The Review
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Review PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH, as usual, has a clear and insightful explanation of the Supreme Court's ruling in the Cincinnati vouchers case.
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Review) PEGGY NOONAN has more on the rise of the White Collar Big Money Psychopath.
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Review) CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER says that the key point in GEORGE W. BUSH's Palestine speech was not that YASSER ARAFAT had to go, but rather for the first time, the president has put the goal of bringing democracy to the Mideast squarely on the table.
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Review) RALPH PETERS says that the recent bout of scandals over accounting practices in large corporations shows that, in the end, the system works. After all, they did get caught.
Here, in the world's largest economy, unscrupulous CEOs and CFOs have nearly unlimited opportunities to cheat investors, banks and their own employees. But they get caught in the end.
I still believe, firmly, that in Americasuch cheating is the exception. But in most of the more than 50 countries I've visited, such bad behavior is simply business as usual. You have to see the world firsthand to appreciate how honest and decent most American corporations really are.
In general, I agree with the main thrust of his argument; however, even though these guys are now being found out and will soon be on their way to a federal penitentiary -- where the term "irregular practices" will take on a whole new meaning -- they have done a lot of damage to the general economic and investment environment in the meantime.
I suspect that several years from now, when we look back on this, the loss of confidence in the investment markets, accounting practices, and investing in general, will have proven to be a watershed moment in our economic history. I suspect it may take years to the markets to regain the confidence they had in the '90s and began pushing forward to new highs.
In the end, the market is about more than earnings or stock prices. The health of the market is a direct reflection on the confidence that the investing public has in the transparency and fairness of the market. When that confidence is broken, it can take a fairly long time before investors are willing to place their trust in it again.
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Review JONAH GOLDBERG says the Constitution doesn't matter
that much:
If you step back and listen to the arguments over the Pledge of Allegiance it's amazing how diverse, and often stupid, the debate is. There's almost no argument, pro or con, which hasn't been made ten times over in every variation of passion. Yeah, intellectually, many liberals agree with the court. And many conservatives are content to concede that this decision is at least consistent with legal precedents (even if, to paraphrase Dickens, the precedents are an ass).
But emotionally, instinctively, most people think this was an idiotic decision at minimum and a dangerous one at worst. The instantaneous 99-0 vote in the Senate, the little-noticed fact that evangelical secularist Barry Lynn and the plaintiff are pretty much the only two people willing to defend this decision on TV, the general mockery from late-night comics -- all point to the fact that most Americans don't care whether the constitutional reasoning is solid.
It seems that when push comes to shove, Americans like to have a little bit of "ceremonial Deism" in public life.
Review) MARK STEYN's commentary on GEORGE W. BUSH's Palestine speech and the Kananaskis summit, is as usual, biting and incisive.
For Bush, the Kananaskis summit is a better emblem for the state of the planet than even his hosts realize: the representatives of the free world holed up in a luxury resort surrounded by a wilderness of grizzlies, mountain lions and other predators. Of course, that symbolism -- the fragility of civilization -- only works if you take on board such Bush concepts as "liberty" and "barbarism," and, as we know, most of his G8 confreres have a more nuanced view, which is one reason he's ceased paying them any heed, as was made evident by his speech on Palestine.
The Bush plan on the Middle East and the Chrétien plan on Africa are not just differences in priorities but in fundamental approach. The NEPAD business is in the grand tradition of multilateral plans; the Palestine plan is really an anti-plan, a plan for those who don't like plans. Mr. Chrétien really thinks he can save Africa, and so do his chums at The Globe And Mail who hailed it last month as "a deal to pull Africa out of poverty." Mr. Bush is under no illusions that he brings peace to the Middle East and his plan is to have no plans on the subject until those involved get serious. He's not "imposing" "onerous" "conditions" on the Palestinians. His message to them is a simple one: No shirt, no shoes, no service. They're not conditions, only a statement of the obvious: It may be "up to the Palestinians" (as Chirac, Graham et al. insist) to choose their leaders but if they choose corrupt and duplicitous terrorism-facilitators like "Chairman" Arafat, there's no reason on earth why the United States should help them to statehood.
If Mr. Chrétien had decided to devote this summit to Palestine, he would have had a big plan brokered with the EU, he'd have flown in Arafat and Assad and Saudi "Crown" "Prince" Abdullah and a bunch of Arab League honchos -- and nothing would have come of it, because it would have been predicated on a fiction. The acronym for Mr. Chrétien's African plan -- NEPAD, pronounced "kneepad" -- could just as easily be applied to the Euro-Canadian approach to Mr. Arafat: If you spend enough time on your kneepads, the guy'll come round. He won't. Mr. Bush has seen the Arafat memo authorizing a payment of US$20,000 to the family of that last suicide bomber -- the one the Chairman supposedly "condemned." The President has made a statement of the obvious: You can't plan on a fellow like that. Mr. Bush's plan is, in fact, a superb explanation of why he doesn't have a plan.
This is, by the way, why the United States didn't go out of its way to enlist European support any meaningful way from most of our European allies. Until the Europeans understand that the consensual type of diplomacy that's practiced within the European Union is almost completely inapplicable anywhere outside of it, they simply will not be able to provide any meaningful assistance in the war against terror, or in obtaining peace in the Mideast.
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Review) COLBERT KING tells a story about the criminal justice system and Washington D.C. By the time he's done you're not sure which emotion you feel is the strongest: anger or sadness.
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Review) MARTIN INDYK lays out a road map in the Washington Post for implementing the vision for a Palestinian state laid out by GEORGE W. BUSH in his speech earlier this week. In doing so, you lays out all of the necessary requirements for success in implementing the president's vision. The last paragraph, however, he does have one small warning:
The only catch is that it will require the United States and its allies to confront Palestinian terrorist organizations, exposing U.S. troops to the suicide bombers while they engage directly in the kind of military actions in Palestinian cities and refugee camps that have earned Israel international opprobrium. But the president's rhetorical commitment to personal engagement in the radical transformation of Palestine could combine with a further descent into violent chaos there to produce circumstances that require a much deeper engagement. Breathtaking visions of nation-building in the Holy Land can have unintended consequences.
Actually, that's a pretty large catch. The fact is in their current mood there's no guarantee that a democratic Palestinian state will make decisions that are any more well thought out than those Mr. Arafat has been making recently. Every opinion poll I've seen, plus all of the street demonstrations, and all of the other indicators that one can find, indicate that the Palestinians are in a fairly belligerent mood. It may very well be that if the Palestinians are allowed to express themselves democratically we may not like the opinions they express, or the leaders they choose. Indeed, we might end up with a far more radical Palestinian Authority than we already have.
In such a case, it's difficult to see how we are moved farther along on the road towards peace if in fact what the Palestinians want is more dead Jews.
If the Palestinians do hold onto that death cult thing they seem to be engaged in, it does not bode well for the future. In the past when such states have been caught up in similar delusions, the only way to disabuse them of their folly has been to defeat them decisively and utterly, eliminating their delusions with an application the harsh dose of reality that is embodied by war.
And make no mistake about it, when the world begins to see pictures of American soldiers going into Palestinian refugee camps, and having to shoot up the place because they come under fire, I doubt that's going to have a positive impact on our relations with the rest of the Arab world. Of course, having said that, I also suspect that a lasting peace and Palestine is not possible
without some sort of decisive military conflict with the Arab world in general. I certainly hope that won't be the case, but I fear that it will be.
If it does come to that, we had better be prepared to deal them the same sort of defeat that we dealt to the Germans and the Japanese.
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Review) MEGAN McARDLE has a wonderful post over her blog. She takes the case of the large woman who tried to take a Southwest Airlines flight, then got upset because she was so large that Southwest Airlines wanted her to buy two seats instead of one, to keep her from crushing the poor son of a gun who was assigned to sit next to her. Megan parlays this into a really wonderful explanation of the economics of the airline industry. Not only is it well-written but it's simple, and easy for the laymen to understand, without all those buzzwords and other boring stuff that economists usually stick in their writing.
This one is not to be missed.
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Review) The fantastically talented MEGAN McARDLE explains everything you need to know about the Worldcom debacle in one easy lesson.
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Review) Hmmm. Maybe the Pledge of Allegiance isn't unconstitutional after all.
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Review JONAH GOLDBERG in todays's NRO vis a vis Mideast Peace:
But my favorite example of this Mobius-strip logic: the people here in the U.S. who would justify suicide bombings because Palestinians don't have tanks and planes while insisting that the Palestinians want peace. Well, if they are only using suicide bombers because they don't have tanks and planes, logic suggests that if they had tanks and planes they would use them. In other words, they're at war with Israel, they're just poorly equipped. If a career armed robber doesn't have a gun and uses a crowbar instead, that doesn't change the fact that he's a robber. If he told the judge "I don't have guns and squad cars like the police, I have to use a crowbar," we wouldn't nod with appreciation at the impeccable logic. But if you make this point about Palestinians, eyes roll at your simplistic view of such a complicated situation.
At some point, the truth about the Palestinians needs to be told and accepted, which is that they are at war with Israel. They wish to destroy Israel more than they want a peaceful state of their own. They would rather have tier own children die killing Jews than live in an independent Palestine.
That's just creepy.
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Review) FOUAD AJAMI has a powerful and compelling article in today's OpinionJournal. Here's a good bit:
The "realists" will say that Palestinian political culture is what it is and can do no better than Arafat and the masked men of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. But the bet must be made that Palestinian society--its professionals and merchants, and the deep wisdom that comes to ordinary men and women who have endured endless betrayals--can do better than the autocracy of the Maximum Leader in the Ramallah compound and the cynical, cruel bargain he has made with the perpetrators of terror. "You deserve democracy and the rule of law. You deserve an open society and a thriving economy," President Bush told the Palestinians. There must be decent men and women in the Palestinian world who can see in this new opening an alternative to rule by brigands.
Arafat made his wager and lost: he had bet that an America in the throes of an antiterror campaign in the Islamic world would have no choice but to conciliate him. He had fallen for and had peddled the old legend that a foreign power out to organize and lead a coalition in the world of Islam will have to grant the Palestinians all sorts of concessions. Indeed, Operation Enduring Freedom required a new kind of clarity, a distancing of America from the deeds and follies of Arafat and his lieutenants. For the Palestinians the choice couldn't be clearer: It is either a starring role on the broadcasts of al-Jazeera, or a patient political process that brings the Palestinian world back to the compromises and patience of political life.
A people who give themselves over to the fury of "the street" and the rage of suicide bombers are a people who have lost their way. Pollsters tell us that 60% of the Palestinian population approves of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians--civilians no less! A people in the throes of this kind of vengeance and radicalism needs leaders who can tell it sobering truths about what the balance of power, and the judgment of the contemporary order of nations, will permit. This kind of clarity has never been an Arafat trademark.
There is much, much, more in the full article.
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Review) My newest TechCentralStation article, on Ballistic Missile Defense, is up and running.
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Review) ABRAHAM FOXMAN writes in the Washington Post today about the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe.
Throughout history a constant barometer for judging the level of hate and exclusion vs. the level of freedom and democracy in any society has been anti-Semitism -- how a country treats its Jewish citizens. Jews have been persecuted and delegitimized throughout history because of their perceived differences. Any society that can understand and accept Jews is typically more democratic, more open and accepting of "the other." This predictor has held true throughout the ages.
During the Holocaust, Jews and other minorities of Europe were dispatched to the camps and, ultimately, their deaths in an environment rife with anti-Semitism. Nearly 60 years later in a modern, democratic Europe that presumably had shed itself of the legacy of that era, Jews have again come under attack. During the past year and a half a troubling epidemic of anti-Jewish hatred, not isolated to any one country or community, has produced a climate of intimidation and fear in the Jewish communities of Europe. Never, as a Holocaust survivor, did I believe we would witness another eruption of anti-Semitism of such magnitude, in Europe of all places.
I simply don't understand why there are still people in America who are concerned with what the Europeans think. Trust me, try living in Europe for a few years, and you'll come home with a lot less assurance that the Europeans are worth listening to. I've said it before, and I say it again: For the last century, the Europeans have either participated in, appeased, or ignored totalitarianism, armed aggression, and genocide, then required American political, economic, and military power to rescue them from the results of their own folly. As such, I don't grant that the Europeans speak from a morally superior point of view about...well...anything.
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Review) JOHN PODHORETZ thinks that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, by saying that the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional, has just given the GOP a huge stick with which to beat the Dems over the head and shoulders mercilessly.
But this time there's precious little they can do to avoid the GOP bulldozer. If they agree with Republican pols that the decision was wrong - which Senate Democrats did yesterday by joining in a 99-0 resolution condemning the ruling - they'll help the GOP raise money.
The Republican Party really ought to send the Ninth Circuit a nice basket of fruit and maybe even some flowers. The judges have made the GOP's day, week, month and year.
This is probably true. The new line will be, "See what kind of judges those Democrats want to put on the bench? Vote Republican so that W can put more mainstream judges on the bench."
It also has the virtue of being true. In general, the judges that Democrats put on the bench tend to be farther out of the mainstream of American thought than the judges nominated by conservatives. Americans may not buy into a lot of the conservative philosophy, but they certainly don't agree with the leftist party line pushed by the academic world from which liberal judges tend to come.
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Review) The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the most overturned appeals court in the nation, has now ruled that the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance is unconstitutional. This decision illustrates why the 9th Circuit is the most overturned circuit. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that nonspecific, non-sectarian, references to God are perfectly Constitutional, and are part of our tradition of benign public expressions of religion.
What I really want to know is what ass decided that this was important enough to make a Federal case out of. I mean, I'm sure there are more pressing issues than whether or not the pledge mentions God in passing.
But, of course, nothing is too small to escape action from the Perennially Worried.
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Review) Salon magazine leads of the story like this:
Two noted Israeli scholars have been sacked from European journals, victims of a boycott against Israel. Why are progressive intellectuals descending to such bankrupt tactics?
Uh, well, maybe because progressive intellectuals have
always used such tactics. I mean, geez, look at the history of the progressive movement. It's full of examples of people who got blacklisted because they were ideologically inconvenient. Look at what happened to guys like RON RADOSH or DAVID HOROWITZ. Hell, the second you begin to even questions some of the "progressive" movement's tenets, you're out on your ear before you can say "Workers of the world, Unite!"
To even ask the question is simply another sign of the left Not Getting It.
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Review) Environmentalists insist that humanity really has overshot the earth’s carrying capacity this time. RONALD BAILEY says they're wrong.
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Review) THOMAS FRIEDMAN. Still in Iran. Still writing good stuff. You should read it.
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Review) Thanks to Worldcom's announcement that its financial reports for the last 5 quarters have been a steaming pile of bushwah, the market is tanking today.
CFO Scott Sullivan has been fired. Huh. That's the least of his worries now, since he's probably going to be finding himself on the bus to the federal pen in Marion, IL, in the near future, where he'll undoubtedly learn about a whole new kind of "irregular procedure", if you know what I mean.
Oh, by the way, who was Worldcom's auditor during 2001-2002? Arthur Andersen, of course.
These accounting irregularities have to stop. I suspect the SEC will be going over financial statements for companies with a fine-toothed comb, now.
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Review) In a move entirely unrelated to GEORGE W. BUSH's call for new leadership in the Palestinian authority, the Palestinian authority has called for new elections.
Unfortunately, YASSER ARAFAT, whose presidential term expired a few years ago, will be running for re-election again. Since his general practice is to have his political opponents dragged into the street and shot in the head, he probably has a good chance of winning re-election. The "race" therefore will do exactly what other Arab "elections" do. It's sole purpose is to provide a thin veneer of legitimacy, without actually endangering the power structure of the PA.
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Review) Well-known progressive TODD GITLIN has discovered--gasp--anti-Semitism on the left. Like Inspector Reynaud, he's shocked,
shocked, to discover this. How can this be happening in the progressive movement, especially among students, who should be so much more noble than the general population?
Well, Todd, here's two answers.
1) In general, students are dumber than a bag of hammers. Not because they're intrinsically dumb, of course, but because they haven't been around long enough to know anything. They've lived with Mom and Dad all their lives. They've never bought a car, rented a house, or balanced a checkbook. They are empty little vessls. Indeed, to even be a student, one must, a priori, be ignorant. That's
why they're students. This whole idea that 19-year-old college kids have a freaking clue about...well...
anything is asinine. These ignorant children actually believe what their teachers tell them. Throw in the standard youthful idealism, as well as the general lack of experience and the wisdom experience brings, and you will produce ignorant little blatherskites that mindlessly ape the pretentious musings of their professors, all while feeling smugly self-assured that their
feelings are a reliable indicator of reality.
2) Unfortunately, since many of those teachers are possessed of a peculiar stupidity that can only be attained through several years of post-graduate study, followed by years of separation from the real world in the academic ivory tower, much of what the teachers tell the students is simply wrong. There is, after all, a reason why "progressive" states like the USSR collapsed under the weight of foolish ideas. So, when academics tell their students about the nobility of the Palestinian cause, and compare the Israelis to Nazis, it seems overly tendentious to wonder why these students, many of whom have probably never even met a Jew in their lives, suddenly become anti-Semitic bigots.
You, Mr. Gitlin, and your "progressive" ilk, are responsible. It has been the "progressives" that have lionized the Palestinians, ignored and excused their terror and anti-Semitism , while at the same time excoriating anyone who has publicly defended Israel, and compared the state of Israel to Nazi Germany.
So, let's not come over all surprised to learn that these children start acting on what you've been feeding them.
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Review) MY TCS article on NATO is up.
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Review) OK, so the immediate danger of war between India and Pakistan has receded for the time being. Unfortunately, the core problem of Kashmir has not fundamentally changed, which means that the fuse is still lit.
Fortunately, PETER BEINART of The New Republic is keeping an eye on things for us, just so we don't forget. And he also reports that things aren't as bad as they were, and there may even be some hope for the future, if the Bush Administration plays its cards right.
India has long opposed foreign meddling in its governance of Kashmir. And the United States has abided by that. But the Bush team--which has forced Musharraf to back down twice in the last six months--today enjoys more leverage in New Delhi than any American administration in memory. And just as the U.S. parlayed its post-Gulf war prestige in the Middle East into the 1991 Madrid peace talks, it may now be able to parlay its post-Afghan war influence into an internationally mediated peace process for Kashmir. Over time, with British, Russian, and Chinese help, that process could recreate a moderate Kashmiri nationalism willing to accept Indian sovereignty in return for self-governance and human rights. And that, in turn, would buttress liberalism and secularism in Pakistan.
It's always nice to glimpse that silver lining, isn't it?
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Review) Recently, it seems that I'm starting to agree with NICK KRISTOFF more and more. Today he writes about those horrible third-world sweatshops.
The third world is already battered by heartless conservatives in the West who peddle arms and cigarettes or who (like the Bushies) block $34 million desperately needed for maternal and infant health by the United Nations Population Fund. So it's catastrophic for muddle-minded liberals to join in and cudgel impoverished workers for whom a sweatshop job is the first step on life's escalator.
By this point, I've offended every possible reader. But before you spurn a shirt made by someone like 8-year-old Kamis Saboor, an Afghan refugee whose father is dead and who is the sole breadwinner in the family, answer this question: How does shunning sweatshop products help Kamis? All the alternatives for him are worse.
"I dream of a job in a factory," said Noroz Khan, who lives on a garbage dump and spends his days searching for metal that he can sell to recyclers. He earns about $1.40 a day, and children earn just 30 cents a day for scrounging barefoot in the filth — a few feet away from us, birds were pecking at the bloated carcass of a cow, its feet in the air.
Of course, Western anti-sweatshop activists mean well and aim only for improved conditions and a "living wage." But the reality is that the bad publicity becomes one more headache for companies considering operating in international hellholes (where the only lure is wages so low that it would be embarrassing if journalists started asking questions about them), and so manufacturers opt to mechanize their operations and operate in somewhat more developed countries.
Of course these sweatshops are hideous by
our standards. But in the Third World, they are often the best jobs available to the people. They line up by the
hundreds to try to get these jobs. In general, Western activism about Third World sweatshops is moral vanity. It makes the rich Westerner feel good about his own nobility, while consigning these poor people to lives of backbreaking manual labor, or unemployment and starvation, and grinding poverty in both cases.
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Review) JOHN DERBYSHIRE takes a look at the Raciasl Privacy Initiative that WARD CONNERLY is pursuing in California.
Ward Connerly is the Sacramento businessman who is chairman of the American Civil Rights Coalition. He was a prime mover in the 1996 "Proposition 209" campaign to ban racial preferences in California public hiring, education, and contracting. Now he is arguing that since, following the success of that campaign, it is illegal for the state to discriminate by race, there is no reason why the state should continue to gather data on race, or to operate systems of racial classification for any but a small number of very restricted purposes. (You can read the precise wording of the RPI on the website tagged above). He is trying to get this new initiative on the ballot for either this November or next March.
Naturally, there is any number of people who will argue that the government has to keep track of racial matters.
The counterargument, put forward by Connerly himself, is that our governments need to stop taking notice of our race (or, in the case of "Hispanics," pseudo-race) as decisively as they stopped taking notice of our religion when the First Amendment was ratified. It's none of their business. True, it's difficult for our governments to wean themselves off their race fixation, which is as old as the Constitution itself. And we all know that once they have their fingernails dug into any one part of your flesh, it's awfully hard to pry them away. But if we could once get government people out of the race business, we might have a fair shot at racial peace, as we have had religious peace for 209 years.
I agree. The whole point of the Civil Rights movement was to make race irrelevant, not to push it to the forefront of the political spoils system. It is simply not possible to make race less divisive by putting it in everyone's face every day.
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Review) Oops. MARK LEVIN didn't like the Bush Speech either.
The Bush proposal is built on the same faulty premise as the Oslo Accords. Neither the Palestinians nor several of the terrorist states surrounding Israel seek peaceful coexistence with Israel. Every accord, every agreement, every treaty before and since Oslo has been viewed by the Palestinians and their allies as an incremental step toward Israel's demise. The historical record is incontrovertible and overwhelming.
The president's address is a de facto retreat in the war against terrorism. He essentially restates the Declaration of Principles of the Oslo Accords, fails to hold the terrorists and their state sponsors accountable for their horrific and repeated acts of murder, and offers no concrete plan to discourage future terrorism. Whatever happened to the Bush Doctrine?
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Review) RICH LOWRY, on the other hand, is more hopeful about the Bush speech.
Everyone realizes the shift in the Bush administration's policy toward the Palestinians, as outlined in Bush's speech yesterday.
But the sweep of the administration's ambition is much larger than the West Bank, extending to an effort to remake politics in the entire Middle East in a new reformist, free-market, pluralistic direction.
This is so important because the Palestinian Authority is a minnow in the Middle East, simply swimming the same way the bigger fish — the Iraqis, Syrians, and Saudis — do. It probably won't be until those larger states change that the PA embraces a new kind of politics.
Well, let's hope so.
Review) Mideast scholar DANIEL PIPES is not too impressed with GEORGE W. BUSH's speech on Palestine yesterday. He writes:
A house cannot be built from a blueprint that gets wrong the terrain, the size and shape of the plot, and the building materials. Likewise, a political program cannot work if it is premised on errors.
By rewarding terrorism, the Bush speech sets back the current war effort; by misunderstanding the Palestinian-Israeli war, it is rendered unworkable as a serious effort at conflict resolution. In all, it represents a disappointment and a missed opportunity.
I happen to think the speech was signifigant for telling YASSER ARAFAT, "Get Out". Pipes is less impressed.
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Review) Well, he did it. GEORGE BUSH has called for the creation of an "interim" Palestinian state. At the same time, he also said that it's time for YASSER ARAFAT to go.
Arafat's toadies, of course, immediately objected, claiming that Arafat was democratically elected, which is 1) a bit of a stretch considering his thugs were already terrorizing Palestinians into voting for him even though he faced
no real opposition candidates, and 2) immaterial, even if true, because Arafat was "elected" for fixed term that expired months and months ago. Yet, he's still there, no new elections have been held, and his thugs bump off his political opponents in broad daylight.
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Review)) FRED BARNES writes that agreeng to a Palestinian state at this particular time is tantamount to going wobbly in the war on terrorism.
Though Bush's embrace of an interim state is highly conditional, his plan will be harmful to him nonetheless--morally, strategically, and politically. The moral angle is quite simple: He's rewarding Palestinian terrorism. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has failed to deliver a promised speech denouncing suicide bombings, and he hasn't arrested any Palestinian terrorists either. Yet his regime would suddenly be moved a large step closer to full statehood. And Bush would also weaken his brave and lonely support of Israel as it suffers relentless terrorist attacks. That has moral undertones as well.
In general, I agree. There will, at the end of the day, probably have to be a Palestinian state. But I would never allow YASSER ARAFAT to be a part of it, nor would I do it until the Palestinians find a way to get over the death-cult of martyrdom that seems to have overcome them.
Doing it now might just be a recipe for disaster.
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Review) STANLEY KURTZ writes that we are unprepared for a real war on terror. As a result, we may not be able to, say, attack Iraq.
But let us return to the real issue. We are not prepared to handle the all-too-possible consequences of an invasion of Iraq. Nor are we prepared for all the other imponderables that the war on terror holds, a war that will likely be with us for years or decades. Someday, somewhere, we may pay the price for our lack of preparedness. Indeed, we may even shirk what is necessary in Iraq because our leaders understand that we are not prepared. And yet the political barrier to doing something about our lack of military preparedness is immense. The problem, at base, is the question of what sort of country we have become in the wake of Vietnam and the sixties. So in the end, the real war and the culture war are the same war.
As I have argued previously, I believe we have problems with both manpower and logistics. And it doesn't appear that these problems are being addressed by the DoD in any meaningful way. Why? As Kurtz, says, it's all politics.
SHAMELESS PLUG: my new TCS article on keeping NATO viable should be up on TechCentralStation in the next day or so.
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Review) WILLIAM M. ARKIN has a fascinating analysis in today's Los Angeles Times about how to use modern military weapons and tactics in any attack on Iraq. He believes our technical and strategic thinkers have not kept pace with the amazing rapidity of technological development and are weapons systems. He argues for complete revision of our tactical and strategic thinking.
Even if you disagree with his conclusions, he makes cogent and interesting arguments.
