two words: "Too late." The same goes for political disasters.
As the book develops, Buchanan begins to unmask his true colors more and more. It is one thing to make the case that Germany was ill-used, and German minorities harshly maltreated, as a consequence of the 1914 war of which Germany's grim emperor was one of the prime instigators. It's quite another thing to say that the Nazi decision to embark on a Holocaust of European Jewry was "not a cause of the war but an awful consequence of the war." Not only is Buchanan claiming that Hitler's fanatical racism did not hugely increase the likelihood of war, but he is also making the insinuation that those who wanted to resist him are the ones who are equally if not indeed mainly responsible for the murder of the Jews! This absolutely will not do. He adduces several quotations from Hitler and Goebbels, starting only in 1939 and ending in 1942, screaming that any outbreak of war to counter Nazi ambitions would lead to a terrible vengeance on the Jews. He forgets—at least I hope it's only forgetfulness—that such murderous incitement began long, long before Hitler had even been a lunatic-fringe candidate in the 1920s. This "timeline" is as spurious, and as sinister, as the earlier dates, so carefully selected by Buchanan, that tried to make Prussian imperialism look like a victim rather than a bully.
One closing example will demonstrate the corruption and prejudice of Buchanan's historical "method." He repeatedly argues that Churchill did not appreciate Hitler's deep-seated and respectful Anglophilia, and he continually blames the war on several missed opportunities to take the Führer's genially outstretched hand. Indeed, he approvingly quotes several academic sources who agree with him that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union only in order to change Britain's mind. Suppose that Buchanan is in fact correct about this. Could we have a better definition of derangement and megalomania than the case of a dictator who overrules his own generals and invades Russia in wintertime, mainly to impress the British House of Commons? (Incidentally, or rather not incidentally, it was precisely that hysterical aggression that curtain-raised the organized deportation and slaughter of the Jews. But it's fatuous to suppose that, without that occasion, the Nazis would not have found another one.)
It is of course true that millions of other people lost their lives in this conflict, often in unprecedentedly horrible ways, and that new tyrannies were imposed on the countries—Poland, Czechoslovakia and China most notably—that had been the pretexts for a war against fascism. But is this not to think in the short term? Unless or until Nazism had been vanquished, millions of people were most certainly going to be either massacred or enslaved in any case. Whereas today, all the way from Portugal to the Urals, the principle of human rights and popular sovereignty is at least the norm, and the ideas of racism and totalitarianism have been fairly conclusively and historically discredited. Would a frightened compromise with racist totalitarianism have produced a better result?
Winston Churchill may well have been on the wrong side about India, about the gold standard, about the rights of labor and many other things, and he may have had a lust for war, but we may also be grateful that there was one politician in the 1930s who found it intolerable even to breathe the same air, or share the same continent or planet, as the Nazis. (Buchanan of course makes plain that he rather sympathizes with Churchill about the colonies, and quarrels only with his "finest hour." This is grotesque.) As he closes his argument, Buchanan again refuses to disguise his allegiance. "Though derided as isolationists," he writes, "the America First patriots kept the United States out of the war until six months after Hitler had invaded Russia." If you know anything at all about what happened to the population of those territories in those six months, it is rather hard to be proud that America was neutral. But this is a price that Buchanan is quite willing to pay.
I myself have written several criticisms of the cult of Churchill, and of the uncritical way that it has been used to stifle or cudgel those with misgivings. ("Adlai," said John F. Kennedy of his outstanding U.N. ambassador during the Bay of Pigs crisis, "wanted a Munich.") Yet the more the record is scrutinized and re-examined, the more creditable it seems that at least two Western statesmen, for widely different reasons, regarded coexistence with Nazism as undesirable as well as impossible. History may judge whether the undesirability or the impossibility was the more salient objection, but any attempt to separate the two considerations is likely to result in a book that stinks, as this one unmistakably does.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/141501
A War Worth Fighting
Revisionists say that World War II was unnecessary. They're wrong.
Christopher Hitchens
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 3:36 PM ET Jun 14, 2008
Is there any one shared principle or assumption on which our political consensus rests, any value judgment on which we are all essentially agreed? Apart from abstractions such as a general belief in democracy, one would probably get the widest measure of agreement for the proposition that the second world war was a "good war" and one well worth fighting. And if we possess one indelible image of political immorality and cowardice, it is surely the dismal tap-tap-tap of Neville Chamberlain's umbrella as he turned from signing the Czechs away to Adolf Hitler at Munich. He hoped by this humiliation to avert war, but he was fated to bring his countrymen war on top of humiliation. To the conventional wisdom add the titanic figure of Winston Churchill as the emblem of oratorical defiance and the Horatius who, until American power could be mobilized and deployed, alone barred the bridge to the forces of unalloyed evil. When those forces lay finally defeated, their ghastly handiwork was uncovered to a world that mistakenly thought it had already "supped full of horrors." The stark evidence of the Final Solution has ever since been enough to dispel most doubts about, say, the wisdom or morality of carpet-bombing German cities.
Historical scholarship has nevertheless offered various sorts of revisionist interpretation of all this. Niall Ferguson, for one, has proposed looking at the two world wars as a single conflict, punctuated only by a long and ominous armistice. British conservative historians like Alan Clark and John Charmley have criticized Churchill for building his career on war, for ignoring openings to peace and for eventually allowing the British Empire to be squandered and broken up. But Pat Buchanan, twice a candidate for the Republican nomination and in 2000 the standard-bearer for the Reform Party who ignited a memorable "chad" row in Florida, has now condensed all the antiwar arguments into one. His case, made in his recently released "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War," is as follows:
That Germany was faced with encirclement and injustice in both 1914 and 1939.
Britain in both years ought to have stayed out of quarrels on the European mainland.
That Winston Churchill was the principal British warmonger on both occasions.
The United States was needlessly dragged into war on both occasions.
That the principal beneficiaries of this were Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.
That the Holocaust of European Jewry was as much the consequence of an avoidable war as it was of Nazi racism.
Buchanan does not need to close his book with an invocation of a dying West, as if to summarize this long recital of Spenglerian doomsaying. He's already opened with the statement, "All about us we can see clearly now that the West is passing away." The tropes are familiar—a loss of will and confidence, a collapse of the desire to reproduce with sufficient vigor, a preference for hedonism over the stern tasks of rulership and dominion and pre-eminence. It all sounds oddly … Churchillian. The old lion himself never tired of striking notes like these, and was quite unembarrassed by invocations of race and nation and blood. Yet he is the object of Buchanan's especial dislike and contempt, because he had a fondness for "wars of choice."
This term has enjoyed a recent vogue because of the opposition to the war in Iraq, an opposition in which Buchanan has played a vigorous role. Descending as he does from the tradition of Charles Lindbergh's America First movement, which looked for (and claimed to have found) a certain cosmopolitan lobby behind FDR's willingness to involve the United States in global war, Buchanan is the most trenchant critic of what he considers our fondest national illusion, and his book has the feel and stamp of a work that he has been readying all his life.
But he faces an insuperable difficulty, or rather difficulties. If you want to demonstrate that Germany was more the victim than the aggressor in 1914, then you must confine your account (as Buchanan does) to the very minor legal question of Belgian neutrality and of whether Britain absolutely had to go to war on the Belgian side. (For what it may be worth, I think that Britain wasn't obliged to do so and should not have done.) But the rest of the kaiser's policy, most of it completely omitted by Buchanan, shows that Germany was looking for a chance for war all over the globe, and was increasingly the prisoner of a militaristic ruling caste at home. The kaiser picked a fight with Britain by backing the white Dutch Afrikaner rebels in South Africa and by butchering the Ovambo people of what is now Namibia. He looked for trouble with the French by abruptly sending warships to Agadir in French Morocco, which nearly started the first world war in 1905, and with Russia by backing Austria-Hungary's insane ultimatum to the Serbs after the June 1914 assassinations in Sarajevo. Moreover, and never mentioned by Buchanan at all, the kaiser visited Damascus and paid for the rebuilding of the tomb of Saladin, announced himself a sympathizer of Islam and a friend of jihad, commissioned a Berlin-to-Baghdad railroad for the projection of German arms into the Middle East and Asia and generally ranged himself on the side of an aggressive Ottoman imperialism, which later declared a "holy war" against Britain. To suggest that he felt unjustly hemmed in by the Royal Navy's domination of the North Sea while he was conducting such statecraft is absurd.
And maybe a little worse than absurd, as when Buchanan writes: "From 1871 to 1914, the Germans under Bismarck and the Kaiser did not fight a single war. While Britain, Russia, Italy, Turkey, Japan, Spain, and the United States were all involved in wars, Germany and Austria had clean records." I am bound to say that I find this creepy. The start of the "clean record" has to be in 1871, because that's the year that Prussia humbled France in the hideous Franco-Prussian War that actually annexed two French provinces to Germany. In the intervening time until 1914, Germany was seizing colonies in Africa and the Pacific, cementing secret alliances with Austria and trying to build up a naval fleet that could take on the British one. No wonder the kaiser wanted a breathing space.
Now, this is not to say that Buchanan doesn't make some sound points about the secret diplomacy of Old Europe that was so much to offend Woodrow Wilson. And he is excellent on the calamitous Treaty of Versailles that succeeded only—as was noted by John Maynard Keynes at the time—in creating the conditions for another world war, or for part two of the first one. He wears his isolationism proudly: "The Senate never did a better day's work than when it rejected the Treaty of Versailles and refused to enter a League of Nations where American soldiers would be required to give their lives enforcing the terms of so dishonorable and disastrous a peace."
Actually, no soldier of any nation ever lost so much as a fingernail in the service of the League, which was in any case doomed by American abstention, and it's exactly that consideration which invalidates the second half of Buchanan's argument, which is that a conflict with Hitler's Germany both could and should have been averted. (There is a third Buchanan sub-argument, mostly made by implication, which is that the democratic West should have allied itself with Hitler, at least passively, until he had destroyed the Soviet Union.) Again, in order to believe his thesis one has to be prepared to argue that Hitler was a rational actor with intelligible and negotiable demands, whose declared, demented ambitions in "Mein Kampf" were presumably to be disregarded as mere propaganda. In case after case Buchanan shows the abysmal bungling of British and French diplomacy—making promises to Czechoslovakia that could never have been kept and then, adding injury to insult, breaking those promises at the first opportunity. Or offering a guarantee to Poland (a country that had gleefully taken part in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia) that Hitler well knew was not backed by any credible military force.
Buchanan is at his best here, often causing one to whistle at the sheer cynicism and stupidity of the British Tories. In the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of June 1935, for example, they astounded the French and Italians and Russians by unilaterally agreeing to permit Hitler to build a fleet one third the size of the Royal Navy and a submarine fleet of the same size as the British! Not only was this handing the Third Reich the weapon it would soon press to Britain's throat, it was convincing all Britain's potential allies that they would be much better off making their own bilateral deals with Berlin. Which is essentially what happened.
But Buchanan keeps forgetting that this criminal foolishness is exactly the sort of policy that he elsewhere recommends. In his view, after all, Germany had been terribly wronged by Versailles and it would have been correct to redraw the frontiers in Germany's favor and soothe its hurt feelings (which is what the word "appeasement" originally meant). Meanwhile we should have encouraged Hitler's hostility to Bolshevism and discreetly rearmed in case he should also need to be contained. This might perhaps have worked if Germany had been governed by a right-wing nationalist party that had won a democratic vote. However, in point of fact Germany was governed by an ultra-rightist, homicidal, paranoid maniac who had begun by demolishing democracy in Germany itself, who believed that his fellow countrymen were a superior race and who attributed all the evils in the world to a Jewish conspiracy. It is possible to read whole chapters of Buchanan's book without having to bear these salient points in mind. (I should say that I intend this observation as a criticism.) As with his discussion of pre-1914 Germany, he commits important sins of omission that can only be the outcome of an ideological bias. Barely mentioned except in passing is the Spanish Civil War, for example, where for three whole years between 1936 and 1939 Germany and Italy lent troops and weapons in a Fascist invasion of a sovereign European nation that had never threatened or "encircled" them in any way. Buchanan's own political past includes overt sympathy with General Franco, which makes this skating-over even less forgivable than it might otherwise be.
On the one occasion where Spain does get a serious mention, it illustrates the opposite point to the one Buchanan thinks he's making. The British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Neville Henderson, is explaining why Hitler didn't believe that Britain and France would fight over Prague: "[Hitler] argued as follows: Would the German nation willingly go to war for General Franco in Spain, if France intervened on the side of the Republican government? The answer that he gave himself is that it would not, and he was consequently convinced that no democratic French government would be strong enough to lead the French nation to war for the Czechs."
In this instance, it must be admitted, Hitler was being a rational actor. And his admission—which Buchanan in his haste to indict Anglo-French policy completely fails to notice—is that if he himself had been resisted earlier and more determinedly, he would have been compelled to give ground. Thus the whole and complete lesson is not that the second world war was an avoidable "war of choice." It is that the Nazis could and should have been confronted before they had fully rearmed and had begun to steal the factories and oilfields and coal mines and workers of neighboring countries. As Gen. Douglas MacArthur once put it, all military defeats can be summarized in the two words: "Too late." The same goes for political disasters.
As the book develops, Buchanan begins to unmask his true colors more and more. It is one thing to make the case that Germany was ill-used, and German minorities harshly maltreated, as a consequence of the 1914 war of which Germany's grim emperor was one of the prime instigators. It's quite another thing to say that the Nazi decision to embark on a Holocaust of European Jewry was "not a cause of the war but an awful consequence of the war." Not only is Buchanan claiming that Hitler's fanatical racism did not hugely increase the likelihood of war, but he is also making the insinuation that those who wanted to resist him are the ones who are equally if not indeed mainly responsible for the murder of the Jews! This absolutely will not do. He adduces several quotations from Hitler and Goebbels, starting only in 1939 and ending in 1942, screaming that any outbreak of war to counter Nazi ambitions would lead to a terrible vengeance on the Jews. He forgets—at least I hope it's only forgetfulness—that such murderous incitement began long, long before Hitler had even been a lunatic-fringe candidate in the 1920s. This "timeline" is as spurious, and as sinister, as the earlier dates, so carefully selected by Buchanan, that tried to make Prussian imperialism look like a victim rather than a bully.
One closing example will demonstrate the corruption and prejudice of Buchanan's historical "method." He repeatedly argues that Churchill did not appreciate Hitler's deep-seated and respectful Anglophilia, and he continually blames the war on several missed opportunities to take the Führer's genially outstretched hand. Indeed, he approvingly quotes several academic sources who agree with him that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union only in order to change Britain's mind. Suppose that Buchanan is in fact correct about this. Could we have a better definition of derangement and megalomania than the case of a dictator who overrules his own generals and invades Russia in wintertime, mainly to impress the British House of Commons? (Incidentally, or rather not incidentally, it was precisely that hysterical aggression that curtain-raised the organized deportation and slaughter of the Jews. But it's fatuous to suppose that, without that occasion, the Nazis would not have found another one.)
It is of course true that millions of other people lost their lives in this conflict, often in unprecedentedly horrible ways, and that new tyrannies were imposed on the countries—Poland, Czechoslovakia and China most notably—that had been the pretexts for a war against fascism. But is this not to think in the short term? Unless or until Nazism had been vanquished, millions of people were most certainly going to be either massacred or enslaved in any case. Whereas today, all the way from Portugal to the Urals, the principle of human rights and popular sovereignty is at least the norm, and the ideas of racism and totalitarianism have been fairly conclusively and historically discredited. Would a frightened compromise with racist totalitarianism have produced a better result?
Winston Churchill may well have been on the wrong side about India, about the gold standard, about the rights of labor and many other things, and he may have had a lust for war, but we may also be grateful that there was one politician in the 1930s who found it intolerable even to breathe the same air, or share the same continent or planet, as the Nazis. (Buchanan of course makes plain that he rather sympathizes with Churchill about the colonies, and quarrels only with his "finest hour." This is grotesque.) As he closes his argument, Buchanan again refuses to disguise his allegiance. "Though derided as isolationists," he writes, "the America First patriots kept the United States out of the war until six months after Hitler had invaded Russia." If you know anything at all about what happened to the population of those territories in those six months, it is rather hard to be proud that America was neutral. But this is a price that Buchanan is quite willing to pay.
I myself have written several criticisms of the cult of Churchill, and of the uncritical way that it has been used to stifle or cudgel those with misgivings. ("Adlai," said John F. Kennedy of his outstanding U.N. ambassador during the Bay of Pigs crisis, "wanted a Munich.") Yet the more the record is scrutinized and re-examined, the more creditable it seems that at least two Western statesmen, for widely different reasons, regarded coexistence with Nazism as undesirable as well as impossible. History may judge whether the undesirability or the impossibility was the more salient objection, but any attempt to separate the two considerations is likely to result in a book that stinks, as this one unmistakably does.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/141501
Reporting for Duty -- Not
June 15, 2008
Reporting for Duty -- Not
By Debra Saunders
Iraq isn't the big story this month. Gas prices are. In May, the Associated Press reported, U.S. military deaths plunged to the lowest monthly level in four years and civilian casualties were down sharply, too. Gasoline also hit $4 a gallon. And you don't see as many "No war for oil" bumper stickers as you used to.
The success of the Bush surge -- with Iraqi forces having led offensives in three major cities and taking on Shiite militias -- has been greeted in America with a collective shrug. "My perhaps overly cynical view is that it's probably too much to hope for -- a lot of good news stories coming out of Iraq," U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said during a recent conference call. But also, with the al-Maliki government clearing once dangerous areas and violence dropping, "Iraq no longer occupies the status as the overarching, all-encompassing crisis that requires full national attention."
Reporters based in Iraq have seen improvements. NBC News' Richard Engel told the New York Observer about a recent trip to Najaf, "I was walking around the city doing interviews, without any kind of security or back up at all. That felt great. I hadn't done that in years. A Chinese restaurant, takeout, just opened up down the street from our bureau. There were no businesses opening in '06 and '07. People are getting out more. You see more people on the streets going to markets. When I go to do interviews, I can stay longer."
And yet, there is a "marked drop-off in the appetite for stories from Iraq," ABC news' Terry McCarthy told the Observer. "That's partly due to the election, partly because of the fatigue, and partly because things have started to go right here. The spectacular car bombs, the massive attacks, you just don't see them anymore. A drip, drip story that's getting a little better day by day doesn't make a headline."
CNN's Michael Ware calls it "audience fatigue." Other journalists, who have risked their lives covering the war, complain that Americans aren't paying attention to their stories on Iraq.
If reporters think their work is unappreciated, imagine how U.S. troops in Iraq feel. They're working miracles -- to insufficient applause.
Four years ago, before the U.S. troop death toll hit 1,000 in September 2004, the war was the moral issue. When liberal Democrats were trying to take over Congress in 2006, they used the war to clobber President Bush and told America that if they were in power, the war would end. Well, they took control of Congress, and the war continues. So now there are fewer political points to be won banging the war.
As of Thursday, 4,098 U.S. troops had died in the Iraq war. Yet Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's No. 1 issue is the U.S. economy. When the senator talks about the war, he often does so in terms of the $12 billion spent each month in Iraq. Clearly, Team Obama figures that it's not the toll of American blood but the price tag that enrages voters in this short-attention span nation.
It seems the better the war goes, the less interest some partisans show in Iraq. Their attention wanders if they can't play the blame game and chant, "Bush lied."
Ah, and this time, the critics were wrong when they argued the surge could not work. Obama was wrong, and, face it, opposing the surge was the politically easy thing to do.
Conversely, John McCain supported the surge -- and he did so in opposition to well-wishers and pundits who argued that his support for the war would doom his campaign.
So Team Obama is reduced to nitpicking at McCain. When McCain told NBC's "Today" show that it's "not too important" when U.S. troops are brought home -- "We will be able to withdraw, but the key to it is that we don't want any more Americans in harm's way" -- Obama surrogates pounced.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., called McCain "unbelievably out of touch with the needs and concerns of Americans, particularly of the families of the troops that are over there." Sure, McCain spent five years as a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton. His 19-year-old son, Jimmy, just returned from his first tour in Iraq and another son, Jack, is in the U.S. Naval Academy. Yet somehow Team Obama paints McCain as out-of-touch with military families.
Four years ago, when Iraq was center stage and Democrats thought opposition to the war would lead to electoral victory, Kerry led off his address to the Democratic National Committee with a salute as he announced, "I'm John Kerry and I'm reporting for duty."
In 2008, now that prices at the pump are his big issue and Iraq is framed as an economic issue, what will Obama say: You deserve a break today?
Reporting for Duty -- Not
By Debra Saunders
Iraq isn't the big story this month. Gas prices are. In May, the Associated Press reported, U.S. military deaths plunged to the lowest monthly level in four years and civilian casualties were down sharply, too. Gasoline also hit $4 a gallon. And you don't see as many "No war for oil" bumper stickers as you used to.
The success of the Bush surge -- with Iraqi forces having led offensives in three major cities and taking on Shiite militias -- has been greeted in America with a collective shrug. "My perhaps overly cynical view is that it's probably too much to hope for -- a lot of good news stories coming out of Iraq," U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said during a recent conference call. But also, with the al-Maliki government clearing once dangerous areas and violence dropping, "Iraq no longer occupies the status as the overarching, all-encompassing crisis that requires full national attention."
Reporters based in Iraq have seen improvements. NBC News' Richard Engel told the New York Observer about a recent trip to Najaf, "I was walking around the city doing interviews, without any kind of security or back up at all. That felt great. I hadn't done that in years. A Chinese restaurant, takeout, just opened up down the street from our bureau. There were no businesses opening in '06 and '07. People are getting out more. You see more people on the streets going to markets. When I go to do interviews, I can stay longer."
And yet, there is a "marked drop-off in the appetite for stories from Iraq," ABC news' Terry McCarthy told the Observer. "That's partly due to the election, partly because of the fatigue, and partly because things have started to go right here. The spectacular car bombs, the massive attacks, you just don't see them anymore. A drip, drip story that's getting a little better day by day doesn't make a headline."
CNN's Michael Ware calls it "audience fatigue." Other journalists, who have risked their lives covering the war, complain that Americans aren't paying attention to their stories on Iraq.
If reporters think their work is unappreciated, imagine how U.S. troops in Iraq feel. They're working miracles -- to insufficient applause.
Four years ago, before the U.S. troop death toll hit 1,000 in September 2004, the war was the moral issue. When liberal Democrats were trying to take over Congress in 2006, they used the war to clobber President Bush and told America that if they were in power, the war would end. Well, they took control of Congress, and the war continues. So now there are fewer political points to be won banging the war.
As of Thursday, 4,098 U.S. troops had died in the Iraq war. Yet Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's No. 1 issue is the U.S. economy. When the senator talks about the war, he often does so in terms of the $12 billion spent each month in Iraq. Clearly, Team Obama figures that it's not the toll of American blood but the price tag that enrages voters in this short-attention span nation.
It seems the better the war goes, the less interest some partisans show in Iraq. Their attention wanders if they can't play the blame game and chant, "Bush lied."
Ah, and this time, the critics were wrong when they argued the surge could not work. Obama was wrong, and, face it, opposing the surge was the politically easy thing to do.
Conversely, John McCain supported the surge -- and he did so in opposition to well-wishers and pundits who argued that his support for the war would doom his campaign.
So Team Obama is reduced to nitpicking at McCain. When McCain told NBC's "Today" show that it's "not too important" when U.S. troops are brought home -- "We will be able to withdraw, but the key to it is that we don't want any more Americans in harm's way" -- Obama surrogates pounced.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., called McCain "unbelievably out of touch with the needs and concerns of Americans, particularly of the families of the troops that are over there." Sure, McCain spent five years as a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton. His 19-year-old son, Jimmy, just returned from his first tour in Iraq and another son, Jack, is in the U.S. Naval Academy. Yet somehow Team Obama paints McCain as out-of-touch with military families.
Four years ago, when Iraq was center stage and Democrats thought opposition to the war would lead to electoral victory, Kerry led off his address to the Democratic National Committee with a salute as he announced, "I'm John Kerry and I'm reporting for duty."
In 2008, now that prices at the pump are his big issue and Iraq is framed as an economic issue, what will Obama say: You deserve a break today?
Right-wingers really are nicer people
Don't listen to the liberals - Right-wingers really are nicer people, latest research shows
By Peter Schweizer
Last updated at 10:25 PM on 14th June 2008
George Orwell once wrote that politics was closely related to social identity. 'One sometimes gets the impression,' he wrote in The Road To Wigan Pier, 'that the mere words socialism and communism draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, nature-cure quack, pacifist and feminist in England'.
Orwell was making an observation. But today a whole body of academic research shows he was correct: your politics influence the manner in which you live your life. And the news is not so good for those on the political Left.
There is plenty of data that shows that Right-wingers are happier, more generous to charities, less likely to commit suicide - and even hug their children more than those on the Left.
Come on, you miserable Lefties...
Prove Peter Schweizer wrong and tell us below why Left-wingers are really more lovable. The three best replies will win a bottle of Bollinger champagne and a donation of £100 to the Red Cross appeal to help Burma cyclone victims...
In my experience, they are also more honest, friendly and well-adjusted.
Much of this springs from the destructive influence of modern liberal ideas.
In the Sixties, we saw the beginning of a narcissism and self-absorption that gripped the Left and has not let go.
The full-scale embrace of the importance of self-awareness, self-discovery and being 'true' to oneself, along with the idea that the State should care for the less fortunate, has created a swathe of Left-wing people who want to outsource their obligations to others.
The statistics I base this on come from the General Social Survey, America's premier social research database, but they are just as relevant to the UK, as I believe political belief systems drive one's attitudes, regardless of where you happen to live.
Those surveyed were asked: 'Is it your obligation to care for a seriously injured/ill spouse or parent, or should you give care only if you really want to?' Of those describing themselves as 'conservative', 71 per cent said it was. Only 46 per cent of those on the Left agreed.
To the question: 'Do you get happiness by putting someone else's happiness ahead of your own?', 55 per cent of those who said they were 'very conservative' said Yes, compared with 20 per cent of those who were 'very liberal'.
It's been my experience that conservatives like to talk about things outside of themselves while progressives like to discuss themselves: how they are feeling and what their desires are. That might make for a good therapy session but it's not much fun over a long dinner.
Research also indicates those on the Left are less interested in getting married: 30 per cent of those who were 'very liberal' said it was important, in contrast to 65 per cent of Right-wingers.
The same holds true when the question of having children arises. Progressive American cities such as San Francisco and Seattle have become 'childless liberal boutique' cities, according to Joel Kotkin, an expert on urban development.
While 69 per cent of those who called themselves 'very conservative' said it was important for them to have children, only 38 per cent of corresponding liberals agreed.
Many on the Left proudly proclaim themselves 'child-free'. While some do not want children on ecological grounds, much has to do with the fact that they simply don't want the responsibility of having a child.
When asked by the World Values Survey whether parents should sacrifice their own well-being for those of their children, those on the Left were nearly twice as likely to say No.
'I'll have babies if you pay for them,' one Leftie blogger said on the social networking website yelp.com.
Billionaire Ted Turner, a self-described socialist, publicly regrets that he had five children. 'If I was doing it over again, I wouldn't have had that many,' he says. 'But I can't shoot them now they're here.'
All of this should not come as a surprise to anyone watching the drift of progressive thinking over the past 40 years.
Starting with British anthropologist Edmund Leach, who said: 'Far from being the basis of a good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all its discontents', feminists, progressives and others have seen the family as an oppressive force.
Feminist Gloria Steinem says on behalf of women: 'The truth is, finding ourselves brings more excitement and wellbeing than anything romance can offer.'
Linda Hirshman tells women not to have more than one baby so they can concentrate on a career. 'Find the money,' she advises. Ah, the important things in life.
Even when they do have children, research carried out at Princeton University shows liberals hug them less than conservatives. My wife thinks they're too busy hugging trees.
Most surprising of all is reputable research showing those on the Left are more interested in money than Right-wingers.
Both the World Values Survey and the General Social Survey reveal Left-wingers are more likely to rate 'high income' as an important factor in choosing a job, more likely to say 'after good health, money is the most important thing', and agree with the statement 'there are no right or wrong ways to make money'.
You don't need to explain that to Doug Urbanski, the former business manager for Left-wing firebrand and documentary-maker Michael Moore. 'He [Moore] is more money-obsessed than anyone I have known - and that's saying a lot,' claims Urbanski.
How is it possible that those who seem to renounce the money culture are more interested in money?
One might suggest those on the Left are simply being more honest when they answer such questions. The problem is that there is no evidence to support this.
Instead, I believe the results have more to do with the powerful appeal of progressive thinking.
Many on the Left apparently believe that espousing liberal ideals is a 'get out of jail free' card that inoculates them from the evils of the money culture.
Cherie Blair, for example, never lets her self-proclaimed socialist attitudes stop her making money. She is even willing to be paid (as she was in Australia) to appear at charity events.
Such progressives, sure that they are not overly interested in money and possessions, believe they are then free to acquire them.
Studies also indicate that those on the Left are less likely to give to charity or to volunteer their time to charity. When they do support charity, it is often less the sort of organisation that helps people and more one that advocates political action.
Uber-progressive Barbra Streisand gives lots of money to charity but the largest recipients are not organisations that feed the hungry - the cash goes to advocacy organisations such as The Bill Clinton Foundation.
Similarly, Michael Moore gives to film festivals and elite cultural institutions such as the Lincoln Center - but barely a penny goes to needy people.
Progressives see economic equality as the highest form of social justice, so they have become obsessed with questions of income inequality.
Can there be any surprise then that those on the Left tend to be more envious and jealous of successful people? That's what studies indicate.
Professor James Lindgren, of Northwestern University in Chicago, found those who favour the redistribution of wealth are more envious than those who do not.
Scholars at Oxford and Warwick Universities found the same sort of behaviour when they conducted an experiment.
Setting up a computer game that allowed people to accumulate money, they gave participants the option to spend some of their own money in order to take away more from someone else.
The result? Those who considered themselves 'egalitarians' (i.e. Left of centre) were much more willing to give up some of their own money if it meant taking more money from someone else.
Much of the desire to distribute wealth and higher taxation is motivated by envy - the desire to take more from someone else - and bitterness.
The culprit here is not those on the Left who embrace progressive ideas but the ideas themselves.
As John Maynard Keynes reminds us: 'The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and wrong, are more powerful than commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.' Or, as the American theorist Richard Weaver once declared: 'Ideas have consequences.'
And it seems that today modern progressive ideas can often bring out the worst in people.
• Peter Schweizer is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His book, Makers And Takers, is published by Doubleday.
By Peter Schweizer
Last updated at 10:25 PM on 14th June 2008
George Orwell once wrote that politics was closely related to social identity. 'One sometimes gets the impression,' he wrote in The Road To Wigan Pier, 'that the mere words socialism and communism draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, nature-cure quack, pacifist and feminist in England'.
Orwell was making an observation. But today a whole body of academic research shows he was correct: your politics influence the manner in which you live your life. And the news is not so good for those on the political Left.
There is plenty of data that shows that Right-wingers are happier, more generous to charities, less likely to commit suicide - and even hug their children more than those on the Left.
Come on, you miserable Lefties...
Prove Peter Schweizer wrong and tell us below why Left-wingers are really more lovable. The three best replies will win a bottle of Bollinger champagne and a donation of £100 to the Red Cross appeal to help Burma cyclone victims...
In my experience, they are also more honest, friendly and well-adjusted.
Much of this springs from the destructive influence of modern liberal ideas.
In the Sixties, we saw the beginning of a narcissism and self-absorption that gripped the Left and has not let go.
The full-scale embrace of the importance of self-awareness, self-discovery and being 'true' to oneself, along with the idea that the State should care for the less fortunate, has created a swathe of Left-wing people who want to outsource their obligations to others.
The statistics I base this on come from the General Social Survey, America's premier social research database, but they are just as relevant to the UK, as I believe political belief systems drive one's attitudes, regardless of where you happen to live.
Those surveyed were asked: 'Is it your obligation to care for a seriously injured/ill spouse or parent, or should you give care only if you really want to?' Of those describing themselves as 'conservative', 71 per cent said it was. Only 46 per cent of those on the Left agreed.
To the question: 'Do you get happiness by putting someone else's happiness ahead of your own?', 55 per cent of those who said they were 'very conservative' said Yes, compared with 20 per cent of those who were 'very liberal'.
It's been my experience that conservatives like to talk about things outside of themselves while progressives like to discuss themselves: how they are feeling and what their desires are. That might make for a good therapy session but it's not much fun over a long dinner.
Research also indicates those on the Left are less interested in getting married: 30 per cent of those who were 'very liberal' said it was important, in contrast to 65 per cent of Right-wingers.
The same holds true when the question of having children arises. Progressive American cities such as San Francisco and Seattle have become 'childless liberal boutique' cities, according to Joel Kotkin, an expert on urban development.
While 69 per cent of those who called themselves 'very conservative' said it was important for them to have children, only 38 per cent of corresponding liberals agreed.
Many on the Left proudly proclaim themselves 'child-free'. While some do not want children on ecological grounds, much has to do with the fact that they simply don't want the responsibility of having a child.
When asked by the World Values Survey whether parents should sacrifice their own well-being for those of their children, those on the Left were nearly twice as likely to say No.
'I'll have babies if you pay for them,' one Leftie blogger said on the social networking website yelp.com.
Billionaire Ted Turner, a self-described socialist, publicly regrets that he had five children. 'If I was doing it over again, I wouldn't have had that many,' he says. 'But I can't shoot them now they're here.'
All of this should not come as a surprise to anyone watching the drift of progressive thinking over the past 40 years.
Starting with British anthropologist Edmund Leach, who said: 'Far from being the basis of a good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all its discontents', feminists, progressives and others have seen the family as an oppressive force.
Feminist Gloria Steinem says on behalf of women: 'The truth is, finding ourselves brings more excitement and wellbeing than anything romance can offer.'
Linda Hirshman tells women not to have more than one baby so they can concentrate on a career. 'Find the money,' she advises. Ah, the important things in life.
Even when they do have children, research carried out at Princeton University shows liberals hug them less than conservatives. My wife thinks they're too busy hugging trees.
Most surprising of all is reputable research showing those on the Left are more interested in money than Right-wingers.
Both the World Values Survey and the General Social Survey reveal Left-wingers are more likely to rate 'high income' as an important factor in choosing a job, more likely to say 'after good health, money is the most important thing', and agree with the statement 'there are no right or wrong ways to make money'.
You don't need to explain that to Doug Urbanski, the former business manager for Left-wing firebrand and documentary-maker Michael Moore. 'He [Moore] is more money-obsessed than anyone I have known - and that's saying a lot,' claims Urbanski.
How is it possible that those who seem to renounce the money culture are more interested in money?
One might suggest those on the Left are simply being more honest when they answer such questions. The problem is that there is no evidence to support this.
Instead, I believe the results have more to do with the powerful appeal of progressive thinking.
Many on the Left apparently believe that espousing liberal ideals is a 'get out of jail free' card that inoculates them from the evils of the money culture.
Cherie Blair, for example, never lets her self-proclaimed socialist attitudes stop her making money. She is even willing to be paid (as she was in Australia) to appear at charity events.
Such progressives, sure that they are not overly interested in money and possessions, believe they are then free to acquire them.
Studies also indicate that those on the Left are less likely to give to charity or to volunteer their time to charity. When they do support charity, it is often less the sort of organisation that helps people and more one that advocates political action.
Uber-progressive Barbra Streisand gives lots of money to charity but the largest recipients are not organisations that feed the hungry - the cash goes to advocacy organisations such as The Bill Clinton Foundation.
Similarly, Michael Moore gives to film festivals and elite cultural institutions such as the Lincoln Center - but barely a penny goes to needy people.
Progressives see economic equality as the highest form of social justice, so they have become obsessed with questions of income inequality.
Can there be any surprise then that those on the Left tend to be more envious and jealous of successful people? That's what studies indicate.
Professor James Lindgren, of Northwestern University in Chicago, found those who favour the redistribution of wealth are more envious than those who do not.
Scholars at Oxford and Warwick Universities found the same sort of behaviour when they conducted an experiment.
Setting up a computer game that allowed people to accumulate money, they gave participants the option to spend some of their own money in order to take away more from someone else.
The result? Those who considered themselves 'egalitarians' (i.e. Left of centre) were much more willing to give up some of their own money if it meant taking more money from someone else.
Much of the desire to distribute wealth and higher taxation is motivated by envy - the desire to take more from someone else - and bitterness.
The culprit here is not those on the Left who embrace progressive ideas but the ideas themselves.
As John Maynard Keynes reminds us: 'The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and wrong, are more powerful than commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.' Or, as the American theorist Richard Weaver once declared: 'Ideas have consequences.'
And it seems that today modern progressive ideas can often bring out the worst in people.
• Peter Schweizer is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His book, Makers And Takers, is published by Doubleday.
The Gitmo Nightmare What the Supreme Court has wrought.
The Gitmo Nightmare
What the Supreme Court has wrought.
by Matthew Continetti
06/23/2008, Volume 013, Issue 39
It's hard to summarize a decision as long and complicated as the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling last week in Boumediene v. Bush. But we can try. Unprecedented. Reckless. Harmful. Breathtakingly condescending.
The Court, in an opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, ruled that non-citizens captured abroad and held in a military installation overseas--the remaining 270 or so inmates at the terrorist prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba--have the same constitutional right as U.S. citizens to challenge their detention in court. Furthermore, the current procedures by which a detainee's status is reviewed--procedures fashioned in good faith and at the Court's behest by a bipartisan congressional majority in consultation with the commander in chief during a time of war--are unconstitutional.
The upshot is the prisoners at Camp Delta can now file habeas corpus petitions in U.S. district courts seeking reprieve. Hence lawyers, judges, and leftwing interest groups will have real influence over the conduct of the war on terror. Call it the Gitmo nightmare.
As it happens, some of the most effective arguments against Boumediene come from the decision itself. For example, Justice Kennedy wrote that in cases involving terrorist detention, "proper deference must be accorded to the political branches." Then he overrode them.
Kennedy further noted that "unlike the President and some designated Members of Congress, neither the Members of this Court nor most federal judges begin the day with briefings that may describe new and serious threats to our Nation and its people." They had better start, because the courts are about to be flooded with petitions to release terrorists sworn to America's destruction.
He also wrote that now the "political branches can engage in a genuine debate about how best to preserve constitutional values while protecting the Nation from terrorism." But that is precisely what Congress and the president were doing when they passed legislation laying out a process for detainee review, one that in fact addressed concerns previously raised by the Court. The Court now says this process is inadequate. What would be adequate? Kennedy's answer: I'll get back to you on that.
In his opinion, Kennedy conceded that "before today the Court has never held that non-citizens detained by our Government in territory over which another country maintains de jure sovereignty have any rights under our Constitution." Inventing rights seems to be what some of today's Supreme Court justices do best. In 1950 the Court ruled in Johnson v. Eisentrager that foreign nationals held in a military prison on foreign soil (in that case, Germany) had no habeas rights. But, without overruling Eisentrager, Kennedy said the Guantánamo detainees are different from the German prisoners 58 years ago.
Why? Kennedy wrote that Eisentrager had a unique set of "practical considerations," and the United States did not have "de facto" sovereignty over Germany as it does over Guantánamo Bay. That territory, "while technically not part of the United States, is under the complete and total control of our Government." But these slippery distinctions only raise more questions. Doesn't the United States government exercise "complete and total control" over its military and intelligence facilities worldwide? If so, what's to stop foreign combatants held in those locations from asserting their habeas rights?
And what precise form will these habeas hearings take? What standards of judgment are the courts to apply? Will plaintiffs' attorneys be allowed to go venue shopping and file their petitions in the most liberal courts in the nation? Will they conduct discovery? Will they recall soldiers and intelligence agents from the field to testify? What happens when the available evidence does not satisfy judges who are used to adjudicating under the exclusionary rule? Will the cases be thrown out? Will the detainees be freed, able to return to the battlefield? That, after all, is what some 30 released detainees seem already to have done.
The Supreme Court does not worry about such things. Instead it piously reminded the people that "the laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times." No kidding. Has anyone ever argued otherwise?
Kennedy's sanctimony points to the ultimate tragedy of the Boumediene mess. In their visceral, myopic hatred of President Bush, liberals will see the ruling as a blow to the president and not the broad, foolish, and dangerous judicial power grab it is. The New York Times's editorialists wrote that "compliant Republicans and frightened Democrats" allowed Bush to deny foreign enemy combatants during wartime "the protections of justice, democracy and plain human decency."
Give us a break. One day soon Bush will be gone. But thanks to the Court, we'll still all be living the Gitmo nightmare.
--Matthew Continetti, for the Editors
© Copyright 2008, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
What the Supreme Court has wrought.
by Matthew Continetti
06/23/2008, Volume 013, Issue 39
It's hard to summarize a decision as long and complicated as the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling last week in Boumediene v. Bush. But we can try. Unprecedented. Reckless. Harmful. Breathtakingly condescending.
The Court, in an opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, ruled that non-citizens captured abroad and held in a military installation overseas--the remaining 270 or so inmates at the terrorist prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba--have the same constitutional right as U.S. citizens to challenge their detention in court. Furthermore, the current procedures by which a detainee's status is reviewed--procedures fashioned in good faith and at the Court's behest by a bipartisan congressional majority in consultation with the commander in chief during a time of war--are unconstitutional.
The upshot is the prisoners at Camp Delta can now file habeas corpus petitions in U.S. district courts seeking reprieve. Hence lawyers, judges, and leftwing interest groups will have real influence over the conduct of the war on terror. Call it the Gitmo nightmare.
As it happens, some of the most effective arguments against Boumediene come from the decision itself. For example, Justice Kennedy wrote that in cases involving terrorist detention, "proper deference must be accorded to the political branches." Then he overrode them.
Kennedy further noted that "unlike the President and some designated Members of Congress, neither the Members of this Court nor most federal judges begin the day with briefings that may describe new and serious threats to our Nation and its people." They had better start, because the courts are about to be flooded with petitions to release terrorists sworn to America's destruction.
He also wrote that now the "political branches can engage in a genuine debate about how best to preserve constitutional values while protecting the Nation from terrorism." But that is precisely what Congress and the president were doing when they passed legislation laying out a process for detainee review, one that in fact addressed concerns previously raised by the Court. The Court now says this process is inadequate. What would be adequate? Kennedy's answer: I'll get back to you on that.
In his opinion, Kennedy conceded that "before today the Court has never held that non-citizens detained by our Government in territory over which another country maintains de jure sovereignty have any rights under our Constitution." Inventing rights seems to be what some of today's Supreme Court justices do best. In 1950 the Court ruled in Johnson v. Eisentrager that foreign nationals held in a military prison on foreign soil (in that case, Germany) had no habeas rights. But, without overruling Eisentrager, Kennedy said the Guantánamo detainees are different from the German prisoners 58 years ago.
Why? Kennedy wrote that Eisentrager had a unique set of "practical considerations," and the United States did not have "de facto" sovereignty over Germany as it does over Guantánamo Bay. That territory, "while technically not part of the United States, is under the complete and total control of our Government." But these slippery distinctions only raise more questions. Doesn't the United States government exercise "complete and total control" over its military and intelligence facilities worldwide? If so, what's to stop foreign combatants held in those locations from asserting their habeas rights?
And what precise form will these habeas hearings take? What standards of judgment are the courts to apply? Will plaintiffs' attorneys be allowed to go venue shopping and file their petitions in the most liberal courts in the nation? Will they conduct discovery? Will they recall soldiers and intelligence agents from the field to testify? What happens when the available evidence does not satisfy judges who are used to adjudicating under the exclusionary rule? Will the cases be thrown out? Will the detainees be freed, able to return to the battlefield? That, after all, is what some 30 released detainees seem already to have done.
The Supreme Court does not worry about such things. Instead it piously reminded the people that "the laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times." No kidding. Has anyone ever argued otherwise?
Kennedy's sanctimony points to the ultimate tragedy of the Boumediene mess. In their visceral, myopic hatred of President Bush, liberals will see the ruling as a blow to the president and not the broad, foolish, and dangerous judicial power grab it is. The New York Times's editorialists wrote that "compliant Republicans and frightened Democrats" allowed Bush to deny foreign enemy combatants during wartime "the protections of justice, democracy and plain human decency."
Give us a break. One day soon Bush will be gone. But thanks to the Court, we'll still all be living the Gitmo nightmare.
--Matthew Continetti, for the Editors
© Copyright 2008, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
It Isn't Tilting in The Same Old Ways
It Isn't Tilting in The Same Old Ways
By Dahlia Lithwick
Sunday, June 15, 2008; B01
With just two weeks left in the Supreme Court's term, everything we thought we knew about the Roberts court seems wrong. The question now is: Who plans to tell the presidential candidates?
Both Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain are finally beginning to campaign as though the composition of the Supreme Court actually matters. And that's a good thing, because -- the American public's lack of interest notwithstanding -- the court counts as much as almost every other issue facing the voters in November. Assuming that you work, worship, vote, parent, own property the government might covet or occasionally have sex, the high court will intimately affect your life. This is particularly true now that the average justice is older than Mount Rushmore and the next president may well have two or three new court picks in the space of a few years.
But it's hard to generate much public hysteria over nameless, faceless future jurists deciding nameless, faceless future cases. And so the court plods along undisturbed, like the tortoise, while presidential elections zoom by like the hare.
But the dialogue about the judiciary now taking place between the two presidential nominees is antiquated. (Bear in mind that in picking their way among the minefields of abortion, affirmative action, same-sex marriage and school prayer, presidential candidates tend to discuss the courts only in code.) Both McCain and Obama have now taken predictable stands on the Supreme Court of their dreams. In a speech last month, McCain offered a jeremiad about the evils of "judicial activism," deriding the "common and systematic abuse of our federal courts by the people we entrust with judicial power." Last March, Obama offered up his own judicial ideal: a judge with "enough empathy, enough feeling, for what ordinary people are going through."
The main problem: Both McCain and Obama start from the premise that the Supreme Court is tidily balanced among four conservative judicial minimalists, four liberal judicial empaths and the inscrutable Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, swinging away at the center. This is a useful model for trying to stir up public concern about the court's composition, and the decision in at least one blockbuster case -- last Thursday's ruling that the Bush administration is violating the constitutional rights of foreign terrorism suspects being held indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- did indeed go down along the traditional lines. Still, the current term is rapidly proving the simple conservatives-vs.-liberals construct to be a thing of the past. This court term has revealed a series of patterns that aren't so easy to neatly file away: conservative moderation, moderate conservatism, liberal pragmatism and pragmatic minimalism. And that's just for starters.
Court watchers have stood dumbfounded all spring as the high court rejected and renounced the 5 to 4 conservative-liberal splits that seemed to have calcified after last term's bitter divisions. The end of June 2007 saw a full third of the court's cases decided by a 5 to 4 margin; as of this writing, the court has decided just four cases that way this year. At this point last year, Kennedy had cast his vote with the prevailing five justices every single time. But this term has seen a slew of ideology-busting unanimous, 7 to 2, and 6 to 3 decisions, which have not just baffled the experts but also made the usual end-of-term chatter about "activists," "minimalists" and "strict constructionists" sound as old-fashioned as the Bee Gees.
Last week, the high court handed down five more unanimous opinions. The week before, it served up a 5 to 4 split decision in which the dissenters included the usually conservative Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., his fellow Bush appointee Samuel A. Alito Jr., the moderate Kennedy and the liberal Stephen G. Breyer. We've passed the point of crying "strange bedfellows" at the Supreme Court. As of this month, conservative and liberal justices are routinely sharing a toothbrush.
So what has happened? Have the liberals caved, are the conservatives becoming more restrained, or is something else afoot? Most court watchers have been astonished to witness the liberal lion, John Paul Stevens, voting with the conservative bloc in cases upholding Kentucky's lethal-injection process, Indiana's rigid voter-identification law and Texas's fast-and-loose treatment of a Mexican on death row. (One commentator joked that 2007 might have been the year in which Stevens remembered that "he is a Republican.") Linda Greenhouse, who covers the court for the New York Times, speculated that the court's liberals may be joining with the conservatives to dilute the force of right-leaning decisions, extracting "modest concessions as the price of helping the conservatives avoid another parade of 5-to-4 decisions."
Perhaps all the newfound bipartisanship is explained by the fact that it's an election year, putting the justices on their best behavior. And of course, there are still a couple of weeks left in the term, which might not turn out to be so harmonious after all; the potentially explosive cases still pending include the decades-in-the-making D.C. gun rights case and a fight over expanding the death penalty to rapists. But here's one more hypothesis to explain the implosion of judicial ideology at the high court this year: It may simply have to do with the strange physics of time.
Last year, dissenting in the school affirmative-action case, the liberal Breyer lashed out at the slash-and-burn tendencies of the new conservative majority: "It is not often that so few have so quickly changed so much." Breyer was chiding the conservatives for their push to eviscerate decades' worth of abortion, affirmative-action and church-state doctrine in a week-long binge at the end of June. But even before Breyer's outburst, a key rift had been carved into the court's right wing: Alito and Roberts were declining to go as far as Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas wanted to in several big cases that logically demanded that established precedents be overturned. In a church-state case last term, Alito wrote cryptically that he would not overrule a key precedent but "leave [it] as we found it." That language seems to have enraged Scalia, who dressed down Alito and Roberts for clinging to the empty shells of old cases. In yet another case, Scalia accused the two young conservative justices of "faux judicial restraint." The seeds of a split between two generations of conservatives had been sown: The younger justices opted for the tortoise, while their impatient elders chose the hare. Scalia and Thomas call to mind the famous quip about Gladstone being an old man in a hurry.
The urgency that Thomas and Scalia feel about "fixing" constitutional doctrine in big, sweeping ways may simply be caused by their lengthy tenures on the bench. Scalia and Thomas have served for 22 and 17 years respectively. Roberts and Alito have each served just over two. The young Turks are not sitting on decades of accumulated frustration and outrage. (Scalia barely bothers to hide his scorn for his lily-livered colleagues these days; he sneered in his dissent that last Thursday's Guantanamo ruling "will almost certainly cause more Americans to get killed.") But Roberts and Alito can afford to move slowly, with an eye toward how things look to observers already sourly suspicious -- especially after the travesty of Bush v. Gore-- that the court has become crassly political. And with the court hearing fewer cases every year -- it heard just 70 this year, its shortest docket in modern history -- the decision to slow the pace of change is probably a savvy one.
At the liberal end of the spectrum, Breyer and Stevens appear increasingly inclined to work with the court's conservatives to sidestep the trap of a 5 to 4 stalemate. Again, that may have more to do with age than you'd think. At 88, Stevens may well be the justice closest to retirement, and he may not to want to end his brilliant career with a series of brokenhearted dissents. At 69, Breyer may feel -- much like Alito and Roberts -- that he can afford to be a bit patient. He may also be learning the lesson that Sandra Day O'Connor taught in recent years: You can catch more votes with honey than with vinegar.
But the notion that time heals all wounds may mask what really lies beneath the new compromises at the high court. Consider how these new majorities of six, seven or eight justices are actually forged. Time and again, the justices have converged around the narrowest possible reading of a case -- in effect using the decision as a placeholder to say, "We'll decide the present case on very narrow facts, but we reserve the right to revisit the underlying issues in years to come."
This approach certainly represents judicial minimalism, or humility, and it was the young chief justice's confirmation promise to the American people. But it also does very little to guide future litigants. It's a deflection -- a constitutional push of the pause button that allows legislatures and the electorate to catch up. This new conciliation is a way for the younger justices to defer ideological disagreements and for the aging justices to pass the baton to their more energetic successors. And it may simply reflect an understanding on the part of various justices that some of them have big dreams but very little time remaining, while others have big dreams and all the time in the world.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Sunday, June 15, 2008; B01
With just two weeks left in the Supreme Court's term, everything we thought we knew about the Roberts court seems wrong. The question now is: Who plans to tell the presidential candidates?
Both Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain are finally beginning to campaign as though the composition of the Supreme Court actually matters. And that's a good thing, because -- the American public's lack of interest notwithstanding -- the court counts as much as almost every other issue facing the voters in November. Assuming that you work, worship, vote, parent, own property the government might covet or occasionally have sex, the high court will intimately affect your life. This is particularly true now that the average justice is older than Mount Rushmore and the next president may well have two or three new court picks in the space of a few years.
But it's hard to generate much public hysteria over nameless, faceless future jurists deciding nameless, faceless future cases. And so the court plods along undisturbed, like the tortoise, while presidential elections zoom by like the hare.
But the dialogue about the judiciary now taking place between the two presidential nominees is antiquated. (Bear in mind that in picking their way among the minefields of abortion, affirmative action, same-sex marriage and school prayer, presidential candidates tend to discuss the courts only in code.) Both McCain and Obama have now taken predictable stands on the Supreme Court of their dreams. In a speech last month, McCain offered a jeremiad about the evils of "judicial activism," deriding the "common and systematic abuse of our federal courts by the people we entrust with judicial power." Last March, Obama offered up his own judicial ideal: a judge with "enough empathy, enough feeling, for what ordinary people are going through."
The main problem: Both McCain and Obama start from the premise that the Supreme Court is tidily balanced among four conservative judicial minimalists, four liberal judicial empaths and the inscrutable Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, swinging away at the center. This is a useful model for trying to stir up public concern about the court's composition, and the decision in at least one blockbuster case -- last Thursday's ruling that the Bush administration is violating the constitutional rights of foreign terrorism suspects being held indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- did indeed go down along the traditional lines. Still, the current term is rapidly proving the simple conservatives-vs.-liberals construct to be a thing of the past. This court term has revealed a series of patterns that aren't so easy to neatly file away: conservative moderation, moderate conservatism, liberal pragmatism and pragmatic minimalism. And that's just for starters.
Court watchers have stood dumbfounded all spring as the high court rejected and renounced the 5 to 4 conservative-liberal splits that seemed to have calcified after last term's bitter divisions. The end of June 2007 saw a full third of the court's cases decided by a 5 to 4 margin; as of this writing, the court has decided just four cases that way this year. At this point last year, Kennedy had cast his vote with the prevailing five justices every single time. But this term has seen a slew of ideology-busting unanimous, 7 to 2, and 6 to 3 decisions, which have not just baffled the experts but also made the usual end-of-term chatter about "activists," "minimalists" and "strict constructionists" sound as old-fashioned as the Bee Gees.
Last week, the high court handed down five more unanimous opinions. The week before, it served up a 5 to 4 split decision in which the dissenters included the usually conservative Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., his fellow Bush appointee Samuel A. Alito Jr., the moderate Kennedy and the liberal Stephen G. Breyer. We've passed the point of crying "strange bedfellows" at the Supreme Court. As of this month, conservative and liberal justices are routinely sharing a toothbrush.
So what has happened? Have the liberals caved, are the conservatives becoming more restrained, or is something else afoot? Most court watchers have been astonished to witness the liberal lion, John Paul Stevens, voting with the conservative bloc in cases upholding Kentucky's lethal-injection process, Indiana's rigid voter-identification law and Texas's fast-and-loose treatment of a Mexican on death row. (One commentator joked that 2007 might have been the year in which Stevens remembered that "he is a Republican.") Linda Greenhouse, who covers the court for the New York Times, speculated that the court's liberals may be joining with the conservatives to dilute the force of right-leaning decisions, extracting "modest concessions as the price of helping the conservatives avoid another parade of 5-to-4 decisions."
Perhaps all the newfound bipartisanship is explained by the fact that it's an election year, putting the justices on their best behavior. And of course, there are still a couple of weeks left in the term, which might not turn out to be so harmonious after all; the potentially explosive cases still pending include the decades-in-the-making D.C. gun rights case and a fight over expanding the death penalty to rapists. But here's one more hypothesis to explain the implosion of judicial ideology at the high court this year: It may simply have to do with the strange physics of time.
Last year, dissenting in the school affirmative-action case, the liberal Breyer lashed out at the slash-and-burn tendencies of the new conservative majority: "It is not often that so few have so quickly changed so much." Breyer was chiding the conservatives for their push to eviscerate decades' worth of abortion, affirmative-action and church-state doctrine in a week-long binge at the end of June. But even before Breyer's outburst, a key rift had been carved into the court's right wing: Alito and Roberts were declining to go as far as Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas wanted to in several big cases that logically demanded that established precedents be overturned. In a church-state case last term, Alito wrote cryptically that he would not overrule a key precedent but "leave [it] as we found it." That language seems to have enraged Scalia, who dressed down Alito and Roberts for clinging to the empty shells of old cases. In yet another case, Scalia accused the two young conservative justices of "faux judicial restraint." The seeds of a split between two generations of conservatives had been sown: The younger justices opted for the tortoise, while their impatient elders chose the hare. Scalia and Thomas call to mind the famous quip about Gladstone being an old man in a hurry.
The urgency that Thomas and Scalia feel about "fixing" constitutional doctrine in big, sweeping ways may simply be caused by their lengthy tenures on the bench. Scalia and Thomas have served for 22 and 17 years respectively. Roberts and Alito have each served just over two. The young Turks are not sitting on decades of accumulated frustration and outrage. (Scalia barely bothers to hide his scorn for his lily-livered colleagues these days; he sneered in his dissent that last Thursday's Guantanamo ruling "will almost certainly cause more Americans to get killed.") But Roberts and Alito can afford to move slowly, with an eye toward how things look to observers already sourly suspicious -- especially after the travesty of Bush v. Gore-- that the court has become crassly political. And with the court hearing fewer cases every year -- it heard just 70 this year, its shortest docket in modern history -- the decision to slow the pace of change is probably a savvy one.
At the liberal end of the spectrum, Breyer and Stevens appear increasingly inclined to work with the court's conservatives to sidestep the trap of a 5 to 4 stalemate. Again, that may have more to do with age than you'd think. At 88, Stevens may well be the justice closest to retirement, and he may not to want to end his brilliant career with a series of brokenhearted dissents. At 69, Breyer may feel -- much like Alito and Roberts -- that he can afford to be a bit patient. He may also be learning the lesson that Sandra Day O'Connor taught in recent years: You can catch more votes with honey than with vinegar.
But the notion that time heals all wounds may mask what really lies beneath the new compromises at the high court. Consider how these new majorities of six, seven or eight justices are actually forged. Time and again, the justices have converged around the narrowest possible reading of a case -- in effect using the decision as a placeholder to say, "We'll decide the present case on very narrow facts, but we reserve the right to revisit the underlying issues in years to come."
This approach certainly represents judicial minimalism, or humility, and it was the young chief justice's confirmation promise to the American people. But it also does very little to guide future litigants. It's a deflection -- a constitutional push of the pause button that allows legislatures and the electorate to catch up. This new conciliation is a way for the younger justices to defer ideological disagreements and for the aging justices to pass the baton to their more energetic successors. And it may simply reflect an understanding on the part of various justices that some of them have big dreams but very little time remaining, while others have big dreams and all the time in the world.
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