Waiting for Justice. It's easy to urge gay men and lesbians to be patient and wait for society to come around to permitting same-sex marriage — if you're straight. It was also easy for most Americans to take their time about abolishing slavery. But waiting didn't seem so noble to the slave, and waiting does not, today, seem wise to gay men. The Stonewall Riots were almost 36 years ago. How long are we to wait? How long can any of us wait who belong to a species whose lifespan is only about "three score and ten"?
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And what of the precept "Justice delayed is justice denied"? It is never too soon to do justice.
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In researching where the quote "Justice delayed is justice denied" came from — I thought it was originated by the U.S. Supreme Court, perhaps during Earl Warren's tenure as Chief Justice — I discovered that it actually (apparently) was first uttered in that form by William Gladstone, a British politician of the 19th Century who traveled a long road from Conservative to Whig to Liberal. In checking the one quote, I came across some others you might want to see. I append some personal observations in brackets and italics. This first quotation is from worldofquotes.com:

Selfishness is the greatest curse of the human race. [(1890) Heterosexuals are to hold tight to sole possession of marriage. How does it hurt them to let others marry too?]

These are from brainyquote.com:

All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.

Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.

Nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right. [Anti-gay hate-mongering may have brought short-term advantage to Republicans in winning the White House and Congress in 2004, but when the Republican Party puts itself on the wrong side of history, as promoter of antique and eroding intolerance, it subverts its future.]

Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own. [How very relevant to today!]

There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle [Great Britain], that in freedom you lay the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order. [If the Federal Government had sided with slavery, in the 19th Century, and segregation in the mid-20th, how much loyalty could we expect from tens of millions of black Americans, and how much order would we enjoy in our streets? Gay Americans are for the most part nonviolent, tho the modern gay movement did arise from the Stonewall Riots, but this country has enemies, and when gay men are driven out of military translator jobs in the war against al-Qaeda, and otherwise insulted and attacked, society cannot long rely upon their continued loyalty. In an age when technology empowers a single individual to blow up a federal office building, it really is not a good idea to antagonize millions.]

You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side. [We can only hope. But how much time?]

And this last quote comes from bartleby.com:

National injustice is the surest road to national downfall. [Israel and its slaves in the U.S. Government really should heed that advice.]

Progress does not proceed at an even rate, but runs, then lags, skips expected steps, and jumps. Like tectonic plates sliding past each other, the longer no movement occurs, the more tension builds, and the bigger the destruction when the plates do finally slip. We saw that in nature with the catastrophic tsunami of late. What disruption do we face as a civilization if we do not move with the times as regards same-sex marriage? Progress can be gradual and smooth, or erratic and disruptive. I choose smooth.
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(Responsive to "A Noble Cause Takes Time", column by Arnold Ahlert in the New York Post, February 28, 2005)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,497.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:33 PM

 
Seeing "The Gates". The New York Post's resident oaf, John Podhoretz, referred today to Christo and Jeanne-Claude's art event "The Gates" as "a bunch of orange tablecloths flapping in the wind". He is of course entitled to his moronic view, but wiser and more esthetic people would do well to ignore him and get themselves to "The Gates" before Sunday nite, after which they will be taken down and recycled. Here are seven reasons why. (You may have to scroll down a bit.)















Perhaps Podhoretz likes the grim grayness of mid-winter in New York, but millions of people gladly added some color to these dismal days by trekking to and thru Central Park for the spatial experience of walking thru miles of colorful hanging and billowing acres of fabric in a work of art beyond the scale of anything they have ever witnessed before. If "The Gates" were a permanent intrusion on the Park, Podhoretz might have a reasonable objection. But the entire project is coming down Sunday nite after only 16 days. I knew that Podhoretz had a tiny intellect. It's sad to see that he also has a tiny esthetic soul.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:45 PM

 
Item 1 (of 2): Death by Disease, Death by Choice. Two prominent Americans died yesterday. Sandra Dee (that's Sondra, not Saandra as some blonde twit of a newsreader on CNN pronounced it), an actress who played iconic wholesome teen girls Gidget and Tammy, and married Bobby Darin, died yesterday of kidney disease after four years on dialysis. I wonder why she didn't get a transplant. She was 62.
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Hunter Thompson, a self-obsessed political writer, shot himself dead the same day. He was 67. It's too bad that unhappy loser couldn't give his extra five years to Sandra Dee, who would probably have appreciated them a lot more than he did.
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The AP story on the drug-soaked, alcoholic Thompson says:

The writer's compound in Woody Creek [Colorado], not far from Aspen, was almost as legendary as Thompson. He prized peacocks and weapons [perhaps he took his name, "Hunter", too literally]; in 2000, he accidentally shot and slightly wounded his assistant trying to chase a bear off his property. * * * He later became a proud member of the National Rifle Association and almost was elected sheriff in Aspen in 1970 under the Freak Power Party banner.

The NRA claims another victim. It insists you have the right to have a firearm at hand when you fall into a bad state of mind, so you can choose a permanent solution to a temporary problem, and blast your brains out. If you happen to shoot other people by accident from time to time, well, that's tuf.
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Society must reject such disordered thinking. "Freak Power"? That is indeed what the NRA has.
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Sandra Dee was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, which is about 11 miles from me, and married Bobby Darin in Elizabeth, about 9 miles from me. Like too many New Jerseyans, she had to leave New Jersey to reach the top of her profession (she was the fifth biggest box-office draw at her peak). Perhaps her career would have gone better if after the California studios dumped her she had returned East to do Broadway theater and independent films. But maybe she didn't like the snow. (I actually hope there's some snow left on the ground tomorrow, because I'm planning to take pictures of Christo's "The Gates" in Central Park, and the saffron fabric against snow would be more dramatic than against gray tree branches alone.)
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Snow apparently didn't bother Hunter Thompson. One television obituary showed him walking thru the snow in his bathrobe and pajamas. He was always trying to get attention. Now he has apparently killed himself, but left no suicide note. I suppose he wants us to spend time wondering why he did it. I have better things to do.
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Item 2: Lebanese Ingratitude, Lebanese Democracy. In the past few days there have been large demonstrations in Lebanon on both sides of the question of whether Syria should withdraw its army from that troubled country, a country that plunged into civil war despite having been a democracy. Democracy, you see, is not a cure-all. We are soon to see if democracy can do more for Iraq than it did for Lebanon.
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Americans are told endlessly that Israel is 'the only democracy in the Middle East'. The CIA World Factbook, however, says plainly:

Since the end of the [civil] war [in 1991], the Lebanese have conducted several successful elections.

So Lebanon, right nextdoor to Israel, has long been a democracy. (For this discussion, we will ignore the fact that Israel maintains an antidemocratic military occupation over millions of Palestinians and discriminates against those Palestinians it is forced by the world to grant Israeli citizenship to (and who are magically transformed into "Israeli Arabs", not "Palestinians"), so doesn't really qualify as a democracy.)
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How is it that American media continue to toast that old Israel's-the-only-democracy chestnut right in front of Lebanon? It's not as tho Lebanon is impossible to see. It's small, yes (almost exactly half the size of Israel), but not tucked away in some remote mountain valley in the Himalayas. It's only a few dozen miles from the center of U.S. media attention in the Middle East. So the assertion we hear all the time about Israel being the only democracy in the Middle East wasn't a simple, honest error born of ignorance. It was a lie.
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The recent history of the tiny, multireligious nation Lebanon, which most Americans came to have fond feelings for thru identification with Danny Thomas, has been filled with violence caused in no small measure by the establishment of a Zionist state right nextdoor, a state that has repeatedly attacked, invaded, and occupied that sad country, exacerbated interreligious frictions, and co-conspired in mass murders at the Sabra and Shattila refugee camps. While Israel was doing everything in its power to weaken Lebanon, kill Lebanese, and set different Lebanese factions at each other's throat, Syria stepped in to stop the violence and restore civil society. It worked, but Lebanon regained internal peace only because of Syria.
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Now the Lebanese want to pretend that Syria is a foreign occupier, even tho historically Lebanon has for centuries been considered a region of Syria. Would a Syrian withdrawal leave Lebanon intact and peaceful? We can hope so. But hope is feeble. It is no match for armed militias and impassioned mobs. If Lebanon explodes in intercommunal slaughter again, who will restore peace?
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In what may be his most cynical display of chutzpah yet, Dubya dared suggest in Europe today that Syria should end its occupation of Lebanon. Huh? Syria, a "brother Arab nation", should withdraw from Lebanon, where it ended a war, says the President of a country that occupies Iraq, where it started a war! Is it any wonder that almost everyone on Earth holds George Bush in profound contempt?
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(The most recent U.S. military death toll in Iraq (for Zionism), as reported at the website Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, is 1,482.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:50 PM

 
Irritating Zionists (and Yes, That Is a Double Entendre). Unbeknownst to me, the New York Post recently published a letter I sent them about indignation that anti-Zionists are allowed to express their views at Columbia University. The Post has been very exercised about freedom of anti-Zionist speech, and it campaigns to suppress all dissent from the strict Zionist line everywhere in the United States. The way I found out the letter was published — I rarely read the New York Post, unless I find an abandoned copy, since I'm not about to pay my good money to support a bad (evil) paper — is that I got first a hostile phone call and then a hostile, 10-page, handwritten letter about it, which enclosed a copy of the text as printed. That text, by the way, says in part:

Before long, Americans in general will realize that Zionism is poisonous, violent, hate-filled madness that has put the United States in grave danger and made us betray everything we have ever stood for.

The caller, apparently a Jew, started out by saying I had a lot of nerve criticizing Israel, given Christians' '2,000-year' history of killing Jews. I promptly hung up on him.
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Crimes that Christians may or may not have committed against Jews in the past have nothing to do with crimes that Jews ARE presently committing against Arabs. In any event, I seriously doubt that Christian predations against Jews, prior to the Nazi era, resulted in a significant number of deaths, in either absolute terms or the proportion of Jews killed. Do we have hard numbers? Or are asserted Christian crimes against Jews thru all of history except for a few years in the mid-20th Century trivial, blown up beyond all reason by self-important Jews who ignore the deadly predations and persecutions every people has suffered at somebody's hands?
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I know something of history, so know that the Jews have NOT suffered more than many other peoples have. Julius Caesar, in conquering what is now Switzerland, killed 40,000 Helvetians. Hulegu, grandson of Jengis Khan, attacked Baghdad in 1258 and killed at least 200,000 people, and maybe 800,000. As I point out in the Expansionist Party's Iraq page,

A century and a half later, the Mongol conqueror Timur the Lame, known to literature as Tamerlane, "The Scourge of God", sacked Baghdad again, causing less devastation only because so much had been destroyed already. To give you an idea of what Tamerlane was like, we offer one evocative sentence from the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

"The revolts which broke out all over Persia during these campaigns were repressed with ruthless vigour; whole cities were destroyed, their populations massacred, and towers built of their skulls."

Now Iraq has been attacked TWICE by the United States, and starved between wars. Maybe it is Iraqis, not Jews, who have been singled out by history! Consider this: the Hebrews are themselves Iraqis, having come, most historians believe, from Sumer!
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In any case, the indignant Jew who phoned me ignores the fact that it is Christians who FOUGHT the Nazis and ENDED the slaughter of Jews. Even the Soviet Union called a time-out in its war against religion to enlist Christian piety in the cause of destroying Nazism.
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But all decent people reject the notion that because Germans or other Europeans may have committed crimes against Jews, therefore Jews have a right to displace their anger onto Arabs, who did not participate in any way, to any degree, in any such crimes. Quite the contrary, thru much of the caliphate, Jews were treated very well, and numbered among the most privileged and trusted advisers to the monarch.
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As the king of Saudi Arabia at the time the State of Israel was being created told American policymakers, if Germany committed crimes against Jews, then the Jews should have been given a piece of Germany, not Arabia, as compensation. Recently, Germany has conveniently pledged itself to help 'defend' Israel from the Arabs, that is, help Israel continue to kill Arabs for the crimes of Germans.
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The idea that Jews should take Arab land to get even with Germany never made the tiniest bit of sense, but was always morally wrong. Everyone on Earth EXCEPT Zionist Jews and a few stupid Americans understands that.
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The long letter I received, hand-printed in block capitals on yellow, lined paper, tries to project onto me some kind of guilt for speaking out about Jewish guilt for crimes against Arabs. It is precisely the ploy of crying "Thief!" if you ARE a thief, to distract attention from the real culprit. That letter-writer would have you believe that to decry the crimes of Zionists is not simply seeing clearly the wrongfulness of their behavior but irrational prejudice against the Jews as a 'race', which of course they are NOT. No. Trying to turn my indignation at the crimes of Israel against Arabs into a crime by me against Jews is fatuous, dishonest nonsense. I haven't killed so much as one Jew. The Zionist movement has killed — what? 650,000 Arabs?
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Oh, we don't keep tabs on the number of Arabs murdered by Zionism. That would suggest that Jews are capable of evil, and no one must ever suggest any such thing. God's "Chosen People" can do no wrong. Or can they?
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And what exactly were they "chosen" for? Persecution? Why would God cause 'His people" to be hated and persecuted in almost every country in which they have ever been present in significant numbers, over centuries? Can the fault really be in everybody ELSE, never in the Jews themselves? Surely that strains credulity.
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But let's get back to how many people the Jews have killed for Israel. How do I reach the extraordinary number of 650,000 or so, for Arabs murdered by Zionism?
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Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's ancestrally-Jewish Secretary of State, was skewered by critics for an infamous statement she made in a public interview. On May 12, 1996, Albright was involved in the following exchange on the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes:

Leslie Stahl: "We have heard that a half million children have died [as a result of sanctions against Iraq]. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"

Madeleine Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it."

That constitutes an admission that the figure given is approximately correct. Even apologists for the sanctions that killed enormous numbers of Iraqi children and old people concede that at least 227,000 Iraqis died as a result of U.S. sanctions against Iraq during the interwar period, Gulf War I to Gulf War II. The decade of 'sanctions' (aggression by another name) had nothing to do with anything but Zionism, since Iraq had already left Kuwait. Sanctions had nothing to do with liberating Kuwait (and thus Arabs) but only with preventing Iraq from becoming a threat to the only Middle Eastern country the U.S. media and political leadership care a thing about: Israel.
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Since even apologists for sanctions admit that at least 227,000 Iraqi children (and they give no number for old people, the poor, or other Iraqis who may have died as a result of the embargo), and Madeleine Albright did not indignantly reply, 'Oh, please, there has been no such death toll. That's alarmist nonsense', but said that no matter how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians may have been killed by U.S.-imposed sanctions, "the price [was] worth it".
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On November 1, 1999, CounterPunch magazine, in an article under the names of Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, reported that Iraqi children were dying from sanctions at a rate of 4,000 a month. (Cockburn (whose name is, I believe, pronounced Co-burn) is a left-wing Irish writer I first encountered in the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal years ago.
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Do we know how many Iraqis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Tunisians, Lebanese, Palestinians, and others Zionism has killed? Has anyone even attempted to create and faithfully update a tally? The number of Iraqis killed by the "Coalition" in Gulf Wars I and II has been willfully and carefully suppressed by the U.S. Government,which is terrified of letting decent Americans know how indecently our government has behaved in the Middle East, lest we recoil in shock, horror, and deep moral shame, then explode in rage at what has been done in our name.
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At end, Madeleine Albright did not repudiate the assertion that half a million Iraqi children died because of U.S.-led sanctions up to November 1996.
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In October 2004 the British medical journal The Lancet reported that 100,000 "excess deaths" had occurred in Iraq due to the U.S.-British invasion of Gulf War II and the ensuing occupation. The U.S. Government has pooh-poohed that figure, but since it refuses to keep its own tally, it has NO hard evidence whatsoever with which to disprove that toll.
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Saddam's government released no figures for Iraqi dead in Gulf War I, neither military nor civilian, because he didn't want his people to know how horribly costly in human life his little Kuwaiti adventure had been.
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Similarly, the interim Iraqi government installed by the U.S. after Gulf War II certainly didn't want Iraqis to know how many people the U.S. invasion and ongoing (endless?) occupation has killed.
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Nor does the U.S. military want the American people to know how many Iraqis we have killed.
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So we have no reliable figures whatsoever, not for Iraqi military, not for Iraqi civilians; not for Gulf War I, not for the decade of sanctions; not for Gulf War II, not for the ongoing occupation. Will we ever know how many Iraqis have died because of U.S. aggression against Iraq for Israel?
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If Albright's admission of half a million Iraqi children, and The Lancet's 100,000 dead from the current war are correct, then the SMALLEST number of Arabs killed for Zionism is 600,000 — and that doesn't count so much as one Egyptian, Jordanian, Lebanese, Tunisian, or Palestinian! Not one! How many of these others have been killed?
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Well, we know of two intifadas, indignant uprisings by Palestinians in which Israel slaughtered some 5,000 Palestinians, most of them demonstrators armed only with rocks. Israel fires live ammunition into Arab demonstrations and kills children for the capital crime of throwing ROCKS — all the while pretending to be a 'civilized' country that disdains capital punishment!
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Think about that: 5,000 people, mostly youthful demonstrators, killed over the course of more than 5 years by the government of a country of 5 million Jews, and the people of that Jewish State do not rise in fury at the injustice. Quite the opposite: they insist that even more Arabs must be killed. Contrast that with Kent State, a single incident, never repeated, in which a mere 4 individuals were killed by nervous National Guardsmen — and the United States went NUTS with self-recrimination! Why aren't we indignant about the hundreds of thousands of Arabs we have killed and continue to kill for Zionism?
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I read a few paragraphs of dishonest argumentation by the letter-writer from Boston but will read no more. He accused me of projecting onto Jews my own sins. I don't have sins even remotely comparable to those of Zionists. My conscience is clear, and operating powerfully, in real time. Too many Americans, and especially Jewish Americans, have put their conscience into 'sleep mode'.
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Like a computer that reacts only to a key's being pressed, and not even to the motion of a mouse, scores of millions of Americans, and especially Jewish Americans, who like to think themselves decent, progressive people, hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, as long as the evil is done in the name of Israel. But if the tiniest spoken or written offense is given to Israel, it is a crime against humanity! And if Arabs counterattack Israelis and Americans, killing the tiniest fraction of the number of Arabs whom Israel and its slave the United States have killed, they have committed extraordinary crimes against God and man.
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The message we are teaching our children is that it is wrong to kill Americans or Israelis, but perfectly alrite to kill Arabs.
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No decent person values the life of an Israeli or American more than that of an Arab. No decent person on Earth.
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(The most recent U.S. military death toll in Iraq (for Zionism), as reported at the website Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, is 1,471)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:27 AM

 
Saving Your (Own) Life. My brother in the Houston area (I sometimes call him "Tex" — yes, call him "Tex"; he loves that!) sent me a belated Christmas present that arrived Monday and included this intriguing device: "MULTI FUNCTION EMERGENCY TOOL" for automobile drivers. The packaging contains pictures and the following text to describe what its constituent features can do for you.

HAMMER TO SHATTER SIDE WINDOW WITHIN SECONDS

NEEDLE DEFLATES THE AIR BAG

BUILT IN RAZOR SHARP BLADE TO CUT THROUGH THE SEAT BELT

MOUNTED WHISTLE TO CALL FOR HELP

EMERGENCY FLASH LIGHT

I am most impressed, and will tell you why.
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Less than four months ago we had a HIDEOUS auto accident that killed three female friends who were driving home to Newark from a birthday party in Jersey City when their Jeep ran off the road and into the Passaic River. Mysteriously, altho the women were conscious and screaming for help from a good samaritan who saw the accident and tried to get them out of the vehicle before it sank, the women were trapped inside and drowned in 35 feet of water.
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This happened on a roadway I have often traveled, at nite, mostly on my way home from seeing friends in the bars of Manhattan. There's just a narrow, riverbank, parklike strip, no significant structures nor other barriers, between roadway and water, and I had no idea that the Passaic, which hardly qualifies as a mighty river as seen from above, was 35 feet deep anywhere!
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A woman I worked with at the time, Nadirah, speculated that the car may have had power windows and power door locks that were shorted out as soon as the car was partially immersed in the water, so the occupants could not open the windows because there is no manual override handle for power windows, nor could they even open a door because the water pressure outside was far greater than the air pressure inside. Modern automobile windshields and windows are resistant to shattering, so hitting them with a fist or elbow or shoe won't work. So they drowned.
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I don't know if that is what actually happened, but it sure sounds reasonable to me.
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Many years ago I saw a fictional crime story on TV about two women who get locked in a car with an exhaust leak into the passenger compartment contrived by criminals out to kill them. They pounded on the glass with fists and feet to no avail, and escaped only because they found a metal object with which to shatter a window, reach the outer doorhandle, and escape.
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I then heard that there are small, spring-loaded metal hammers one can buy at an auto parts store or elsewhere by means of which one can shatter automobile glass to effect an emergency escape, and thought that that would be a good thing to have. I'm not sure the metal hitch on which I carry my keys would suffice. But I didn't get around to buying such a device.
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Now my brother has sent me a tool by means of which I might shatter a window if I should be trapped in my car after an accident, with water rushing up or fire threatening, and the door rendered immovable by water pressure, crushing or obstruction. (I have manual windows and door locks, and the horrible Passaic River accident warned me away from EVER getting power windows and power door locks.)
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You too may want to carry a device with which to smash open your car windows in case of an accident — especially if you have power windows and door locks. You can thank me, my brother, and Nadirah, later, should you ever need to use such a hammer to escape imminent death.
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If you find this suggestion worthy, please tell family and friends. You'd feel terrible if someone you care about died, trapped in a car, because you didn't warn them.
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(FYI, the latest U.S. military death toll for Iraq, as reported at the website Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, is 1,464.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:57 AM

 
Whose Chutzpah? Deborah Orin, in an opinion column in today's New York Post entitled "Howie's Chutzpah", willfully misleads readers in suggesting that Howard Dean is dodging a responsibility to make policy pronouncements as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Both he and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi have said plainly that the role of the head of the DNC is NOT to establish policy for the party but only to organize and raise money for Democrats around the country. Democrats have said plainly that it is elected members of Congress, governors, mayors, etc. that establish policy, not the DNC. So Orin's tirade is not just off-target but knowingly malicious for suggesting that Dean is arrogant and cowardly for knowing his role and deferring to elected leaders on all issues of party policy.
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As for Orin's claim that "we all stand in awe of the courage of our troops", that is just plain bull. U.S. troops have no right to be in Iraq. They weren't invited. They have caused massive death and destruction, and continue to impose a military occupation upon an unwilling people. I'm sure the people of Nazi Germany were proud of their brave boys who conquered Poland in a trice and stood valiantly against the forces of Communism at Stalingrad. They have had time to reconsider.
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(The latest U.S. military death toll for Iraq, as reported at the website Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, is 1,461.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:03 PM

 
Why Not Talk Directly? I do not understand the Bush Administration's refusal to talk directly, one-on-one, with North Korea about its nuclear weapons program.
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Isn't it good to open a channel of communication and speak directly with people who have a problem trusting you?
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North Korea is very dangerous to us if, as it claims, it has nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Kim Jong Il is, recent news reports suggest, insecure and emotional but not insane, as had been widely speculated. If that is true, then surely he should be able to understand that nuclear weapons endanger him far more than they could protect him.
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If he were insane, it would be urgent to kill him and destroy all military installations that could possibly be used to launch a nuclear strike against the United States, thru a "shock and awe" campaign employing long-range missiles, cruise missiles, and manned and unmanned airplanes. Such a campaign from the air should suffice to destroy the threat to the U.S. and South Korea.
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If Kim is afraid of precisely that kind of thing, he can be made to understand that pursuing weapons of mass destruction that can reach our shores makes such an attack far more likely than would discontinuing programs to create such weapons systems, destroying existing stocks, and even substantially disarming. He cannot believe that South Korea is eager to invade, and if China takes North Korea under its defense umbrella, which the U.S. could actually encourage in exchange for giving up nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, he will have nothing to fear from the United States either — well, not unless and until China itself makes war upon the United States, which some people in the Pentagon believe it is preparing for, down the road.
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Unlike Saddam's Iraq, North Korea admits to having nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, so really is a danger to us. The longer we wait to attack, the more dangerous it becomes. Kim must understand that continuing to pursue nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles practically assures that the U.S. will ravage his country, since the Pentagon's understanding is that if we attack by air, North Korea will attack the South by land and sea, so we will have to destroy the entire North Korean military, possibly with nuclear weapons of our own, tactical (small blast) or even strategic (huge blast). In the case of nuclear weapons, we really can't afford to suffer a first-strike upon our own territory.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:35 PM

 
A Real "Two-State Solution" for Palestine? U.S. media have treated the recent summit between Israeli Prime Minister Sharon and Palestinian President Abbas like the arrival of true peace, as tho somehow, magically, this time, of all the many, many times we have heard of peace, it will work. Alas, there is absolutely no reason to believe that this time will be any different from Camp David or Oslo or any other ceasefire or peacetalk whatsoever.
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I do not believe the Palestinians are so beaten and disheartened that they will just roll over, give up all their rights, let Israel keep what it has stolen, and simply let pass all the murder and misery inflicted upon them by worldwide Zionism, with the active connivance of the U.S. Government.
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Miserable people who see little hope for the future and are depressed about the injustices that have been imposed upon them might be willing to accept crumbs instead of a full, fair division of the pie — or return of a pie stolen from them whole — but I don't believe it. Many have demonstrated that they'd rather die.
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The "Editorial of the week" at the Jerusalem Media & Communication Center website says that Israel is tightening its grip upon Arab East Jerusalem by dispossessing Arab landowners:

East Jerusalem landowners are kept outside the illegally expanded Jerusalem municipal boundaries due to a series of Israeli measures. Those measures include: revoking or denying Palestinians Jerusalem residency permits, denying Palestinians housing permits and access to public housing in the city, continuing to demolish Palestinian homes, and cutting Palestinians off from their properties through settlement expansion, Jewish-only bypass roads and most recently the separation wall.

Israel refers to both Occupied East Jerusalem and West Jerusalem as Jerusalem. This conflicts with international law and the stated policies of the United States (US), the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU).

According to the 1947 UN Partition Plan — from which Israel draws its legitimacy as a nation-state — the areas of East and West Jerusalem were not allocated to either the Arab or Jewish states. Instead, the areas were to be internationally administered. In 1948, Israel ignored the UN resolution and occupied over 80 percent of Jerusalem. In 1967, Israel occupied East Jerusalem along with the rest of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. Almost immediately after the occupation, Israel expanded the borders of city's eastern sector. The expansion was designed to incorporate undeveloped Palestinian land while excluding Palestinian population centers. Israel went further in 1980 by annexing East Jerusalem to Israel.

The 1967 UN Security Council Resolution 242 rejects the admissibility of acquisition of territory by force. Israel's occupation and annexation of East Jerusalem is therefore illegal under international law. The UN recognizes East Jerusalem as occupied territory and states that subsequent action taken by the occupying power to alter the status of Jerusalem has no legal validity.

The official US position does not recognize the annexation of East Jerusalem. The 1991 US Letter of Assurances to the Palestinians states:

[We] do not recognize Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem or the extension of its municipal boundaries, and we encourage all sides to avoid unilateral acts that would exacerbate local tensions or make negotiations more difficult or preempt their final outcome.

But the U.S. Government not only does not do anything to force Israel to revoke its illegal land grab but tacitly backs to the hilt everything Israel does. UN resolutions condemn Israeli actions? Well, surely we must enforce UN resolutions, right? That's what Bush said about Iraq. But when it comes to Israel, it doesn't matter how many resolutions the UN passes; the U.S. will give lip service to them but do nothing to enforce them.
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A U.S. State Department website sets out our ostensible intentions about one necessary step toward achieving a "two-state solution" in Palestine:

Parties [must] reach [a] final and comprehensive permanent status agreement that ends the Israel-Palestinian conflict in 2005, through a settlement negotiated between the parties based on UNSCR 242, 338, and 1397, that ends the occupation that began in 1967, and includes an agreed, just, fair, and realistic solution to the refugee issue, and a negotiated resolution on the status of Jerusalem that takes into account the political and religious concerns of both sides, and protects the religious interests of Jews, Christians, and Muslims worldwide, and fulfills the vision of two states, Israel and sovereign, independent, democratic and viable Palestine, living side-by-side in peace and security.

Is voiding the property ownership rights of East Jerusalem Arabs consistent or inconsistent with that Stated view?
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Since Israel's behavior from the outset has and continues to be utterly inconsistent with UN resolutions, the U.S. is honor-bound, if not actually legally bound, to end all support for such Israeli actions, at the least, and possibly also to join with other UN members to impose airtite sanctions against Israel or lead a UN military coalition to take back lands stolen from Palestinians by Israel.
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Instead, the U.S. issues righteous pronouncements of principle, then ships another billion dollars of U.S. Christian taxpayer money off to the Jews of Jerusalem, while giving Palestinians nothing. The President utters muffled, ineffective, little-girl protestations against illegal Israeli acts, all the while winking at the Zionist lobby, and then calls Palestinian actions to reverse Israel's illegal acts "terrorism", and imposes sanctions not on Israel, the thief, but on Palestine, the victim.
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All the while, the Arab world looks on, the wider Moslem world looks on and sees our Government for the bunch of hypocritical, lying scumbags they are, and holds us responsible. We're a democracy, after all, and if our politicians back every single crime committed by Israel, it has to be because we the people approve of and co-conspire in those crimes, right? So we're all legitimate targets of retribution, to be killed on sight. If they can kidnap us from homes in Arab countries that pro-Arab Americans have lived in for years, and behead us, they will do so. If they can blow up U.S. soldiers in Iraq, they will do so. If they can destroy office buildings and kill us by the thousands, they will do so.
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Instead of waking to the fact that these people have legitimate reasons for hating us, and repenting our national sins, we become INDIGNANT that these "terrorists" are "attacking" us — not COUNTERattacking, but attacking, as tho we never did anything to them!
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So blind have we become that we invaded a country over 6,000 miles from our nearest shores in a 'pre-emptive strike', an attack, not counterattack, against a country that never in its history attacked us, but pretend to have done so righteously! And we're astonished that we weren't welcomed with open arms as "liberators". We destroy their infrastructure, plunging them into electric-outage darkness for hours a day and filling their schoolyards with untreated sewage still, almost two years later, and kill literally uncounted numbers of them (tho a British study suggested at least 100,000 as of last October), but we want to be regarded as kindly benefactors! The human capacity for self-deception is astonishing.
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Well, we're in it now, deep in Middle Eastern sh*t, and there's no escaping our responsibility to undo the harm we have done, to the extent possible. We can't entirely withdraw from the region without making things worse — or so we tell ourselves. So, what do we do?
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If we're going to have to be there, we must accept that the only "two-state solutions" that might work in Palestine are (a) two states of a federal, secular union, with Jerusalem as neutral federal district à la the District of Columbia or (b) two entirely sovereign separate countries, dividing Jerusalem between them. And we will have to force either such solution by telling Israel that if it doesn't do justice to Palestinians, we will enforce UN resolutions against them, by worldwide sanctions or, if need be, by military invasion after an extended "shock and awe" campaign to destroy the entire Israeli military and every nuclear installation they have lest they attack us — which I am absolutely certain Israeli planners have provided for in their worst-case, doomsday scenario: using missiles developed in Israel's space program to launch nuclear warheads against Washington and other major American cities, possibly even including New York despite its large Jewish population: 'They didn't save us, they didn't come here to fite the Arabs— to hell with them!'
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A threat of sanctions or military action to bring Israel into line would be The Stick. The Carrot would be an offer of billions of dollars of aid, to be equitably distributed between Jews and Arabs, to create a successful two-state solution, plus U.S. or U.S.-supported UN forces to patrol the borders and provide interstate security.
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Would that work? Maybe. But if the two-state solution is two separate countries, the separation and sovereignty of both states must be as complete as those of the United States and Canada or United States and Mexico. Israel must absolutely unhand every square inch of Palestinian territory, accord Palestine absolute sovereignty, and no more reserve a "right" to intervene in Palestine militarily or create a 'buffer zone' than the U.S. reserves the right to send the army across the Canadian border or establish a 'buffer zone' in northern Mexico to stop illegal immigration. Will Israel ever accord Palestine the sovereignty the U.S. accords Canada and Mexico? I don't believe it.
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So there is, at end, only one viable solution longest-term: a ONE-state solution, in which the U.S. accepts that divided Palestine cannot be made to work and the U.S. cannot withdraw from the region so there's only one thing left: to annex Palestine as a State of the Union, with Jerusalem as its state capital; English, Arabic, and Hebrew as its co-official languages; and the U.S. Government as enforcer of all civil rights laws throughout reunited Palestine. No one gets special treatment. U.S. immigration and migration laws apply. All illegally confiscated property is returned to its rightful owner, or purchased for a fair price. The First Amendment's prohibition on establishment of religion takes effect, as well as its defense of free speech. Every one of the Bill of Rights applies and is enforced by U.S. marshals or Marines, as ever may be necessary. Palestinians and Israelis get exactly the same aid, per capita, in the same programs as their peers in the rest of the states do — not one cent more nor less. (We might even offer Lebanon inclusion in this state, to add more Christians to the mix of adherents of the three religions that hold Jerusalem dear.)
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Call it the State of Palestine, the State of the Holy Land (if that would pass constitutional muster), or something else — tho I doubt Arabs would accept the "State of Israel". But do it. Let's annex the Holy Land, end all discrimination against everyone, and make peace work in what may be the only way it can work: by reuniting Palestine as a State of the United States.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:30 PM

 
Punishing Juries. Perhaps the most disgusting news story today is the report that an Idaho criminal who killed two state wildlife officials in cold blood and escaped from prison and evaded recapture for almost a year is to be freed after only 22 years in prison — for killing two men to evade prosecution for poaching wildlife, and escaping prison. Even more disgusting is that he was not even convicted of murder! but only of "voluntary manslaughter", and that he:

might have been freed outright if he hadn't used his .22 caliber rifle [to shoot the victims in the head after they were down]. Moore [foreman of the jury that coddled him] said testimony about [one of the victim]'s reputation as a tough-guy lawman influenced the verdict.

"We felt it was self-defense up to a certain point [resisting arrest for poaching is "self-defense"?!?]," Moore said in a recent interview. "Had he not shot them in the head, it would have been a different verdict."

Still MORE disgusting is this fillip:

The case has been among the most polarizing in Idaho history, with some expressing disgust at how Dallas has gained a measure of folk-hero status among those who rally against the establishment. * * *

"Claude Dallas," a ballad written by singer-songwriters Ian Tyson and Tom Russell, and sung by Tyson, romanticizes Dallas' lifestyle and life on the lam, saying: "It took 18 men and 15 months to finally run Claude down. In the sage outside of paradise, they drove him to the ground."

Idaho has an apparently deserved reputation for harboring violent extremists, the kind of antisocial, "mountain man" scum that filled too much of the West during our frontier era, people who couldn't abide being required to be civilized back East, so fled civilization and lived as savages out West. Such barbarians are still admired by some Red State Westerners.
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The jury that handed down this insane and evil verdict should be hunted down, rounded up, and shot in the back of the head, every last one. Their various body parts, to the extent usable, should be redistributed to decent people waiting for organ transplants. The same fate should meet the scum who wrote a BALLAD praising a double-murdering poacher! Kill them, and chop them up for parts.
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Today's U.S. military death toll in Iraq was 4, bringing the total to 1,447. I guess they're dying to preserve the "freedom" to kill game wardens in Idaho.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:16 PM

 
Ossie, Israelis from the Andes, SocSec Cures, George W. Hoover, and New York Gay Marriage (Separate Stories). A lot worth note has happened in the past two days.
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Item 1: Ossie Davis, distinguished black actor and civil-rights activist, died today in Miami, at age 87. I sort of met him once. He spoke to my (English?) class at the Freshman Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York on 42nd Street in 1967 or ’68 sometime, and I might have asked him a question. It was a long time ago, and I don’t remember what the topic of his talk was, nor what my question might have been. But the class was small, and we got a good sense of a good man. I was impressed that so famous a man (even then) would take the time to talk to so small a group of college kids.
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Alas, Mr. Davis later allowed his racial identification to overwhelm his good sense and principles in narrating a tribute to the notorious black Stalinist, Paul Robeson, on PBS, and praising that chip-on-the-shoulder fool who to the end of his life made excuses for Communist tyranny and mass murder. Ossie Davis, like all too many people, seems to have accepted the notion that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", even tho Stalin was not by any stretch of the imagination a friend to freedom, for black Americans or anyone else. Davis disgraced himself in praising Paul Robeson and passing over Robeson’s active connivance in Communism.
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Item 2: In my last entry, I spoke to how Israel is so desperate to boost the number of Jews in Palestine that it is casting its net wide, bringing in people it might better do without. The British colleague who alerted me to the Haaretz article cited in that entry later told me of another Haaretz article, as edited and reprinted in The Guardian newspaper of Britain on August 27, 2002. It starts out:

When a delegation of rabbis travelled to Lima [Peru] to convert a group of South American Indians to Judaism, they added just one condition: come and live with us in Israel. As soon as these new Jews arrived in the country, they were bussed straight to settlements in the disputed territories.

The story is startling in its madness and ugliness. One of the Indian converts says:

after he finishes the Hebrew course, he may join the army, "because I wasn't in the army in Peru and that is something I lack, and also because I want to defend the country and if there is no choice, I will kill Arabs. But I am sure that Jews kill Arabs only for self-defence and justice, but Arabs do it because they like to kill."

Despite Israel’s best efforts, however, a commentator on Charlie Rose (PBS) last nite said that immigration to Israel has declined to a mere trickle, Israelis have fewer children than Palestinians, and demographics impel Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories (we’ll pass over, for this purpose only, that all of Israel is occupied territory) and accept a "two-state solution" because in a single state, Arabs will outnumber Jews within a few decades.
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So there’s a population race in a desert! And we’re paying for the Jewish part of this overpopulation problem.
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Bizarrely, the U.S. is also turning a blind eye to illegal Israeli migration to the U.S. OUT of the danger zone. So on one hand we’re sending boatloads of cash to boost Israeli numbers, and on the other, we’re draining away the very people Israel needs to ‘survive’. That’s another of the idiocies of U.S. policy in the Middle East.
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Item 3: George Bush is hiding key facts about the Social Security system now in place, to hide obvious fixes.
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Did you know that the maximum salary on which Social Security taxes are paid is $90,000? Beyond that, no Social Security taxes are taken out whatsoever. So the rich and super-rich stop paying Social Security taxes above a relative pittance, while ordinary working people pay Social Security taxes on every cent they make! I suspect that we could solve the entire Social Security funding problem simply by eliminating the maximum tax base and continuing to tax the rich at the same rate the rest of us pay! — thru all their millions and tens of millions of dollars a year, year after year without end.
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Did you also know that everyone who pays Social Security tax is eligible to receive Social Security benefits, even Bill Gates?! The richest of us get a smaller percentage of their income on retirement — which may nonetheless be more than the typical person receives — but they still get a lot of money from Social Security at retirement, even if they have private pension plans, investments, and savings that provide them hundreds of thousands or MILLIONS of dollars a year. They also qualify for Medicare! Now, what happens when funds are limited, and the rich get some of those funds? Plainly, the poor and middle class get less than they otherwise would.
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Put these two huge factors together and you get the be-all and end-all of why Social Security could go bust: because the rich don’t pay Social Security taxes on everything they earn but are entitled to draw benefits as tho they needed them.
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We need, thus, do only two things to fix Social Security: tax the rich at the same rate as the poor and middle class, and means-test the grant of benefits. The program is called Social Security. The rich are already secure. They don’t need our money. They should be proud they can provide for themselves, and stop stealing public funds. If they should somehow lose their money in old age, as thru catastrophic illness, THEN, and ONLY then, should they get Social Security and Medicare. Just as we don’t give the rich welfare or Medicaid, we shouldn’t give them Social Security or Medicare.
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Item 4: The media have made the peculiar assertion that because January’s job gains, just announced, have brought us back to the number of jobs in the economy before Bush came into office, somehow he is no longer the only President since Herbert Hoover to have lost jobs during his term. But the comparison used, validly, in the campaign was to ONE term, which is all the people gave Hoover — as we should have given Dubya only one term. The January numbers take in part of his second term. So unless the numbers can be broken down by the first 19 days of January as against the last 12, and there is still a gain, the media may be comparing apples and oranges. Moreover, the United States has gained 3 million people since Dubya took office, so just regaining the number of jobs we had in 2001 does NOT equal the level of employment we had in 2001. We are still in the hole.
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Item 5: A New York State judge ruled today that present law permits same-sex marriage:

A Manhattan judge declared Friday that a section of law that forbids same-sex marriage violates the state constitution, a ruling which if upheld on appeal would allow gay couples to wed.

State Supreme Court Justice Doris Ling-Cohan ruled that the words "husband," "wife," "groom" and "bride" in relevant sections of the Domestic Relations Law "shall be construed to mean `spouse,' and all personal pronouns ... shall be construed to apply equally to either men or women." * *  *

I assume that decision will be appealed by the government. Let’s see what happens.
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My own view is that all the Blue States should just legalize same-sex marriage outrite, by forthrite legislative act, not by judicial stealth. That would drive the rednecks WILD.
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I’m planning to end each entry from now until the U.S. leaves Iraq with the number of dead American soldiers in the Iraq war to date. Today’s figure: 1,443. There have also been about 10,600 Americans wounded but not killed. No one knows how many Iraqis have died. They’re not important to the U.S. military. They are to me.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:48 PM

 
"Anti-Semitism" in Israel! A colleague in Britain alerted me to one of the most bizarre stories I have seen within memory. The English-language edition of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported today that there is a neo-Nazi website IN ISRAEL run by Russian immigrants who came to Israel young and have lived there for years. According to the writer of the Haaretz article, Lily Galili, the notorious "Right of Return" applies to people who are only ancestrally Jewish, not presently observant nor Jewish-identified.

To the list of oddities by which the world is now defined, a few local paradoxes can be added. It appears that the number of Russian Jews who will emigrate to Germany this year will be larger than the number who come to Israel; the law under which Jews from the former Soviet Union can immigrate to Germany is close to the restricted definition of "Jewish under Jewish law." The Israeli Law of Return, however, is in fact based on the Nuremberg Laws, in which the Germans expanded the definition of who is Jewish in accordance with their own needs.

I have said before that Zionists take a "racial" view of Jewishness, and this proves it. Apparently the Law of Return permits immigration of anyone who had even one grandparent who was Jewish. Hitler would be proud that his regime's definition of "Jewish" has been adopted by the Israeli state.
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When they arrive in Israel, some immigrants find it hard to adjust and find work that suits them. Says Ms. Galili:

It must be understood that there are cases in which a verbal anti-Semitic reaction is a response to racism encountered here by non-Jewish immigrants, especially the young people whose lives the Israeli establishment embitters, pushing them to alienation from the state. * * *

[D]ealing with the phenomenon must begin with the demographic madness, whereby everyone is welcome to come here as long as he is not an Arab. Even if he hates the state, even if he hates Jews, he is considered a positive contribution to the needs of the demographic head-count. About a year ago, Lutfi Mashour, the editor of the Arabic newspaper Al-Sinara, told Haaretz that while the Jews are obsessing about the Arab demographic threat, a demographic problem is burgeoning for them in quite a different place.

So what is Israel to do about alienation among immigrants? A writer Ms. Galili quotes proposes a simple solution:

"... It's easy to deal with the neo-Nazi movement — they should simply be thrown out of here." [says Maya Kaganskaya]

That's what every democracy does to dissenters, right? Oh. No. That's wrong. People legally in the United States are governmentally entitled to hold and advocate unpopular views (tho some employers will fire them for disapproved views, especially Jewish employers for anti-Zionist views). But then, we're a real democracy. Israel is not, even tho it shouts to the world endlessly that it is 'the only democracy in the Middle East' — a claim, by the way, that recent elections in Palestine and Iraq render utterly void even if one were to call Israel a democracy, which one shouldn't.
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The irony is luscious: to keep the Arabs from outnumbering them thru natural increase and immigration, Arab immigration is forbidden and non-Arab, ancestrally Jewish immigration is encouraged, subsidized by public and private funds from the United States. But in throwing their net wide, the Israelis are bringing in a few people who are furiously hostile to Jews!
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The Jews assert a "Right of Return" to people who have never been to Israel, many of whom have no ancestors who were ever in the Middle East but were of European or other ethnicity who converted to Judaism centuries ago. Some of them do not identify as Jewish, do not approve of Judaism, and can't stand Jews.
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Meanwhile, Arabs who were born in what is now Israel are forbidden to return to a land they actually lived in, even if they are ready to make peace with their Jewish neighbors and create a vibrant multi-ethnic, multireligious, and multicultural society! Brilliant. Small wonder that Zionist Jews brag about how smart they are. Einsteins, every one of them.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:45 PM

 
Praise Be to Iraqis. The people of Iraq have shown inspiring courage in voting in the face of great danger. Americans should care as much about elections as they do.
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Not all areas of the country felt safe enuf to vote, and turnout in a large part of the Sunni Triangle appears to have been very low, tho no figures have yet been released. I wanted to wait for hard figures before commenting on the election, but that might not be for awhile.
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Unfortunately, the fact remains that the election was not really democratic, since in a great many cases people voted for unnamed candidates, so had only a party affiliation to go by. It's like voting Democratic or Republican for President and Congress, without having any idea whether, in voting Democratic, you were voting for an arch-liberal like Ted Kennedy or a fanatical rightwinger like Zell Miller! Would Americans feel comfortable voting for an anonymous candidate for President? Or does it make a difference whether the Republican is George Bush or Dick Cheney? Arlen Specter or Rick Santorum? Colin Powell or Alan Keyes? Christie Whitman or Phyllis Schlafly? John McCain or Trent Lott? Rudolph Giuliani or Newt Gingrich?
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Still, a government composed of elected parties is better than a government appointed by a foreign invader.
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One feature of the election is puzzling. Some reporters suggested that a low voter turnout in Sunni areas could reduce Sunni representation in the new legislature. How is that possible? or did these reporters simply make a mistake?
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In the United States and every other country I know of, seats in a legislature are determined by the base population of a given geographic area, whether most people in that area actually vote or not. Thus, if the Sunni Triangle is given 20% of the seats in a national legislature, won't whoever is voted for, even if by only 1 person per district, still be seated in each and every one of those seats?
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Tho it's good that Iraq has had a semi-democratic election, I must rue the cost of this advance in ruin and death.
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American media commentators in the days leading up to the election spoke about electric power shortages, and sewage-flooded streets and schoolyards that the U.S. occupation has not fixed. What they have not pointed out is that the U.S. attack CAUSED these horrible conditions. Iraq was a functioning, modern society until the United States attacked and deliberately destroyed electric generating stations, power transmission lines, sewage treatment plants, and other civilian infrastructure, with no conceivable military justification, just to inflict misery on the Iraqi people. And misery they did inflict, misery that continues to this day, because nothing like all, nor even 80%, of the destruction the U.S. and Britain inflicted upon Iraq has been repaired. Nor have we brought back to life any of the 120,000 or so Iraqis the invasion and ensuing occupation have killed, and continue to kill.
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How much wiser, saner, and more decent and defensible it would have been simply to have left Saddam in power and worked to move him away from despotism, toward democracy, Iraqi-style.
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Time and again news reports of late have quoted Iraqis saying that none of the terrorism they suffer daily could have happened under Saddam. Saddam knew the dangers and had spies everywhere. He knew when foreign terrorists tried to get into Iraq. He either kept them out or found and killed them before they could do any harm. The people of Iraq had functioning electric systems and sewage systems under Saddam. We destroyed all that, and turned police-state security against terrorism into chaos in which hundreds of Iraqis a week are slaughtered by violence Saddam would have prevented.
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So Saddam was a tyrant. So what? There are scores of tyrannical regimes in countries all over this planet, some far worse than Saddam ever was. Look at the Sudan and North Korea, which have each killed millions of "their own people", the key phrase that was supposed to make us specially indignant about Saddam. There are tens of thousands of local tyrants all over this planet. Are we to invade every area on Earth where an individual tyrant abuses people?
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Saddam gave the bulk of Iraqis security, which we have stolen from them. No people has EVER valued "freedom" more than "security". Our own people have shown willingness to accept severe curtailment of civil liberties to keep us "safe". A survey of high school students released yesterday finds that:

when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high-school students said it goes "too far" in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.

"These results are not only disturbing; they are dangerous," said Hodding Carter III of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the $1 million study's sponsor. "Ignorance about the basics of this free society is a danger to our nation's future."

The students are even more restrictive in their views than their elders, the study says. When asked whether people should be allowed to express unpopular views, 97 percent of teachers and 99 percent of school principals said yes. Only 83 percent of students did.

American society at large shows no interest in U.S. detention of suspected "terrorists" (including U.S. citizens) for years without trial, despite express provisions of the Bill of Rights that insist that government cannot simply arrest people and hold them in prison for months or years but everyone is entitled to a speedy trial. We consent to ever more searches without search warrants, at airports, at government buildings, in our cars on open hiways. All in the name of "security", not least the "security" of our "freedom"! It would be funny if it weren't so sad, and contemptible.
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We could learn something from Iraqis.
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In any case, the new Iraqi assembly is to elect a president and two vice-presidents (two? are they anticipating that one will be killed?) and write a constitution. I suggest to these delegates that they should exactly parallel the U.S. Constitution, one of the most brilliant contrivances of human political ingenuity.
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Iraq has three main communities, Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. They are concentrated mainly in the south, center and northwest, and northeast of the country, respectively. That distribution lends itself to creation of three states joined in a federal union, with Greater Baghdad a neutral federal district, like the District of Columbia, with representation in an Iraqi Congress as tho a fourth state.
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The conservative Heritage Foundation on March 7, 2003 (just before the U.S. invasion) openly advocated a federal system for Iraq:

To be effective, a new post-war Iraqi government must be pluralist, one that includes the three major sub-national groups in Iraq and advances their interests. The Administration should work to persuade the leaders of Iraq's three major groups--Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs, and Kurds--that a decentralized federal political system offers the best means of assuring local autonomy, protection against the return of a tyrannical central government, a fair share in the political settlement in Iraq, and an equitable disbursement of Iraq's oil and tax revenues. With such assurances, Iraq's post-Saddam leaders will be more likely to embrace a federal political system with the degree of enthusiasm that is necessary for its success.

A loose federal system organized along decentralized lines also would greatly improve regional stability. Such a post-Saddam government would be cohesive and legitimate enough to guarantee Iraq's territorial integrity and leave fewer opportunities for a central government to finance and undertake another threatening military buildup or menace its neighbors.

A good political model for such a successful post-war Iraqi federation already exists--the so-called Great Compromise of 1787 that enabled the creation of America's constitutional arrangement among the states. In Iraq's case, this type of system would give each of the country's three major sub-groups equal representation in an upper house of the legislature in order to protect each group's interests at the national level. * * *

A decentralized federal system will best fit the political realities on the ground in Iraq and best meet the needs of the Iraqi people.

It's nice to be able to agree with the Heritage Foundation about something.
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I commend to the Iraqi assembly a president-congress form of government rather than prime minister-parliament form. Parliaments are notorious for being high-handed when the ruling party has a strong majority and unstable and ineffectual when no party has a majority, so shifting coalitions must struggle to stay in power, and tiny groups can make outrageous demands as the price to keep them from shifting their votes to bring down the government.
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Terms of office for all elected officials should be fixed, not subject to abrupt termination because a vote of no-confidence brings down a government and forces new elections. When a government can be tossed out and new elections called at any time, parties spend much of their energy in subverting each other rather than working together.
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Iraq needs stability, and Iraqis must develop the spirit of compromise that comes from having to share power with people you disagree with, for a known period of time, because there's no alternative but deadlock. There is so much that needs doing that if Iraqis are faced with the fact that they are going to have to work together for the next four years, they will find a way to get along. Not so if they can instead anticipate ousting the current government in four months by vote of no-confidence. Then they would be inclined to stick to their most militant posture and work not on national reconciliation or reconstruction but on gaining the upper hand thru endless attacks upon the present leadership.
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What about proportional representation, thru which the current assembly was chosen? Iraqis are, like all peoples, split by political opinion even within the large categories (Sunni, Shia, Kurd) they might fit within. Proportional representation is a two-edged sword. On one hand, it gives minority views a chance at winning seats in the legislature. On the other hand, it disinclines people to look for a consensus candidate.
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And even if a minority candidate should win office, that only puts off by one step the need to find consensus, because his or her view will still be a minority view, and s/he will still have to work with people of other views in the legislature. So why complicate matters? Iraqis should simply adopt the winner-take-all standard for each individual office to force the formation of widely acceptable candidates from the outset. That will in turn promote the creation of a few major parties, say three to five (tho probably not just two major parties as in the U.S.), instead of the 111 that appeared on the ballot and 270 that were announced earlier.
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The advantage of a few major parties as against a host of minor parties is that people have to work together within any large party of diverse opinions, a habit of mind that Iraqis really need to make second-nature.
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At end, Iraq needs a government that is virtually identical to that of the United States. Why the U.S. pattern? Because the United States was originally 13 separate countries, each of which saw itself as different, in greater or lesser measure, from every other, and was suspicious of all the others and afraid of being overwhelmed. So during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, each state voiced its concerns and addressed ways of reassuring everyone that they would not be bullied by other states. This is the "Great Compromise of 1787" that the Heritage Foundation article above refers to, which is also called the "Connecticut Compromise".
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The Constitutional Convention was asked to decide between two competing proposals, called the "Virginia Plan" and "New Jersey Plan". Virginia in those days was one of the big states in both area and population. New Jersey was small in both. (Today, New Jersey is more populous than Virginia, and has been for decades, but because it is geographically much smaller and has a more severe winter than Virginia, it may well be that within a few decades Virginia will again have more people.)
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As explained at a National Archives webpage, Edmund Randolph of Virginia proposed a legislature of two houses, "one with members elected by the people for 3-year terms and the other composed of older leaders elected by the state legislatures for 7-year terms. Both would use population as a basis for dividing seats among the states."
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Little New Jersey had relatively few people and no land to expand westward into — Virginia not only comprised both present states of Virginia and West Virginia but also claimed what is now Kentucky, so was MUCH bigger, with lots of land to expand into. Not surprisingly, New Jersey was very worried that the big states would just crush the little states underfoot. So William Paterson (for whom the city of Paterson, 14 miles from me, is named) proposed the New Jersey Plan, a unicameral legislature in which the states were to be given equal representation. The big states said, 'No way!'
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Then little Connecticut's Roger Sherman stepped forward and offered a compromise: how about a legislature of two houses, one of which is apportioned by population and the other of which accords each state the same vote? Voila! We had a winner! We still do. And what worked to allow 13 separate countries (later joined by two more, the Texas Republic and Hawaii) to trust each other and work together can work for Iraqis too.
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So good luck to the people of Iraq in this brave new world. It is really not necessary to reinvent the wheel to ride into the future. The basic work was done in Philadelphia in 1787. You just have to write the plan down in Arabic — and Kurdish.
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Iraqis deserve what we have. Maybe they can get it by organizing themselves as we did.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:02 PM