David G. Savage, writing for the Los Angeles Times (Feb. 29, 2004)

The ghost of Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun will be back in the news this week, five years after his death and more than 30 years after he wrote the momentous and still-disputed Roe vs. Wade opinion that legalized abortion.

His reputation in life was controversial. Liberals saw him as a conservative Midwestern Republican who grew in his job to become a champion of women's rights and a reborn foe of the death penalty. Conservatives saw him as a weak and indecisive judge who was unnerved by the criticism he received for the abortion decision...

...On Thursday, the anniversary of his death, the Library of Congress will open Blackmun's papers to the public -- all 1,576 boxes full.

Historians and legal scholars are eager to examine the papers, looking for clues to explain Blackmun's shift from right to left during his court career. President Richard M. Nixon nominated him as a conservative, law-and-order judge. By the time of his retirement, he was the court's most liberal justice.

It is a familiar story, and a distressing one for conservatives. Since Nixon's election in 1968, Republican presidents have named 10 justices to the Supreme Court while Democrats have named two. Yet the court as a whole has disappointed conservatives, largely because Blackmun, Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy and David H. Souter proved more liberal on social issues than the Republican presidents who appointed them.

But the main clue to Blackmun's shift may be as simple as the Roe vs. Wade opinion itself.

"The explanation for his leftward evolution is the happenstance of his being assigned to write Roe," said David Garrow, a court historian at Emory University."It was not just the criticism and the hate mail he received, but also thank-you letters he received from women. Over time, he came to think he had done a great thing for women, and it made him much more attuned to the cause of protecting individual rights."...

...Blackmun had been on the court less than two years when the justices took up a challenge to a Texas law that made all abortions a crime. When the justices voted 7-2 to strike down the law, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger selected his fellow Minnesotan to write the opinion because of Blackmun's background. Before becoming a judge, he had been the general counsel to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

"He had spent much of his time working around doctors," Karlan, the Stanford professor, said."He viewed [abortion] as a medical matter. It was about the doctor-patient relationship. He also had the old-style Republican view that this wasn't the government's business."

Just as the Roe vs. Wade ruling has divided the nation, so did it serve as a divide in Blackmun's career. His clerks said the justice spent hours reading hate mail. By the late 1970s, Blackmun had split away from the conservative Burger, a boyhood friend from St. Paul, and aligned himself with the liberal Justice William J. Brennan, an Eisenhower appointee.

"He took so much heat from the right," said Dennis J. Hutchinson, a University of Chicago law professor and biographer of Justice Byron White."And the women's rights and liberals groups lionized him. That would have bounced off a lot of justices -- White, Powell, [Antonin] Scalia, for example. But Blackmun had a lot of insecurities, and he took slights very personally."...

...Some court historians say Blackmun's papers may contain little news, since the previously released papers of Justices Thurgood Marshall and Powell cover the same period."I would be surprised if there's anything that dramatically changes our thinking about him," said Mark V. Tushnet, a law professor at Georgetown University and a biographer of Marshall.

Some historians said they were troubled that Blackmun's law clerks gave advance access to the documents to Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times and Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio. They were given two months of advance access to the files, and their reports will begin Thursday....

...This is not an effort to manage the story," Koh said of the special arrangements."We didn't want someone to grab one piece of paper and make that the story. You need someone who can introduce this collection to the world in a way that promotes genuine public understanding of what this collection means."

That explanation has not impressed several historians who have worked on past collections."This is post-mortem spin control and the closest thing to an in-house press release," said Hutchinson of the University of Chicago."It anoints one person, or two, and says their version is authoritative and trustworthy. I think it's outrageous."

"This is an attempt to manage the coverage, despite what Koh says," said Garrow, who wrote a history of the abortion rulings."He wants a gentle and friendly front page in the New York Times. And he also wants NPR and the 'News Hour' to think well of Harold Koh."

Sidney Schanberg, in the Village Voice (Feb. 24, 2004):

Senator John Kerry, a decorated battle veteran, was courageous as a navy lieutenant in the Vietnam War. But he was not so courageous more than two decades later, when he covered up voluminous evidence that a significant number of live American prisoners—perhaps hundreds—were never acknowledged or returned after the war-ending treaty was signed in January 1973.

The Massachusetts senator, now seeking the presidency, carried out this subterfuge a little over a decade ago— shredding documents, suppressing testimony, and sanitizing the committee's final report—when he was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on P.O.W./ M.I.A. Affairs.

Over the years, an abundance of evidence had come to light that the North Vietnamese, while returning 591 U.S. prisoners of war after the treaty signing, had held back many others as future bargaining chips for the $4 billion or more in war reparations that the Nixon administration had pledged. Hanoi didn't trust Washington to fulfill its pro-mise without pressure. Similarly, Washington didn't trust Hanoi to return all the prisoners and carry out all the treaty provisions. The mistrust on both sides was merited. Hanoi held back prisoners and the U.S. provided no reconstruction funds.

The stated purpose of the special Senate committee—which convened in mid 1991 and concluded in January 1993—was to investigate the evidence about prisoners who were never returned and find out what happened to the missing men. Committee chair Kerry's larger and different goal, though never stated publicly, emerged over time: He wanted to clear a path to normalization of relations with Hanoi. In any other context, that would have been an honorable goal. But getting at the truth of the unaccounted for P.O.W.'s and M.I.A.'s (Missing In Action) was the main obstacle to normalization—and therefore in conflict with his real intent and plan of action.

Kerry denied back then that he disguised his real goal, contending that he supported normalization only as a way to learn more about the missing men. But almost nothing has emerged about these prisoners since diplomatic and economic relations were restored in 1995, and thus it would appear—as most realists expected—that Kerry's explanation was hollow. He has also denied in the past the allegations of a cover-up, either by the Pentagon or himself. Asked for comment on this article, the Kerry campaign sent a quote from the senator:"In the end, I think what we can take pride in is that we put together the most significant, most thorough, most exhaustive accounting for missing and former P.O.W.'s in the history of human warfare."

What was the body of evidence that prisoners were held back? A short list would include more than 1,600 firsthand sightings of live U.S. prisoners; nearly 14,000 secondhand reports; numerous intercepted Communist radio messages from within Vietnam and Laos about American prisoners being moved by their captors from one site to another; a series of satellite photos that continued into the 1990s showing clear prisoner rescue signals carved into the ground in Laos and Vietnam, all labeled inconclusive by the Pentagon; multiple reports about unacknowledged prisoners from North Vietnamese informants working for U.S. intelligence agencies, all ignored or declared unreliable; persistent complaints by senior U.S. intelligence officials (some of them made publicly) that live-prisoner evidence was being suppressed; and clear proof that the Pentagon and other keepers of the"secret" destroyed a variety of files over the years to keep the P.O.W./M.I.A. families and the public from finding out and possibly setting off a major public outcry.

The resignation of Colonel Millard Peck in 1991, the first year of the Kerry committee's tenure, was one of many vivid landmarks in this saga's history. Peck had been the head of the Pentagon's P.O.W./M.I.A. office for only eight months when he resigned in disgust. In his damning departure statement, he wrote:"The mind-set to 'debunk' is alive and well. It is held at all levels . . . Practically all analysis is directed to finding fault with the source. Rarely has there been any effective, active follow-through on any of the sightings . . . The sad fact is that . . . a cover-up may be in progress. The entire charade does not appear to be an honest effort and may never have been."

Finally, Peck said:"From what I have witnessed, it appears that any soldier left in Vietnam, even inadvertently, was in fact abandoned years ago, and that the farce that is being played is no more than political legerdemain done with 'smoke and mirrors' to stall the issue until it dies a natural death."...

Joel Mowbray, in frontpagemag.com (Feb. 24, 2004):

After the media tore into President Bush's 30-year-old National Guard record like a rabid pit bull into a bacon-scented postman, Democrats have been licking their chops in anticipation of highlighting John Kerry's decorated service during the same time period.

A new web site that launched yesterday (Monday, January 23), however, should give Democrats more than a moment's pause—and is likely just the opening salvo in exposing the truth about the outlandish actions of Kerry and his comrades as part of an anti-war group known as Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Created by the conservative Free Republic Network, WinterSoldier.com seems to contain the most comprehensive compilation of Kerry's words and deeds shortly after returning to America more than three decades ago. (It can also be found at JohnKerryforPresident.info .)

The new site is named after the event that helped raise Kerry to prominence in 1971. The Winter Soldier Investigation, as it was called, was held in Detroit from January 31 to February 2—with financial backing from Hanoi Hannah herself, Jane Fonda, according to an historian cited on the web site—where over 100 veterans testified about the most horrendous war crimes imaginable happening every day .

John Kerry was an instant celebrity, and the group behind the three-day conference, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), certainly served his political ambitions well. But if the wealth of information found at WinterSoldier.com gains any traction, Kerry's past could come back to haunt him.

Although it is not the most user-friendly site, WinterSoldier.com carries everything from charges leveled at the original Detroit event to excerpts from historians' books that are quite damning to Kerry and VVAW.

But the bulk of the research for the site, done largely by Free Republic Director Scott Swett, comes from a book authored by John Kerry and the VVAW, “The New Soldier.” Since the out-of-print book is almost impossible to find—Free Republic spent over $400 to obtain its copy—most people will have to rely on the new web site to fully appreciate just how radical VVAW and Kerry were.

VVAW was a media favorite: war veterans who were anti-war. Quite a sales pitch. But the more realistic characterization would have been Americans who were anti-American. (Literally, too: One of the documents at WinterSoldier.com is the minutes of a VVAW executive meeting where members decided to take down American flags from all VVAW offices.)

Their goal was not just to sour Americans on the Vietnam war, but to make them hate America and American soldiers.

Hence the Winter Soldier Investigation.

The three-day circus featured tales of the most sadistic forms of torture, including genital mutilation and gang rape, and wanton mass murder of innocent civilians. In the words of Kerry three months later to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”

In other words, Kerry and VVAW claimed that almost unprecedented war crimes were not simply rampant, but committed as a matter of U.S. policy.

One of the most shocking quotes comes from Kerry himself, admitting that he had committed war crimes in Vietnam, then shrugging that off as merely a matter of following orders. Following orders, however, does not absolve someone of guilt for committing war crimes. Which begs the question: will Kerry be willing to discuss the details of the war crimes he admits committing?

Though not quite proof of a war crime, WinterSoldier.com has two flyers for a September 1971 event listing both Kerry and the former Mrs. Ted Turner as speakers. Though that issue makes for media fodder, it is far from the most appalling piece of evidence on the new site.

Also under the “documents” section at WinterSoldier.com is a particularly incendiary VVAW flyer with the screaming, all-caps headline, “A U.S. INFANTRY COMPANY JUST CAME THROUGH HERE!” Just below, the top line reads, “If you had been Vietnamese--” and it is followed by eight lines of increasingly inflammatory charges. Each line begins with “We might have” and then finishes with such doozies as “burned your house,” “shot your dog,” “shot you,” and “raped your wife and daughter.”

Some will excuse VVAW's actions and hyperbolic rhetoric as necessary tactics or as the work of people understandably disillusioned by an embittering war experience. But there is evidence suggesting that many of the atrocities routinely touted by VVAW were, well, made up.

An excerpt of historian Guenter Lewy's book According to America posted on WinterSoldier.com discusses the results of a government investigation that attempted to corroborate the claims made at the VVAW event in Detroit. The investigators couldn't.

According to Lewy, the VVAW had told its members not to cooperate with the government inquiry—a probe that was initiated by Sen. Mark Hatfield of Oregon in order to verify gruesome claims made at the VVAW-sponsored event. The historian also notes that government inspectors found veterans whose names had been used by people testifying in Detroit that were not actually there.

In other words, some of the “witnesses” in Detroit were impostors, tarnishing the names of real soldiers

Margot Adler, on NPR News (Feb. 23, 2004):

If you are talking about a single marriage law that covers both heterosexual and homosexual couples, the history of same-sex marriage is only three years old. Today such laws exist in the Netherlands , in Belgium , as well as two provinces in Canada , British Columbia and Ontario . Gay registered partnerships, the equivalent of civil unions, go back further. Denmark was the first country to legalize them in 1989. Norway followed in 1993. There are several other European countries with some form of domestic partnership arrangement.

Here in the United States , the legal history of attempts by gays to get a marriage license go back at least to the early 1970s. In 1971, two cases, one in Minnesota and one in Washington state, challenged bans on gay marriage. Both failed. Other cases followed. They, too, failed. In 1984, the Unitarian Universalist Association voted to approve ceremonies celebrating same-sex unions. Several other denominations followed.

If you go back further in time, facts are much harder to come by. There are historical examples of gays attempting to marry. Louis Crompton, Americas professor of English at the University of Nebraska , cites one. He is the author of "Homosexuality in Civilization." Crompton quotes the Venetian ambassador in Rome in 1578, describing an incident involving Portuguese and Spanish men.

Professor LOUIS CROMPTON (Author, "Homosexuality in Civilization"): And they were part of a group--and I'll quote what he wrote about them--"who had assembled in the church where they performed some ceremonies of a horrible wickedness which sullied the sacred name of matrimony." Two years later, the French philosopher Montaigne visited Rome and commented on the incident. And he identified the church, which is still standing, as the Church of St. John at the Porta Latina. The men were later captured and burned in the square in Rome where heretics were regularly executed.

ADLER: Many other examples of gay unions in history are contested. A controversial historian, the late John Boswell, claimed liturgical ceremonies in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches sanctioned gay unions, but many historians dispute his scholarship.

Mr. DANIEL MENDELSOHN ( Princeton University ): I thought that Boswell's book was extremely problematic.

ADLER: Daniel Mendelsohn is a writer who also teaches classics at Princeton University . He says the ceremony that Boswell describes, called the Adelphopoiesis, the making of brothers, was never meant as a marriage.

Mr. MENDELSOHN: People have always known about this ceremony, which he presented as this spectacular, new, earth-shaking find. It had always been satisfactorily explained as a sort of official blood-brother ceremony used to reconcile, say, the heads of warring clans.

ADLER: Mendelsohn says Boswell and others have also attempted to find gay marriage in the classical world. Ancient Greece and Rome are often seen as models of societies that accepted homosexuality. Mendelsohn says although there was one satirical ceremony in Rome where an emperor married a slave during a banquet, and in classical Athens there were clearly homosexual bonds...

Mr. MENDELSOHN: There was nothing like a marriage between men, which would have been looked on really with horror by most Athenians. You know, you had at some point this sort of boyfriend, but you were always supposed to be married to a woman, to procreate, to make babies who would grow up to be good Athenians.

ADLER: When you turn to indigenous societies, both past and present, there are some examples. Some Native American peoples have a concept of two-spirit people, people who are not tied to one gender. In some tribes, there are special ceremonies to determine if a child is a two-spirit person. Gilbert Herdt is a professor and director of human sexuality studies at San Francisco State University . He says the designation of someone as a two-spirit person can sometimes create a same-sex marriage.

Professor GILBERT HERDT (San Francisco State University): Which means that biologically, it may be a male, in the case of a male-male arrangement, but they have the designation of two-spirit, which means that the social role they take as two-spirit obviates or, if you like, overrules their biological gender.

ADLER: But not many people fall into this category. Herdt also argues that over the last few hundred years in the West, people who were not in heterosexual marriages with children have not been seen as true adults or accorded social and political power. In the postmodern world, he says, that definition is now being challenged socially, legally and scientifically by reproductive technologies.

Prof. HERDT: And that's why this whole debate is so dramatic and is so wrenching to people who come very much from the historical and cultural and religious perspective of the modern period. They deeply that a full person or a full citizen is someone who is heterosexually married and produces children. And they cannot accept that you would extend that definition to someone else.

ADLER: Perhaps this subtext is why, history or no history, the stakes in the battle over gay marriage are so high. Margot Adler, NPR News, New York .

From the editorial page of the WSJ (Feb. 5, 2004):

Mr. President, I also rise today--and I want to say that I rise reluctantly, but I rise feeling driven by personal reasons of necessity--to express my very deep disappointment over yesterday's turn of events in the Democratic primary in Georgia.

I am saddened by the fact that Vietnam has yet again been inserted into the campaign, and that it has been inserted in what I feel to be the worst possible way. By that I mean that yesterday, during this presidential campaign, and even throughout recent times, Vietnam has been discussed and written about without an adequate statement of its full meaning.

What is ignored is the way in which our experience during that period reflected in part a positive affirmation of American values and history, not simply the more obvious negatives of loss and confusion.

What is missing is a recognition that there exists today a generation that has come into its own with powerful lessons learned, with a voice that has been grounded in experiences both of those who went to Vietnam and those who did not.

What is missing and what cries out to be said is that neither one group nor the other from that difficult period of time has cornered the market on virtue or rectitude or love of country.

What saddens me most is that Democrats, above all those who shared the agonies of that generation, should now be refighting the many conflicts of Vietnam in order to win the current political conflict of a presidential primary.

The race for the White House should be about leadership, and leadership requires that one help heal the wounds of Vietnam, not reopen them; that one help identify the positive things that we learned about ourselves and about our nation, not play to the divisions and differences of that crucible of our generation.

We do not need to divide America over who served and how. I have personally always believed that many served in many different ways. Someone who was deeply against the war in 1969 or 1970 may well have served their country with equal passion and patriotism by opposing the war as by fighting in it. Are we now, 20 years or 30 years later, to forget the difficulties of that time, of families that were literally torn apart, of brothers who ceased to talk to brothers, of fathers who disowned their sons, of people who felt compelled to leave the country and forget their own future and turn against the will of their own aspirations?

Are we now to descend, like latter-day Spiro Agnews, and play, as he did, to the worst instincts of divisiveness and reaction that still haunt America? Are we now going to create a new scarlet letter in the context of Vietnam?

Certainly, those who went to Vietnam suffered greatly. I have argued for years, since I returned myself in 1969, that they do deserve special affection and gratitude for service. And, indeed, I think everything I have tried to do since then has been to fight for their rights and recognition.

But while those who served are owed special recognition, that recognition should not come at the expense of others; nor does it require that others be victimized or criticized or said to have settled for a lesser standard. To divide our party or our country over this issue today, in 1992, simply does not do justice to what all of us went through during that tragic and turbulent time.

I would like to make a simple and straightforward appeal, an appeal from my heart, as well as from my head. To all those currently pursuing the presidency in both parties, I would plead that they simply look at America. We are a nation crying out for leadership, for someone who will bring us together and raise our sights. We are a nation looking for someone who will lift our spirits and give us confidence that together we can grow out of this recession and conquer the myriad of social ills we have at home.

We do not need more division. We certainly do not need something as complex and emotional as Vietnam reduced to simple campaign rhetoric. What has been said has been said, Mr. President, but I hope and pray we will put it behind us and go forward in a constructive spirit for the good of our party and the good of our country.

Mr. Kerry, who served as a Navy lieutenant in Vietnam, is a Massachusetts senator and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

From the Congressional Record, quoting Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) (Feb. 25, 2004):

Mr. McDERMOTT . Mr. Speaker, the President's presidential prayer team is urging us to ``pray for the President as he seeks wisdom on how to legally codify the definition of marriage. Pray that it will be according to Biblical principles.''

With that in mind, I thought I would remind the body of the biblical principles they are talking about.

Marriage shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women . That is from Genesis 29:17-28.

Secondly, marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives . That is II Samuel 5:13 and II Chronicles 11:21.

A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin . If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed . That is Deuteronomy 22:13.

Marriage of a believer and a nonbeliever shall be forbidden . That is Genesis 24:3.

Finally, it says that since there is no law that can change things, divorce is not possible, and finally, if a married man dies, his brother has to marry his sister-in-law. Gen. 38:6-10; Deut 25:5-10

Tracey Kaplan, Kansas City Star (Feb. 25, 2004):

President Bush on Tuesday joined a long, proud - and mostly unsuccessful - line of Americans that stretches back 215 years: those who have tried to amend the U.S. Constitution.

Even before the notion of banning same-sex marriage became grist for constitutional debate, Congress had considered 1,186 proposed amendments to the nation's defining document. They range from a flag-burning ban in 1989 to an 1810 law that would have stripped the citizenship of anyone who kept or accepted a title of nobility from a foreign land.

But only 27 made it into the Constitution, most recently a 1992 ban on members of Congress raising their own pay between elections. And more than a third of the 27 constitutional postscripts were approved more than 213 years ago as a package - the 10-amendment Bill of Rights.

Historically, amendments that expand the rights of citizens have fared far better than those proscribe rights. The lone amendment that took away rights from citizens, the hugely unpopular prohibition of alcohol, was tossed out 14 years after it became law - and it took another amendment to do that.

Despite Bush's support, the gay-marriage amendment will have a hard time obtaining the necessary support even within the president's own party, experts say. Republicans expressed strong reservations Tuesday about the championing the amendment proposed by U.S. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave and Sen. Wayne Allard, both Republicans from Colorado.

And even proposals with broad political support face a daunting challenge to becoming part of the Constitution.

Purposely reserving amendments only for" certain great and extraordinary occasions," the founding fathers required that any Constitutional amendment be approved by a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress and then ratified by three-fourths of the states.

Right now, the GOP has only a two-seat majority in the Senate, making it tough to get a super-majority there.

"Our biggest hurdle is here inside the beltway," said Aaron Johnson, Musgrave's chief of staff.

In contrast, another hotly debated Constitutional change, the Equal Rights Amendment sailed through Congress in 1972 on a wave of the modern feminist movement but stalled in state legislatures and ultimately failed. ...

Only one successful amendment, the 18th, which banned manufacture or use of alcohol after its ratification in 1919, but was rescinded in 1933, set limits on citizens' rights, scholars said. In contrast, limits on voting rights for blacks and women that were in the original Constitution were removed through the amendment process.

Given their own party's opposition, Republican advocates of the marriage amendment are unlikely to succeed in bringing the issue to a vote in Congress before the November election. The measure's ultimate success could hinge on the timing because politics and national events can have such a crucial effect on attitudes.

For example, giving 18-year-olds the vote had been proposed 11 times since the early 1940s without success. But after languishing for almost three decades, the proposal sailed through Congress in 1971, the midst of the Vietnam War, when 18-year-olds were eligible for an unpopular draft, and was quickly ratified as the 26th amendment the same year.

 

David Aaronovitch, writing for the Guardian (Feb. 24, 2004)

I know it's true that, as an old friend in Australia pointed out to me in an email last week,"It doesn't really matter very much if you were wrong or I was wrong. One hundred years from now, some very clever historians with access to material we all know nothing about may prove the point conclusively, one way or another. What matters is what happens now."

Now, nearly a year after the beginning of the coalition invasion of Iraq, something is beginning to be created, and it doesn't look like anything that anybody quite anticipated. It is more complex, more difficult, more beset by difficulties and tragedies than anyone who supported the invasion ever allowed before the war.

Judging from those relatively few reports that do not deal with the security situation, it seems that parts of the national infrastructure of Iraq, such as electricity and water supply, have taken far longer to repair or construct than expected. Many hospitals still suffer terrible shortages. Unemployment is over 50%. Crime and fear of crime are very high in some places, with many abductions and murders. There is widespread disappointment at the gulf between the material promises and the reality of post-Saddam Iraq.

And, of course, there are the bombings and ambushes, aimed at the Iraqi police, NGO offices, CNN journalists, Shi'a clerics, communists and soon, doubtless, as those targets protect themselves, at buses and markets. The security failure above all has helped to create the other failures. Attempts by coalition forces to contain such attacks have had the inevitable effect of alienating sections of the population whose houses have been raided or who have been subject to rough treatment by occupying forces.

I bundle these negatives together because we are now four months away from the handover of power from the coalition authority to the new sovereign Iraqi entity; an entity whose shape and origin we are still not sure of. And because, between them, they constitute a major reason why the influential organisation, Human Rights Watch, made the judgment a few weeks ago that the invasion of Iraq could not be justified on humanitarian grounds, the grounds that people like me have specifically used to justify it."The difficulty of establishing stable institutions in Iraq," wrote HRW,"is making the country an increasingly unlikely staging ground for promoting democracy in the Middle East."...

...And here we come to it. Three weeks ago, a few days after the devastating bombs in the Kurdish city of Erbil, a representative of the Kurdish PUK, Barham Salih, addressed a meeting of the council of the Socialist International in Madrid."Friends," he told them,"our nightmare of the Saddam Hussein fascist tyranny is over. The world should have acted sooner to end the killing fields and stop mass graves in Iraq. Good social democrats should be making the moral argument that the war of liberation in Iraq came too late for so many innocent victims of Saddam's fascist tyranny. And the lesson for the international community should be (that) it must be prepared to act in time and pre-empt terrible tragedies from happening again anywhere else in the world."

I respect HRW, but there is, in Salih's words, a reproach and a demand, neither of which can be ignored."Most Iraqis," Salih went on,"see the moral and political imperative for the war of liberation as overwhelming." The Guardian's own Salam Pax put it in his different way, two weeks ago."Saddam is gone, thanks to you. Was it worth it? Be assured it was. We all know that it got to a point where we would have never been rid of Saddam without foreign intervention; I just wish it would have been a bit better planned."

Meanwhile many good things have been happening. The Free Prisoners Association, for victims of the old regime, now has 17 offices throughout Iraq. There are 200 newspapers and Iraqis can debate and watch and listen freely. There is, for the first time in the country's history, a woman police officer, and women's organisations are active and demonstrating for equal rights. The Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) has recognised the Iraqi Federation of Trades Unions as"the legitimate and legal representatives of the labour movement in Iraq", despite an unexplained American raid on the IFTU's HQ in December. The UN is back in Iraq and helping to prepare the ground for elections in the next 18 months. The green shoots of civic society are pressing through what Salih has called the"broken clay" of the Iraqi state. This is despite the killing and bombing of organisations associated with this new Iraq...

...You could, as Tariq Ali and John Pilger have suggested, desire victory for the Iraqi"resistance" despite its massacres of the innocent, on the basis that, as Ali has put it,"Occupations are usually ugly. How, then, can resistance be pretty?" Or, in Pilger's words,"While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the 'Bush gang' will attack another country. If they succeed, a grievous blow will be suffered by the Bush gang."

Or you could decide to heed Salih."I call upon you to help Iraqi democrats in this critical juncture of the history of the Middle East. To help us transform our country from the land of mass graves and aggression to the land of peace, justice and democracy. I can see an Iraq that is democratic, that is an anchor for peace in this troubled part of the world and a partner to civilised nations in pursuit of the universal values of human rights and justice. Thank you."

Editorial in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Feb. 23, 2004):

For both sides [in the gay marriage debate], the Constitution is more than what the word literally means: a system for "constituting" the federal government. Especially after the addition of the Bill of Rights and post-Civil War amendments designed to protect recently freed slaves and their descendants, the Constitution is at least semi-sacred, and not lightly to be changed.

It isn't just that amending the Constitution requires super majorities -- two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-fourths of the states. There is a popular conception that the Constitution and what the late Supreme Court Justice William Brennan called its "majestic generalities" encode timeless truths. It follows that the document should be amended only on rare occasions -- even if such a cautious approach locks in unfortunate interpretations of the Constitution by the courts.

Seventeen years ago I participated in a sort of mini-constitutional convention sponsored by the American Assembly. Participants -- judges, constitutional lawyers, political scientists, historians , journalists -- were given a blank check to revise the Constitution, perhaps undertaking radical revisions like a move toward a British-style parliamentary system. When the oratorical dust cleared, we had concluded anti-climactically that the structure of the Constitution "has, in general, proved sound, given the Civil War amendments and other adjustments. There is no fundamental reason to believe that it will not work as well in the closing years of this century and into the next."

This sense of caution also helps to explain the moribund state of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. True, some feminists still agitate for adoption of the amendment declaring that "equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex." Yet the effort has stalled. That is partly because some of the legal victories the ERA was to have produced have been secured under the current Constitution, such as the Supreme Court's 1996 decision requiring that women be admitted to the Virginia Military Institute. But it also probably reflects a preference for new rights to be discerned by courts in the Constitution as it is.

This attitude is not new. In his book "A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture," Michael Kammen cites the results of a Roper poll taken in 1939 and again in 1946. Respondents were asked:

Which of the following most nearly represents your opinion of the American form of government?

1) Our form of government, based on the Constitution, is as near-perfect as it can be and no important change should be made in it.

2) The Constitution has served its purpose well, but it has not kept up with the times and should be thoroughly revised to make it fit for present-day needs.

Kammen notes that "a strong preference for the first option persisted."

The notion that the Constitution is "near-perfect as it is" (or as it has been interpreted by the courts) may be the best check against not only a marriage amendment but two others that are waiting in the wings. One is the much-introduced amendment to overturn Supreme Court decisions protecting the right to burn the American flag as a political protest. The other is a "religious freedom amendment," newly fine-tuned by its author, Rep. Ernest Istook of Oklahoma .