T h a t   O t h e r   B l o g

Usually interesting, sometimes funny, infrequently read.

:: thatotherblog {at} yahoo {dot} com ::

:: Monday, March 31 ::


WHAT IS 'A TIME OF WAR'?: Apparently the US has a new policy of automatically detaining all asylum-seekers from thirty-three countries plus the Palestinian territories until their applications have been processed. You're not supposed to know the part about the Palestinians being detained, though -- actually, you're not supposed to know the the names of any of the countries on the list due to "law enforcement and diplomatic sensitivities". (The New York Terrorist-Collabora... -- err, Times prints the list that human rights groups have pieced together in its article on the policy.)

One supporter of the new policy makes a seemingly fair observation:

David A. Martin, who was the general counsel for the immigration service during the Clinton administration, also said the new policy might be appropriate. "A categorical deterrence policy is in general a legitimate rationale," Mr. Martin said. "In a time of war and a time of risk, to impose it by nationality is defensible."

[W]hy do I think Dean has something special? It's not because he's extremely liberal. It's not cause he's a conservative Democrat. It's cause he's exciting college students -- a key component of the Nader demographic. Dean has an independent streak that will, I believe, appeal to Nader's supporters who ... are not the straight liberals that people assume.

Republicans don't mind their extremists because they help them win elections. Sure, Robertson and Buchanan can fuck around with primaries, but in the end, everyone votes Republican and they win. Our extremists lose elections for us. That's a big difference.

[A]nyone that gets fired up by Sharpton tends to end up sitting out the general election (see: his Senate primary loss in 1992, when the Republican went on to win in November despite Bill Clinton carrying New York State by sixteen points; and the race for mayor in 1997, when his primary challenge left a broke and debilitated Ruth Messinger to lose by seventeen points in the general). He's the kid in kickball who, after grounding out, storms off the field declaring that he's not playing anymore.

Let me put it another way: I'm convinced that the Black Panthers set back the cause of civil rights, PETA sets back the cause of animal rights, and vomit-ins are setting back the cause of peace activism. It's a free country, of course, and these folks can do what they want, but somehow we have to disassociate them from the Democratic party in the public's mind. I know perfectly well that Republicans have the same problem with the Christian right, but for some reason it doesn't hurt them among moderates as much as lefty extremism hurts Democrats. It's not fair, but it's a fact.

So there you have it: my problem with liberal extremism. It may not be an official part of the Democratic party, but it's an albatross around our necks anyway. We need to do something about it.

There shouldn't be ideological litmus tests for judicial nominees. Which is exactly why Democrats should oppose Owen's nomination, since it appears that the bill of particulars NARAL cites [about a parental notification law in Texas] was precisely what endeared Owen to the Bush administration in the first place. White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales -- who before going to Washington served on the Texas Supreme Court alongside Owen -- has acknowledged that Owen was chosen over another Texas Supreme Court justice, Deborah Hankinson, who ruled differently in several of the parental-notification cases. And as Neil A. Lewis reported in The New York Times this week, Hankinson -- a Republican appointed to the Texas Supreme Court by then-Governor Bush -- has told a number of people in the Austin legal community that "someone in the White House told her she was taken out of consideration explicitly because of her rulings in the teenage abortion cases."

In other words, if the Democrats confirm Owen they will be acquiescing to a litmus test, which will likely lead Bush to use that litmus test again. So if Democrats want the White House to stop nominating judges like Owen, then they have to show there is a penalty when it does.

As a member of Texas's highest court, Justice Owen dissented from a ruling granting a minor an exception to the law that she had to notify a parent before she obtained an abortion.

Justice Owen said the teenager in the case had not met the law's requirement of maturity because she had not demonstrated that she knew that there were religious objections to abortion.

In her first committee hearing, Justice Owen said she had drawn the requirement that a girl recognize religious objections from Supreme Court rulings. Her opponents insisted that there had never been any such language from the Supreme Court and her making it a requirement in Texas demonstrated that she let her personal feelings about abortion influence her legal analysis.

After Democrats asked her to explain her assertion that she had relied on Supreme Court rulings, Justice Owen issued a written answer, which Democrats disclosed today. The complex answer, prepared with help from administration lawyers, said she had been referring to language in a 1979 Supreme Court case, Bellotti v. Baird, in which four justices, not a majority, said that abortion was an issue "that for some people raises profound moral and religious concerns."

Justice Owen said that language was cited with approval by a majority in another case two years later.

Elizabeth Cavendish, legal director of Naral Pro-choice America, an abortion rights group, said, "To say that Supreme Court language noting that some people may have religious views on abortion is 100 miles away from saying, as she did, that a religious requirement should be imported into the Texas law."

[M]any speculate that it was not Gonzales but White House political adviser Karl Rove who, in his effort to shore up Bush's right flank, pushed Owen for the federal bench. After all, unlike Gonzales, Rove has worked quite well with Owen: He was paid close to $250,000 to oversee her successful 1994 campaign for the Texas Supreme Court. (The Texas governor appoints justices only when a vacancy arises; otherwise they run for six-year terms.)

"I'm a free trader. I will work to end terriers and barriffs everywhere, across the world".

The United States lost a major trade dispute to Europe today, with the World Trade Organization ruling that the steel tariffs imposed by President Bush last year were illegal.

The administration said immediately that it would appeal the decision.

While Mr. Moynihan's 24-year career in the Senate was not marked by legislative milestones, but by ideas, the legislative lion, Senator Kennedy, nonetheless once described him as an exemplar ``of what the Founding Fathers thought the Senate would be about,'' because of the New Yorker's breadth of interests, ``having read history, and thought about it, and being opinionated.''

Mr. Moynihan was a singular scholar, less an original researcher than a bold, often brilliant synthesizer whose works compelled furious debate and further research.

In January 1980, he told the Senate: ``The Soviet Union is a seriously troubled, even sick, society. The indices of economic stagnation and even decline are extraordinary. The indices of social disorder -- social pathology is not too strong a term -- are even more so. ... The defining event of the decade might well be the break-up of the Soviet Empire.''

Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont who has presented himself as an antiwar candidate, was back in Iowa, a state with a large and vocal antiwar wing among Democrats. It was the start of what an aide said would be a week like any other week in Dr. Dean's campaign.

France -- to say nothing of Germany, which is now an official member of the Axis of Semi-Evil along with Cuba and Libya, according to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- needs a political communication consultant.

The Texas case is a challenge to a law that makes it a crime for people of the same sex to engage in "deviate sexual intercourse," defined as oral or anal sex. In accepting the case, the justices agreed to consider whether to overturn a 1986 precedent, Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld a Georgia sodomy law that at least on its face, if not in application, also applied to heterosexuals.

While the Texas case has received enormous attention from gay news organizations and other groups that view the 1986 decision as particularly notorious, it has been largely overshadowed in a busy Supreme Court term by the challenge to the University of Michigan's affirmative action program. Programs like Michigan's allow preferential admissions treatment for members of minority groups and others underrepresented in student bodies. The justices accepted both cases on the same day last December, and briefs have been submitted along identical schedules. The Texas case will be argued next Wednesday and the Michigan case six days later, on April 1.

After September 11, 2001, enormous crowds in Berlin and London and Paris, and even in Tehran, bore candlelit witness to their solidarity with wounded America. NATO, for the first time ever, invoked the provision of its charter declaring an attack against one to be an attack against all. With the blessing of the U.N. Security Council, the soldiers of a dozen countries fought alongside ours in Afghanistan. (Germans and French, among others, are still there.) Just a year and a half later, in almost every sizable city of Europe, North America, and the rest of the democratic world, the United States government became the target of what was apparently the largest coördinated one-day popular protest in the history of the world. In the Security Council, America’s adversaries suddenly include, for the time being, at least, its putative friends, old and new alike. And wherever pollsters ply their trade they find -- incredibly -- that the publics of the democratic world regard the United States as a greater menace to peace and safety than Iraq.

How did it come to this? Some of the strain, as Robert Kagan argues, is structural, the natural result of asymmetries -- of military strength, of historical experience -- between America and Europe. And some is the consequence of European obtuseness, shortsightedness, hypocrisy, and wishful thinking. Russia and France (and, to a lesser extent, Germany) are not without blame in this crackup. Each in its own way is playing for advantage, worrying over its portion of influence in the world, calculating its economic stakes in Iraq and the Middle East generally. But it is the policies, attitudes, and ideological blindnesses of the Bush Administration that have turned a chronic but manageable alliance problem into an acute crisis. [...]

The roots of that failure have been growing for two years. The Administration trashed the Kyoto environmental treaty, the A.B.M. treaty, and the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, and did so contemptuously and arrogantly, without offering compromises or remedies for their flaws; it demanded the ouster of Yasir Arafat while offering no resistance to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank; it defined the war on terrorism exclusively in the theological language of good versus evil, viewing any attempt to analyze terrorism politically as morally inadmissible; it undermined the power of the convincing reasons for confronting Saddam (such as his consistent failure to disclose and dispose of his weapons of mass destruction) by mixing them with unconvincing ones (such as his alleged coöperation with Al Qaeda); it created the impression that the U.N. effort to disarm Iraq has been a charade masking a predetermined plan to oust Saddam by force no matter what.

The United States bears the burden of leadership in this world whether its chooses to or not. This administration has shirked and abused that responsibility at every opportunity. There is an increasingly large gap between the ever-greater need for US leadership in global affairs and the depths to which this administration's irresponsible exercise of power diminishes us. They have not led.

An Egyptian government spokesman, Nabil Osman, blamed rogue officers for abuses and said there was no systematic policy of torture.

"Any terrorist will claim torture — that's the easiest thing," Mr. Osman said. "Claims of torture are universal. Human rights organizations make their living on these claims. Their job is not to talk about the human rights of the victim but of the human rights of the terrorist or those in jail."

Mr. Osman declined to say whether Egypt had assisted with interrogations of Qaeda suspects at the request of the Americans. He would say only that both governments had cooperated in sharing information about terrorists and potential terrorist activities.

"We are providing them with a wealth of information," he said.

He said many of Egypt's antiterrorism initiatives, like military tribunals, had been imitated by the Untied States. "We set the model," he said, "for combating terrorism."

[T]orture is systematically practiced by the security forces in Egypt, in particular by the State Security Intelligence.

The Western intelligence official described Mr. Faruq's interrogation as "not quite torture, but about as close as you can get."

He said sleep deprivation was "probably within the lexicon."

Colonel King said that an American military pathologist had determined that the deaths of two prisoners in December were homicides and that the circumstances were still under investigation.

[D]eny that the Iraqi regime is particularly ugly, that it lies somewhere outside the range of ordinary states, or to argue that, however ugly it is, it doesn't pose any significant threat to its neighbors or to world peace. Perhaps, despite Saddam's denials, his government is in fact seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. But other governments are doing the same thing, and if or when Iraq succeeds in developing such weapons—so the argument continues—we can deal with that through conventional deterrence, in exactly the same way that the US and the Soviet Union dealt with each other in the cold war years.

[A]rgue that the present system of containment and control is working and can be made to work better. This means that we should acknowledge the awfulness of the Iraqi regime and the dangers it poses, and then aim to deal with those dangers through coercive measures short of war. ... Defending the embargo, the American overflights, and the UN inspections: this is the right way to oppose, and to avoid, a war. But it invites the counter-argument that a short war, which made it possible to end the embargo, and the weekly bombings, and the inspection regime, would be morally and politically preferable to this "avoidance." A short war, a new regime, a demilitarized Iraq, food and medicine pouring into Iraqi ports: wouldn't that be better than a permanent system of coercion and control? Well, maybe. But who can guarantee that the war would be short and that the consequences in the region and elsewhere will be limited?

Right now, even at this last minute, there still are alternatives, and that is the best argument against going to war. I think that it is a widely accepted argument, even though it isn't easy to march with. What do you write on the placards? What slogans do you shout? We need a complicated campaign against the war, whose participants are ready to acknowledge the difficulties and the costs of their politics.

Or, better, we need a campaign that isn't focused only on the war (and that might survive the war) -- a campaign for a strong international system, organized and designed to defeat aggression, to stop massacres and ethnic cleansing, to control weapons of mass destruction, and to guarantee the physical security of all the world's peoples. The threefold constraints on Saddam's regime are only one example, but a very important one, of how such an international system should function.

America's failures and crimes are the patrimony of anti-Americanism, its treasures and its darlings. They inflame and disseminate anti-Americanism, but they are not its root cause. For that we must look to American success, American power, and America's consequent ability to thwart the ambitions of other states and impose its agenda on the rest of the world.

France is not the only country in Europe or the world whose ambitions were frustrated by the British and American hegemonies. France is not the only country which, left to its own devices, would embrace a kinder and gentler, if slower, form of capitalist transformation than the one that the Anglo-Saxon model imposes. France is not the only country in which intellectual and social elites dread the restructuring and decentralization that the Anglo-Saxon model brings in its train. Nor is it the only country where the state fears the loss of authority and power to Anglo-Saxon-driven globalization, with its attendant requirements of low taxes, transparency, and equal treatment for foreign investors and firms.

The challenge for Americans and non-Americans alike is not to end anti-Americanism; only the collapse of American power could accomplish that task. Today, the task is to manage pragmatically the resentments, irritations, and real grievances that inevitably accompany the rise to power of one nation, one culture, and one social model in a complex, divided, and passionate world.

Then there are the notebooks, the daily logs of personal and political activities that Mr. Graham has kept for more than 25 years, their covers color-coded by season. In their thousands of pages, Mr. Graham records his weight, changes of clothes and other minutiae. In 2000, Time magazine made such sport of the logs that some Democrats thought the habit spoiled Mr. Graham's prospects of becoming Al Gore's running mate.

Mr. Graham said he began carrying the notebooks during his first gubernatorial race, inspired by the example of his father, who always carried notebooks around his dairy farm, noting sick cows or fences in need of mending. Mr. Graham notes the names and needs of constituents, to remind himself to follow up.

"I guess I err on the side of inclusion," he said, recalling how Time noted that on the night before one of his four daughters gave birth to her first son, "She wanted to watch a light movie, and so we watched, `Ace Ventura, Pet Detective,' and so I wrote that down."

Mrs. Graham interjected with a gentle smile, "And you rewound it, too." She called the notebooks "an important tool," and noted that her husband's official portrait as governor shows him with one in hand.

"The standard for any type of interrogation of somebody in American custody is to be humane and to follow all international laws and accords dealing with this type of subject. That is precisely what has been happening, and exactly what will happen." [Emphasis added]

"This is the equivalent of the liberation of Paris in the Second World War," said Rep. Porter Goss, R-Florida.

White House and GOP officials remain concerned about the sluggish economy, which contributed to the defeat of Bush's father in 1992. They differ, however, with strategists for some Democratic presidential candidates who believe that once a possible war with Iraq is over, economic and domestic concerns will dominate the 2004 campaign. Top Bush advisers say that even if Iraq is settled quickly, concerns about international terrorism will compete with anxiety about the economy, much as they did in 2002.

"Iraq is one chapter in the war on terrorism, as Afghanistan was one chapter in a war against terrorism," said a senior Bush adviser.

Former President George H. W. Bush has defended his decision not to remove Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, from power in 1991, saying that allowing American troops to march on Baghdad would have "instantly shattered" the coalition that had supported Operation Desert Storm in Kuwait.

In a speech at Tufts University on Wednesday, Mr. Bush said that keeping the "unprecedented international coalition" together helped build momentum for a Middle East peace conference in Madrid in 1991 that included Arab states like Egypt and Jordan.

"The Madrid conference would never have happened," Mr. Bush said, "if the United States had gone on its own, had gone into Baghdad after Saddam and his forces had surrendered and agreed to disarm."

The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America’s most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security. ...

We are straining beyond its limits an international system we built with such toil and treasure, a web of laws, treaties, organizations, and shared values that sets limits on our foes far more effectively than it ever constrained America’s ability to defend its interests.

I am resigning because I have tried and failed to reconcile my conscience with my ability to represent the current U.S. Administration.

It was not just Mr. Dean’s obvious enthusiasm that won him the approval from the crowd, although his rapid-fire delivery and McCain-style bluntness certainly helped. It was his seeming willingness to give voice to their frustrations on a variety of important issues, assuaging their Democratic-loser complexes by providing a forceful antidote to President Bush that sounded every bit as doctrinaire and assertive as the President’s own fierce conservatism. Mr. Dean even turned some of his eclectic political philosophy to advantage in wooing his liberal audience—as he is frequently at pains to point out, he considers himself a moderate and has been assailed vigorously in Vermont from the left as well as the right—by portraying his positions for gun-ownership rights and states’ rights as matters of high principle, and also potential selling points in conservative parts of the country.

On Iraq, Kerry campaign manager Jim Jordan told the Associated Press that Mr. Dean wanted to give the U.N. "veto power over national-security decisions," and that it was "an extraordinary proposition, one never endorsed by any U.S. President or serious candidate for the Presidency."

I believe that the President too often employs a reckless, go-it-alone approach that drives us away from some of our longest-standing and most important allies, when what we need is to pull the world community together in common action against the imminent threat of terrorism.

I believe that the President undercuts our long-term national security interests and the established international order when he seeks to replace decades of bipartisan consensus on the use of American force with a new doctrine justifying preemptive attacks against other nation states -- not because of their current action or imminent threat, but to preempt a threat that could arise in the future. ...

I do not believe the President should have been given a green light to drive our nation into conflict without the case having first been made to Congress and the American people for why this war is necessary, and without a requirement that we at least try first to work through the United Nations. [Emphasis added.]

That the President was given open-ended authority to go to war in Iraq resulted from a failure of too many in my party in Washington who were worried about political positioning for the presidential election. ...

And the Administration has approached the United Nations more as an afterthought than as the international institution created to deal with precisely such a situation as we face in Iraq. From the outset, the Administration has seemed oblivious to the simple fact that it clearly would be in our interests for any war with Iraq to occur with UN authorization and cooperation and not without it.

The Administration's reckless bluster with our allies over Iraq has caused what could be lasting friction in important relationships and has injured our standing in the world community. ...

In short, America may have to go to war with Iraq, but we should not rush into war -- especially without broad international support.

Now, I am not among those who say that America should never use its armed forces unilaterally. In some circumstances, we have no choice. In Iraq, I would be prepared to go ahead without further Security Council backing if it were clear the threat posed to us by Saddam Hussein was imminent, and could neither be contained nor deterred.

The Defense Department general counsel released the list for public comment, and officials said the Pentagon planned to release a final list of crimes in early March.