Roundup: Media's Take
This is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.
Editorial in the WSJ (Feb. 2, 2004):
Was John Kerry brainwashed? That's what we've been wondering as the new Democratic frontrunner struggles to explain his off-again-on-again-off-again support for confronting Saddam Hussein.
Some of our readers may recall that"brainwashing" is the word that turned the late George W. Romney into a footnote in American political history. In the summer of 1967, the Michigan Governor was the leading contender for the 1968 GOP Presidential nod. Then he told a Detroit television station that during a trip to Vietnam he had had"the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get" regarding the increasingly unpopular war. Romney was quickly laughed out of the race.
Now Mr. Kerry seems to be concocting his own Romney-like rationale for changing his mind on Iraq, specifically on weapons of mass destruction. Back in 1991, the Massachusetts Senator opposed President George H.W. Bush's U.N.-backed effort to drive Saddam from Kuwait. But on October 11, 2002 he nonetheless voted to give the current President Bush the unilateral authority"to use the armed forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate."
So why did the Senator later vote against the $87 billion appropriation to finish the job in Iraq (and Afghanistan), while accusing Mr. Bush of pursuing a" cut-and-run" strategy? Well, he now claims, he was"repeatedly misled" about Iraq's weapons by Bush officials including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell. And he is demanding an investigation.
But is it really likely that this savvy Washington insider was hoodwinked? As an 18-year member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he has spent plenty of time thinking about how to handle Iraq. He also had privileged and direct access to U.S. intelligence, the same data that led President Clinton into a military confrontation with Saddam in 1998, which was the same year"regime change" became stated U.S. policy after Mr. Kerry allowed the Iraq Liberation Act to pass the Senate with unanimous consent.
Presumably, similar intelligence played a role in Senator Kerry's speech on October 9, 2002 that"I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force -- if necessary -- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction [our emphasis] in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security." If Mr. Kerry was misled into believing in such a threat, so were the likes of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Madeleine Albright and Senator Carl Levin, all of whom made similarly unequivocal statements on the matter.
Nor does it appear to have been any contrary evidence that started Mr. Kerry's drift back into the antiwar camp. Rather it was the sudden traction Mr. Dean was getting with his antiwar message that led Mr. Kerry in January 2003 to start accusing Mr. Bush of a"rush to war." These days Mr. Kerry has more or less adopted the entire Dean line, decrying as"fraudulent" a coalition that includes most of our key allies from World Wars I and II.
Mr. Kerry has an explanation for all this, sort of. He says Saddam should have been evicted from Kuwait but voted"no" on the first Gulf War to give the former President Bush more time to amass domestic support. He says his"yes" vote in 2002 was premised on this President Bush attracting more international help. He didn't, he told Rolling Stone, expect Mr. Bush to"f -- it up as badly as he did."
Hell, we might curse too if we felt obliged to offer up such a tortured rationale. We're not the only ones who've noticed. Washington Post columnist David Broder, no Republican shill, recently suggested to Mr. Kerry that it would be difficult for him to explain to voters that"your 'no' [in 1991] did not mean no, and your 'yes' [in 2002] did not mean yes."
The Occam's Razor explanation, it seems to us, is that the former Naval Lieutenant tacks with the political winds -- and not just over the course of years and months but of days. The liberal New Republic magazine recently republished two Kerry letters to the same constituent in 1991, one appearing to support the Gulf War, the other to oppose it.
We think Mr. Kerry knows full well that there was no Administration conspiracy to mislead anybody this time around. Intelligence on Iraq was indeed faulty, as weapons inspector David Kay told Senators last week. But Mr. Kay was emphatic that any mistakes were not because of Administration pressure. Meanwhile, the prior occupant of the White House continues to believe the WMD existed. The Portuguese Prime Minister says Mr. Clinton told him recently"he was absolutely convinced, given his years in the White House and the access to privileged information which he had, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction until the end of the Saddam regime."
All of which raises the vital question of Mr. Kerry's constancy and character. In the Romney era, at least, some sort of consistency on matters of war and peace -- or at least a plausible explanation for a change of heart -- was considered a prerequisite for would-be commanders-in-chief. Shouldn't it still be today?
Susan Baer, writing in the Balt Sun (Jan. 23, 2004):
For all the changes that have revolutionized women's lives in the last half-century and recognized women as equal partners in marriages and in the workplace, any variation in the role of a presidential candidate's spouse, generally a wife, seems to set off its own sort of culture war.
Lewis L. Gould, a historian of first ladies and professor emeritus at the University of Texas, says the public's interest in seeing political wives is not so much tied up with views about feminism or women's roles. "It's more a statement about how involved with show business running for president has become," he says. "It's like a situation comedy. Everyone steps into their role. If you start to depart from the formula, there's all sorts of unease."
He says he has been struck in this campaign by how early in the primary process most of the wives have become active, noting that in 1960, Jacqueline Kennedy became involved - reluctantly - only after her husband had been chosen as the Democratic nominee.
"In the run-up to the first voting, people are now asking questions about the spouse," says Gould. "It's an indication of how integral a part of this process their presence has become.
"The general attitude is that running for president is so important, if a candidate has a truly intimate marriage, the wife would want to put aside her career and be a part of the campaign. There's an underlying traditionalism here that's very strong."
He wonders if the same would be true for the husband of a female presidential candidate.
Myra Gutin, another historian of first ladies and a communications professor at Rider University in New Jersey, says the spouses provide the windows into a candidate's personal life and character that voters demand.
"Having your spouse on the campaign trail is the most visible endorsement of your candidacy," she says. "It says to audiences, 'My wife or my husband is supportive of what I'm doing.' We like to know the character of a candidate, and we put his or her family in that particular basket."
The wives of the current crop of candidates have distinctive styles, from the invisible Steinberg, for whom corduroys and a sweater are said to be dressy, to the colorful Teresa Heinz Kerry, one of the nation's top philanthropists, her fortune estimated at $500 million.
With the exception of Steinberg, the wives of the top-tier Democrats have been active in their husband's campaigns, several of them outspoken women who are a far cry from the dutiful, smiling mannequin-variety of political spouses.
George Bisharat, a professor at the University of California's Hastings College of Law, writing in the LAT (Jan. 25, 2004):
Although Israel has claimed that Palestinians willingly abandoned Palestine after being urged to leave in radio broadcasts by Arab leaders, a review of broadcast transcripts by Irish diplomat Erskine Childers in 1961 revealed that Palestinians were exhorted by Arab leaders to stay, not leave their homes. In fact, Yigal Allon, commander of Palmach, the elite Zionist troops, and later Israeli foreign minister, launched a whispering campaign to terrorize Palestinians into flight.
Nor were we simply unintended victims of a war launched by the Arab states against Israel. As far back as the late 19th century, leaders of Political Zionism (the movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine) advocated "transfer" of the Palestinians, by force if necessary. In 1948, Jews owned only 11% of the land allocated by the United Nations to the Jewish state -- not enough for a viable economy. As David Ben-Gurion said in February 1948 before he became prime minister of Israel: "The war will give us the land. The concepts of 'ours' and 'not ours' are peace concepts only, and in war they lose their whole meaning."
Zionist leaders knew that an Arab minority of 40% would challenge the Jewish demographic dominance they sought. Hence, nearly half of the Palestinian refugees ultimately expelled were forced out before the Arab states attacked Israel in May 1948. Israeli historian Benny Morris documented 24 massacres of Palestinian civilians, some claiming hundreds of unarmed men, women and children, during subsequent fighting. Thousands more Palestinians were, like the residents of Majdal (now Ashkelon) -- a southern coastal city 15 miles north of the Gaza Strip -- chased across the border into Gaza after the armistice of 1949.
Palestine had to be "cleansed" of its native population to establish Israel as a Jewish state. Ironically, those who today protest that the return of the refugees would destroy Israel unwittingly confirm this viewpoint, for the refugees are simply the Palestinians and their offspring who would have become Israeli citizens had they not been exiled.
Israel's denial of responsibility for the refugees and rejection of their repatriation (intransigence that was condemned early on by a U.S. official as "morally reprehensible") is nearly as offensive as the original expulsion itself. Israel welcomed immigrant Jews from all over the world but shot Palestinians who tried to return to recover movable property, harvest the fruit of their orchards or reclaim their homes. Oxford professor Avi Shlaim concluded in his book "The Iron Wall" that "between 2,700 and 5,000 [Palestinian] infiltrators were killed in the period 1949-56, the great majority of them unarmed."
Nothing the Palestinians had done merited this treatment, something the international community has consistently recognized. A 1948 U.N. resolution recognizing the Palestinian right of return has been annually -- and almost unanimously -- reaffirmed ever since. The Palestinian right of return is also supported by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
The two-state solution envisioned today would probably ameliorate the conditions of the one-third of the Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. There, Palestinians face incessant military attacks that have demolished homes and orchards and killed an average of nearly 70 Palestinians per month over the last three years. A smothering matrix of closures, curfews and checkpoints restricts movement and has caused unemployment to soar to more than 70% and threaten Palestinian children with malnutrition. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers, shock troops in the grinding 36-year campaign to seize and colonize yet more Palestinian land, speed through the West Bank and Gaza Strip on "Jewish only" roads. The oppressive features of Israeli military occupation were entrenched long before Palestinians resorted in the mid-1990s to the desperate -- yet still indefensible -- tactic of suicide bombings to slow the colonizing juggernaut.
But this two-state solution would not address the concerns of 1.2 million Palestinians living in Israel as second-class citizens. Palestinian citizens there possess formal political rights -- that much Israel can afford after expelling most Palestinians in 1948. But these Palestinians have restricted access to land (most real property in Israel is owned by the state or the Jewish National Fund and is leased to Jews only). They are also forced to carry identity cards that brand them as non-Jews, and they cannot serve in the armed forces (the key to many benefits in Israeli society). Palestinian towns and villages are starved of resources, with many lacking connections to the country's electrical or water systems. Government policies, from immigration to family planning, are designed to counter the "demographic threat" Israelis fear in the higher birthrate of Palestinian citizens. Israeli law enshrines the principle that Israel is the "state of the Jewish people," and it lacks firm guarantees of the legal equality of all citizens.
Nor would the two-state solution fairly redress the rights of diaspora Palestinians -- permitting us only return to a new, already overcrowded and underfunded "statelet" in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
There is no bar to implementing the Palestinians' right of return. If there is room in Israel for a million Russian immigrants (including many non-Jews), there is room for those Palestinians who would elect return over other legal options. The sole obstacle is Israel's desire to maintain a "demographic balance" favorable to Jews.
James Burkee, writing in USA Today (Jan. 28, 2004):
This isn't the first time intelligence information -- or the public's lack of it -- has played a significant role in a presidential election. During the 1960 campaign, Republican Richard Nixon's Democratic challengers -- Sens. Stuart Symington of Missouri, Lyndon Johnson of Texas and John Kennedy of Massachusetts -- all campaigned on the so-called missile gap, the Soviet Union's perceived superiority in nuclear weaponry.
Bombastic Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had capitalized on the shock value of Sputnik in 1957 by boasting that the U.S.S.R. was building missiles "like sausages." By harping on that "missile gap," Kennedy convinced many Americans that it was true: In 1960, 47% of Americans believed the Russians were ahead of the U.S. in missile and rocket production. The problem, historian Martin Walker says, was that "there was no missile gap, and Kennedy knew it."
Photographs taken by the CIA's super spy plane, the U-2, suggested that if there was such a gap, it favored the West. But President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon could not challenge Kennedy's claims without acknowledging the existence of the U-2 and missions over Soviet territory. The Democratic challengers' strategy against Bush mirrors Kennedy's in 1960: attack from the right by saying the president has not been strong enough on homeland security and in postwar Iraq.
By manufacturing a "missile gap" and implying support for an invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro exiles, Kennedy seemed even more hawkish on defense than Nixon. The issue was decisive in a close race, which Kennedy won by fewer than 60,000 votes.
The danger of playing politics with intelligence was revealed in 1962, shortly after Kennedy took office, when the superpowers nearly came to blows over the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Historian John Lewis Gaddis suggests that crisis may be traced to Kennedy's posturing during and after the election. "Khrushchev placed missiles in Cuba," Gaddis writes, "because he saw Kennedy as aggressive, not passive."
Today's Democratic challengers would do well to learn from the consequences of Kennedy's political ambition. By suggesting that President Bush lied about WMD and 9/11, the Democrats are, as was Kennedy, relatively safe: The Bush administration cannot prove the assertions incorrect without exposing U.S. intelligence.
But they play a dangerous game in running at Bush from the right, as Wesley Clark did on Jan. 10, when he asserted that "the two greatest lies" of the Bush presidency were that 9/11 could not have been prevented and that future attacks are inevitable. "If I'm president of the United States," Clark boasted, " . . . we are not going to have one of these incidents."
Someday the truth will come out, as it has about Kennedy. It may take decades, but one day historians will discover what the Bush and Clinton administrations knew and when they knew it.
In the interim, we can only hope the Democrats remember the lesson of 1960: Playing politics with intelligence is very risky business.
Elizabeth Bumiller, writing in the NYT (Jan. 25, 2004):
Historically, Americans have not voted out the commander in chief in the middle of war, which helps explain, Democrats say, why Mr. Bush used the grand stage of the State of the Union speech to underline the threat. ("And it is tempting to believe that the danger is behind us. That hope is understandable, comforting and false.") It is also why the president traced the two-year narrative of a war on terror and then rebutted those who questioned, as he put it, "if America is really in a war."
Historians say that Franklin D. Roosevelt would probably not have won a third term in 1940 had there not been the crisis in Europe and Hitler's invasion of France that June. "There were forces on the right who didn't like anything about the New Deal, he had not brought about economic recovery and a lot of people thought he had too much power," Mr. Kennedy said. "There's very little question he owes his third term, and his fourth as well, to the international crisis."
Similarly, in the Civil War election of 1864, Abraham Lincoln survived a challenge by George B. McClellan, the Democratic nominee and the general Lincoln had fired the year before. But it might have been otherwise had not General Sherman captured Atlanta two months before the election, turning Lincoln's fortunes around after a summer of devastating casualties. "Lincoln was elected on a tide of military success," said James M. McPherson, the Civil War historian. "But Lincoln and everybody else acknowledged that if the election had been held in August, it would have gone the other way."
Of course, unpopular wars have driven some presidents from office, like Lyndon B. Johnson, who chose not to run for re-election in 1968 because of his vulnerabilities over Vietnam. Harry S. Truman was so unpopular in 1952 because of the stalemate in Korea that he might not have won his party's nomination.
It is no surprise that the biggest fear of the current White House, short of another terrorist attack, is that Iraq will implode before the election. Barring that, political analysts say Mr. Bush is wise to wield his most powerful advantage against the opposition. In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted just before the State of the Union, 68 percent, including majorities of both Democrats and independents, gave Mr. Bush high marks for the campaign against terrorism.
Frank Rich, writing in the NYT (Jan. 25, 2004):
Since its release, "The Fog of War" has generated plenty of debate on two fronts. Should Mr. McNamara, who freely admits to making errors about Vietnam but stops well short of outright contrition, rot in hell? The verdicts on his confessions in Mr. Morris's film range from mild praise (he's conceding fallibility, however belatedly) to utter rage (Roger Rosenblatt, on "The NewsHour," likened him to the self-justifying bureaucrats of Treblinka).
The greater debate has been over the degree to which the follies of Vietnam are now being re-enacted in Iraq. Though Mr. Morris started interviewing Mr. McNamara before 9/11 and his film never mentions current events, the implicit parallels between then and now are there for the taking. In the Johnson administration's deceptive hyping of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a provocation to war, we see the Bush administration's deceptive hyping of the supposedly imminent threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction for the same purpose. In Mr. McNamara's stern warnings against waging war unilaterally and against trying to win the hearts and minds of a foreign land without understanding its culture first, we find historical lessons we didn't heed as we blundered into the escalating chaos of our "postwar" occupation of Iraq.
Such analogies can be pushed only so far, however, and Mr. McNamara refuses to draw them publicly, despite repeated badgering by interviewers like me to do so. But if it is inexact, not to mention wildly premature, to declare that Iraq is Vietnam, it is not too soon to mine a related and pressing resonance of the McNamara story. When President-elect John F. Kennedy appointed Mr. McNamara to his cabinet, he was lionized as the very model, indeed the very shiny new model, of the modern star business executive: famously, the first non-Ford to be president of the Ford Motor Company, the most brilliant of the 10 so-called Whiz Kids whom Ford had recruited en masse from the Air Force brain trust of World War II, and the first M.B.A. from Harvard Business School to ascend so high in government.
As a national role model at the dawn of Camelot, Robert McNamara was Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and, yes, Paul O'Neill before it was cool. He entered the cabinet as an exemplar of "American certitude and conviction" who could use "his rationality with facts" to intimidate bureaucratic dissenters, David Halberstam wrote in "The Best and the Brightest" in 1972, after Mr. McNamara had come to his bad end. Among Mr. McNamara's virtues, Mr. Halberstam wrote, was loyalty — but "perhaps too much loyalty, the corporate-mentality loyalty to the office instead of to himself."
"The Price of Loyalty," Ron Suskind's new best-selling exposé of the inner workings of the Bush White House, reads like an as-told-to book by its principal source, Mr. O'Neill, a C.E.O./cabinet officer fired by another Texan wartime president. It casts the former treasury secretary in the same role of protagonist that Mr. McNamara plays in "The Fog of War." When Mr. O'Neill was first appointed, he was hailed for his successful tenure at Alcoa, where, like Mr. McNamara at Ford, he was prized for his humanistic concern with safety as well as his can-do resuscitation of a sinking bottom line. The parallels end there. Whatever one thinks of Mr. O'Neill's White House tenure, he is of footnote stature in American history, if that. And unlike Mr. McNamara, a loyal courtier to presidents to the bitter end and beyond, Mr. O'Neill hardly waited a moment before trashing George W. Bush.
Patrick Tyler, writing in the NYT (Jan. 25, 2004):
Since becoming prime minister in 1997, Tony Blair has proved the most successful and popular Labor leader of the last century, yet there are whispers in his own party that he could be out of office by Easter.
"If Blair is out next week, there probably won't be any tears outside his family because it is a ruthless system and it's the way the system works," said Iain McLean, professor of politics at Oxford University.
Whatever it is about British politics and the parliamentary system that deliver abrupt and surprising reversals of political fortune seems to be at work again. Mr. Blair has proved nimble at brilliant reinventions in the past, but the question remains: Can he outrun British democracy's penchant for fatigue, which has sometimes claimed leaders at the most surprising times?
In May 1945, Winston Churchill was at the apex of power after Germany's surrender. And with Franklin Roosevelt's death the month before, Mr. Churchill was the West's icon of allied victory.
Yet before the month was out, he was forced to resign as prime minister, and the Labor Party soon swept into office under Clement Attlee.
In 1990, Margaret Thatcher suffered a similar indignity after winning three terms for her party, presiding with Ronald Reagan at the burial of Communism in Europe and privatizing much of the British economy.
In August she was telling the first President Bush, with Churchillian verve, not to go "wobbly" in the face of Saddam Hussein invasion of Kuwait. But by November she was political toast, overthrown by Tory rebels and replaced by John Major.
"I was visiting at Stanford University in 1990 and my colleagues had no idea" that Mrs. Thatcher was teetering, said Professor McLean.
"It was Thanksgiving, so there was no one around to explain,'' he added. "So I was briefly a pundit.''
Like Churchill and Lady Thatcher before him, Mr. Blair has set records for longevity and led his nation into war. He returned the Labor Party to a prominence it had not enjoyed in 101 years with two landslide victories. Large Labor majorities took control of the House of Commons, and almost every city, town and shire overturned the Tory supremacy in British life.
But his war leadership in Iraq has made him deeply unpopular with a large segment of the public, even though opinion polls still show that a plurality of Britons back his decision to go to war to remove Mr. Hussein.
Robert Kagan, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writing in the NYT (Jan. 24, 2004):
A great philosophical schism has opened within the West, and instead of mutual indifference, mutual antagonism threatens to debilitate both sides of the trans-Atlantic community. Coming at a time in history when new dangers and crises are proliferating, this schism could have serious consequences. For Europe and the United States to decouple strategically has been bad enough. But what if the schism over "world order" infects the rest of what we have known as the liberal West? Will the West still be the West?
It is the legitimacy of American power and American global leadership that has come to be doubted by a majority of Europeans. America, for the first time since World War II, is suffering a crisis of international legitimacy.
Americans will find that they cannot ignore this problem. The struggle to define and obtain international legitimacy in this new era may prove to be among the critical contests of our time, in some ways as significant in determining the future of the international system and America's place in it as any purely material measure of power and influence.
Americans for much of the past three centuries have considered themselves the vanguard of a worldwide liberal revolution. Their foreign policy from the beginning has not been only about defending and promoting their material national interests. "We fight not just for ourselves but for all mankind," Benjamin Franklin declared of the American Revolution, and whether or not that has always been true, most Americans have always wanted to believe that it is true. There can be no clear dividing line between the domestic and the foreign, therefore, and no clear distinction between what the democratic world thinks about America and what Americans think about themselves.
Every profound foreign policy debate in America's history, from the time when Jefferson squared off against Hamilton, has ultimately been a debate about the nation's identity and has posed for Americans the primal question "Who are we?" Because Americans do care, the steady denial of international legitimacy by fellow democracies will over time become debilitating and perhaps even paralyzing.
Americans therefore cannot ignore the unipolar predicament. ...
Right now many Europeans are betting that the risks from the "axis of evil," from terrorism and tyrants, will never be as great as the risk of an American Leviathan unbound. Perhaps it is in the nature of a postmodern Europe to make such a judgment. But now may be the time for the wisest heads in Europe, including those living in the birthplace of Pascal, to begin asking what will result if that wager proves wrong.
Guy Coq, author of a book about secularism in France, writing in the NYT (Jan. 30, 2004):
With France on the verge of passing a law that would prevent Muslim girls from wearing their head scarves in class, Americans are asking why the French are so attached to secularism....
The French word that is closest to secularism, laïcité, was invented in the late 19th century to express several ideas. Laïcité includes, foremost, tolerance. Tolerance had actually been around for a while. It was first instituted in 1598 under the Edict of Nantes — which allowed Protestants to practice their faith and ended our Wars of Religion. But the state and the Roman Catholic Church were so intertwined that tolerance wasn't enough. We had to take away the church's power to oppress minorities and make law.
For that, France had to go farther than other countries in separating matters of state and matters of religion. The most emphatic expression of this desire came in our Revolution of 1789. The French people didn't just depose a monarch — they also took aim at the Catholic Church's domination of society, stripping the church of its property and demanding that the clergy acknowledge the authority of the state.
In the century after the Revolution, however, the Catholic Church found ways to regain power. A concordat between the papacy and Napoleon in 1801 gave the church a privileged position as the majority religion of France. The church took control of education and provided priests as teachers. As monarchs, emperors and republics succeeded one another during the 1800's, the church inserted itself into politics by joining with forces that were enemies of the rights of man and the republican ideas of the Revolution.
The leaders of the Third Republic, in the 1880's, saw that for the republic to establish itself, it had to wrest control of the schools from the church. Prime Minister Jules Ferry founded the public school system, which barred priests as teachers and took over the job of transmitting common values and the sense of social unity — in short, forming the citizens of the republic — without reference to religion.
The next step, the ending of Napoleon's concordat, came in 1905. By separating church and state — instituting a republic that was neutral toward all religions, and without a national religion — France finally realized the aims of the Revolution. This is laïcité, and it has worked well.
But the laïcité of schools has been eroded by the intrusion of religious symbols, prompted by an excess of individualism, that philosophy so revered by Americans. The necessity of the law that Parliament will debate on Tuesday reveals the regrettable waning of this French tradition
Peter Robinson, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, served as chief speechwriter to Vice President Bush and special assistant and speechwriter to President Reagan. He is the author of How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life (Regan, 2003). In the WSJ (Jan. 22, 2004):
The White House communications director, Dan Bartlett, reported on Tuesday that by the time the president left to deliver his State of the Union address at the Capitol, the speechwriters were "on about draft 30 of the speech." From a speechwriter who went through the ordeal a few times himself, here's a report card:
* The Fatuity Factor: By the time a State of the Union address is in its 10th or 12th draft, it's easy for the speechwriters to start composing sentences that don't actually mean anything. Perhaps because they passed through so many hands -- his speechwriting staff was the largest in recent years, perhaps in history -- President Clinton's State of the Union addresses are especially rich in examples of empty rhetoric. Consider this beauty from Mr. Clinton's 1996 address: "Now is the time for us to look to the challenges of today and tomorrow, beyond the burdens of yesterday."
President Bush? I listened closely, but in all 54 minutes I never heard him utter a single sentence that didn't mean at least a little something. This may seem an odd category in which to award a grade. But within the speechwriting brotherhood, it's important. Even at the worst moments, everyone on the Bush staff kept his head. Grade: A* Make 'Em Laugh: Humor is tricky in a State of the Union address. A few laughs would help set the audience in the House chamber at ease. But the occasion is supposed to be august. In 1992, President George H. W. Bush joked that Speaker Tom Foley and Vice President Dan Quayle, positioned on the rostrum behind him, "saw what I did in Japan [the President, ill with the flu, had vomited at a state dinner] and they're just happy they're sitting behind me." The elder Bush may have gotten a laugh, but he sounded undignified.
One of the finest moments this time took place during the president's discussion of the war on terror. Turning to the argument that the rebuilding of Iraq should be internationalized, the president deadpanned.
"This particular criticism," he said, "is hard to explain to our partners in Britain, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines . . . " As Mr.
Bush continued -- ". .. . Thailand, Italy, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, the Netherlands . . ." -- his audience began to laugh. Then the audience interrupted him with applause. And when he finally completed the litany of nations that have committed troops to Iraq -- ". . . Norway, El Salvador, and . . . 17 other countries . . ." -- the audience gave him an ovation.The best use of humor in a State of the Union address I've witnessed. Grade: A+
* The Speech He Got Stuck With: State of the Union addresses often amount to not one but two speeches: the speech the president got stuck with, which sounds like a hodgepodge, and, somewhere inside it, the speech the president wanted to deliver, which sounds unified, authentic and complete.
How do chief executives get stuck with hodgepodges? For weeks, Cabinet secretaries, agency heads, chairmen of congressional committees, and members of the White House senior staff draw up lists of initiatives they insist the address must contain. Some of this material can be tossed out.
But a lot cannot. Speechwriters do their best to keep this portion of State of the Union addresses thematically unified. They always fail.How was this portion of President Bush's address? Just fine. The president's own interest in the speech came and went -- he appeared a lot more intent on making his tax cuts permanent than on modernizing the electricity grid. But his delivery remained well-paced, the text itself craftsmanlike. And it isn't really the rhetoric in this portion of any State of the Union address that matters in any event. It's the dollars. By contrast with the spree over which George W. Bush has so far presided -- as this newspaper has pointed out, Mr. Bush has increased discretionary domestic spending more than any chief executive since Lyndon Johnson -- the hodgepodge of proposals the president advanced on Tuesday appears restrained. Grade: A
* The Speech He Wanted to Deliver: In 1992, President George H. W. Bush delivered one of the best speeches-within-a-speech in any State of the Union address, speaking with feeling about the end of the Cold War.
"[C]ommunism died this year," the elder Bush proclaimed. "There are still threats. But the long, drawn-out dread is over."
On Tuesday, President George W. Bush delivered a speech-within-a-speech of his own, devoting it to the war on terror. These first 25 minutes of his address proved beautifully written and powerfully delivered. "The work of building a new Iraq is hard, and it is right," the president declared. "And America has always been willing to do what it takes for what is right." Yet something was missing. Although the president provided a compelling defense of his actions in the 28 months since 9/11, he told us almost nothing about what comes next."[N]early two-thirds of [al Qaeda's] known leaders have now been captured or killed," the president stated. Did he mean to suggest that the war on terror is two-thirds over? If not, why not? At times the president spoke as if the war would end as soon as we caught "the remaining killers." At other times he spoke as if the war would continue until we had transformed the entire Arab world, remaking a region that "remains a place of tyranny and despair and anger." Which does he intend?
As he proved in his defiant address on Sept. 20, 2001, nine days after the terrorist attacks, George W. Bush knows how to sound Churchillian. In the State of the Union address, he should have told us whether the war on terror has reached the beginning of the end or only the end of the beginning. Grade: Incomplete
* "Good Enough": The president's failure to lay out our next objectives in the war on terror strikes me as serious. On the other hand, you can submit President Reagan's 1984 State of the Union address to the most minute scrutiny but find only the broadest hints about what he intended to do in a second term. Yet later that year he carried 49 out of 50 states -- and by the time he left office he had won the Cold War.
A pretty good speech is often good enough. Overall Grade: B+
Tony Quinn, co-editor of the California Target Book, a nonpartisan analysis
of California legislative and congressional campaigns, writing in the LAT
(Jan. 25, 2004):
Not since the 1928 elections have the Republicans retained control of both Congress and the White House. Now that 76-year-old record may be about to fall: President Bush is looking stronger with the economy picking up, and Republicans seem likely not only to hold on to control of both houses of Congress but also to increase their numbers.
A GOP gerrymander of Democratic districts in Texas will probably add six to eight Republicans to the House. Every other big state is so heavily gerrymandered that no other major changes are likely. This means the GOP majority in the House is expected to grow by at least half a dozen seats.
The Rothenberg Political Report says that six Democratic Senate seats are in danger of falling to Republicans — five in the South — while only three GOP-held seats are similarly vulnerable. The Democratic minority will almost certainly have fewer seats in the next Congress than it has today.
How did we ever get to this: The nation's historic-majority Democratic Party reduced to a declining minority, and the second-banana Republicans suddenly running everything?
A good place to start is 1928, because U.S. politics seems to run in roughly 60-year cycles.
From the Civil War until 1928, Republicans were dominant, building a coalition from Civil War veterans, farm states and the emerging West. From the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 until 1994, Democrats held both houses of Congress for all but four years and the White House for most of that time, especially in the New Deal years. They also held the most governorships and a majority of state legislatures. The New Deal coalition of the Southern poor, ethnic and minority voters and urban liberals held together, more or less, for six decades.
The big change on the national stage occurred in 1994, when the GOP achieved dominance in the South and its border states, and not on traditional economic issues but on cultural ones. While the Democrats have held their own in the industrial North and New England, they have declined in the South and much of the West over the last 40 years to a point of near-extinction. "Angry white males" in their pickups with gun racks have brought about fundamental political change by doing nothing more than shifting their loyalties from Democrats, based on economics, to Republicans, based on culture and values.
With Democrats getting down to the serious business of choosing an opponent to Bush, they face a basic issue: Can they reverse the cultural alienation that has cost them so many of their former core supporters? Watching their candidates pander to every socially liberal interest group suggests they cannot — indeed do not — even acknowledge their predicament.
The lesson of Al Gore's defeat in 2000 is not Florida, which he would have won had he just gotten as many votes as the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate there, but places like eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, which didn't stray from their New Deal roots until 2000.
A cultural conservatism grounded in religion and traditional values is imbedded in the South and its border states and is now more important to their voters than economic issues. Among the best measures of how people voted in 2000 was church attendance. People who attended church regularly overwhelmingly supported Bush; those who didn't went for Gore.
The Democrats' problem goes beyond simply being irreligious. There's an undercurrent of hostility toward religion in the highest ranks of the party. The Democrats' dismissal of Bush's "faith-based initiative" is just one example of their hostility. Even on an issue like abortion rights, on which Democrats are with the majority of the public, intolerance of any dissent has alienated a mainstay of the New Deal coalition, Roman Catholics.
That's ironic, because the last time the Democrats were in as bad a shape as they are today, 1928, the issue that did them in was religion, specifically the nomination of the Catholic Al Smith for president. Then, the party seemed too religious; now its problem is no religion at all. The gamble Democrats made in 1928, nominating a Catholic for president, paid off handsomely in the half century after Smith, as legions of Irish, Italian and Eastern European Catholics joined Southern and Western Protestants to vote again and again for Democratic majorities. John F. Kennedy's Catholicism is now regarded as crucial to his election in 1960, and he remains the last non-Southern Democrat to win the White House.
Yet, Democrats seem to have forgotten how important religious identification was to their success. Many Catholics and conservative Protestants once regarded Republicans as country-club elitists with whom they had little or nothing in common. A Southern Baptist named Harry S. Truman won in 1948 with solid Catholic and fundamentalist Protestant support.
Today, churchgoing Catholic voters are leaving the Democratic fold with accelerating speed, as are many traditional Protestants. The crucial and growing Latino constituency is more religious — and more Catholic — than mainstream Democrats, and it could be next.
Brendan I. Koerner, writing in Slate (Jan. 28, 2004):
Despite winning both the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, John Kerry trails Howard Dean on the delegate scorecard . How can Kerry have fewer delegates than the man he's twice trounced at the polls?
The discrepancy is due to the early whims of some unpledged delegates, colloquially known as superdelegates. Of the 4,964 delegates who will attend the Democratic convention in Boston this July, the majority are obliged to support specific candidates in accordance with how their respective states voted during primary season. But there are 801 delegates who won't be bound by such customs. These superdelegates—typically congressmen, party leaders, and other political bigwigs—can support whomever they please at the convention. The delegate scorecard so far, then, takes into account that just more than a quarter of the superdelegates have already expressed a public preference for one candidate or another, and Dean has been the more popular choice than Kerry among this elite.
The Democratic National Committee created superdelegates as part of a 1982 overhaul of convention rules. In response to the furor at the 1968 convention, where street protestors railed against the rarefied nature of politics as usual, the party had opted to turn the nominating process entirely over to delegates picked in the primaries and caucuses, rather than giving party elders a backroom say. But after dark horses George McGovern and Jimmy Carter won their respective nominations, party leaders worried that the populist approach encouraged"insurgent" candidates who would tend to lose more often than not—Carter's 1976 triumph notwithstanding. The superdelegates, then, were intended to stabilize the process. As political insiders, they could generally be expected to cast their lot with mainstream candidates favored by the Democratic hierarchy.
Asaf Romirowsky and Jonathan Calt Harris, writing in frontpagemag.com (Jan. 28, 2004):
The university exists for the free exchange of ideas, right? Then why is it that representatives of one half the argument – the conservative half – need bodyguards and metal detectors when they speak on North American campuses, and their leftist counterparts almost never do?
Consider three suggestive parallels of how the Right needs security and the Left is welcomed.
Government officials. In September 2002, Benjamin Netanyahu, a former Likud (conservative) prime minister of Israel was to speak at Concordia University in Montreal, but he never made it. Nearly a thousand anti-Israel protestors rioted prior to the event, [1] smashing windows and hurling furniture at police, kicking and spitting on people going to the event. “By lunchtime,” notes the Globe & Mail daily, “the vestibule of Concordia's main downtown building was littered with paper, upturned chairs, broken furniture and the choking aftereffects of pepper spray.” [2]
In contrast, Hanan Ashrawi, a well-known Palestinian politician and activist, never faces such opposition. As she makes the rounds of American universities (such as the University of Colorado, Beloit, and Yeshiva), she speaks without interference, and what protests take place are completely non-violent. At Colorado College, students held small signs and a rebuttal was offered after the speech. [3] At the University of Pennsylvania , protesting students were so respectful, Tarek Jallad, president of the Penn Arab Student Society which sponsored her visit, commented: “I was very happy with the way the crowd showed her a lot of respect.” [4]
1960s activists. David Horowitz, a founder of the New Left movement in the 1960s and now a high-profile conservative, speaks often at campuses and often faces problems. Protestors at the University of Chicago shouted at him and disrupted his talk before he uttered a word. [5] At the University of Michigan, “the university administration assigned 12 armed guards and a German Shepherd to protect the safety” of those who came to hear him speak. [6]
By comparison, Angela Davis, a former Black Panther and still today a far-leftist, enjoys the highest of esteem when visiting campuses. As she tours American colleges, she meets no protests, requires no excessive security, and is dutifully acclaimed by campus newspapers for her “wise presence.” [7]
Middle East specialists. Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, a Harvard University Ph.D., author of twelve books, and a recent Bush appointee to U.S. Institute for Peace, needs security precautions at more than half his campus appearances. At York University in Toronto, for example, security provisions included “a 24-hour lockdown on the building beforehand, metal detectors for the audience, identification checks.” [8] Multiple bodyguards escorted Pipes through a back entrance and kept him in a holding room until just before his talk. More than a hundred police, including ten mounted on horses, stood by to ensure the speaker's safety and the event not being disrupted. [9]
In contrast, John Esposito, head of Georgetown University's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, a Temple University Ph.D., the author of more than twenty books, [10] and key advisor to the Clinton State Department, [11] enjoys honor and praise at the campuses. He recently served as keynote speaker for the inauguration of Stanford University's new Islamic Studies program, [12] for example, with no hint of special security.
A clear pattern emerges. Speakers on the left are welcomed, conservatives require strict security measures.
William S. Lind, Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism, writing on the website of the Free Congress Foundation (Dec. 2003):
Will Saddam's capture mark a turning point in the war in Iraq? Don't count on it. Few resistance fighters have been fighting for Saddam personally. Saddam's capture may lead to a fractioning of the Baath Party, which would move us further toward a Fourth Generation situation where no one can recreate the state. It may also tell the Shiites that they no longer need America to protect them from Saddam, giving them more options in their struggle for free elections.
If the U.S. Army used the capture of Saddam to announce the end of tactics that enrage ordinary Iraqis and drive them toward active resistance, it might buy us a bit of de-escalation. But I don't think we'll that be smart. When it comes to Fourth Generation war, it seems nobody in the American military gets it.
Recently, a faculty member at the National Defense University wrote to Marine Corps General Mattis, commander of I MAR DIV, to ask his views on the importance of reading military history. Mattis responded with an eloquent defense of taking time to read history, one that should go up on the wall at all of our military schools. "Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation," Mattis said. "It doesn't give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead."
Still, even such a capable and well-bread commander as General Mattis seems to miss the point about Fourth Generation warfare. He said in his missive, "Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face NOTHING new under the sun. For all the '4th Generation of War' intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc., I must respectfully say...'Not really"...
Well, that isn't quite what we Fourth Generation intellectuals are saying. On the contrary, we have pointed out over and over that the 4th Generation is not novel but a return, specifically a return to the way war worked before the rise of the state. Now, as then, many different entities, not just governments of states, will wage war. They will wage war for many different reasons, not just "the extension of politics by other means." And they will use many different tools to fight war, not restricting themselves to what we recognize as military forces. When I am asked to recommend a good book describing what a Fourth Generation world will be like, I usually suggest Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century.
Nor are we saying that Fourth Generation tactics are new. On the contrary, many of the tactics Fourth Generation opponents use are standard guerilla tactics. Others, including much of what we call "terrorism," are classic Arab light cavalry warfare carried out with modern technology at the operational and strategic, not just tactical, levels.
Peter Robinson, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, served as chief speechwriter to Vice President Bush and special assistant and speechwriter to President Reagan. He is the author of How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life (Regan, 2003). In the WSJ (Jan. 22, 2004):
The White House communications director, Dan Bartlett, reported on Tuesday that by the time the president left to deliver his State of the Union address at the Capitol, the speechwriters were "on about draft 30 of the speech." From a speechwriter who went through the ordeal a few times himself, here's a report card:
* The Fatuity Factor: By the time a State of the Union address is in its 10th or 12th draft, it's easy for the speechwriters to start composing sentences that don't actually mean anything. Perhaps because they passed through so many hands -- his speechwriting staff was the largest in recent years, perhaps in history -- President Clinton's State of the Union addresses are especially rich in examples of empty rhetoric. Consider this beauty from Mr. Clinton's 1996 address: "Now is the time for us to look to the challenges of today and tomorrow, beyond the burdens of yesterday."
President Bush? I listened closely, but in all 54 minutes I never heard him utter a single sentence that didn't mean at least a little something. This may seem an odd category in which to award a grade. But within the speechwriting brotherhood, it's important. Even at the worst moments, everyone on the Bush staff kept his head. Grade: A* Make 'Em Laugh: Humor is tricky in a State of the Union address. A few laughs would help set the audience in the House chamber at ease. But the occasion is supposed to be august. In 1992, President George H. W. Bush joked that Speaker Tom Foley and Vice President Dan Quayle, positioned on the rostrum behind him, "saw what I did in Japan [the President, ill with the flu, had vomited at a state dinner] and they're just happy they're sitting behind me." The elder Bush may have gotten a laugh, but he sounded undignified.
One of the finest moments this time took place during the president's discussion of the war on terror. Turning to the argument that the rebuilding of Iraq should be internationalized, the president deadpanned.
"This particular criticism," he said, "is hard to explain to our partners in Britain, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines . . . " As Mr.
Bush continued -- ". .. . Thailand, Italy, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, the Netherlands . . ." -- his audience began to laugh. Then the audience interrupted him with applause. And when he finally completed the litany of nations that have committed troops to Iraq -- ". . . Norway, El Salvador, and . . . 17 other countries . . ." -- the audience gave him an ovation.The best use of humor in a State of the Union address I've witnessed. Grade: A+
* The Speech He Got Stuck With: State of the Union addresses often amount to not one but two speeches: the speech the president got stuck with, which sounds like a hodgepodge, and, somewhere inside it, the speech the president wanted to deliver, which sounds unified, authentic and complete.
How do chief executives get stuck with hodgepodges? For weeks, Cabinet secretaries, agency heads, chairmen of congressional committees, and members of the White House senior staff draw up lists of initiatives they insist the address must contain. Some of this material can be tossed out.
But a lot cannot. Speechwriters do their best to keep this portion of State of the Union addresses thematically unified. They always fail.How was this portion of President Bush's address? Just fine. The president's own interest in the speech came and went -- he appeared a lot more intent on making his tax cuts permanent than on modernizing the electricity grid. But his delivery remained well-paced, the text itself craftsmanlike. And it isn't really the rhetoric in this portion of any State of the Union address that matters in any event. It's the dollars. By contrast with the spree over which George W. Bush has so far presided -- as this newspaper has pointed out, Mr. Bush has increased discretionary domestic spending more than any chief executive since Lyndon Johnson -- the hodgepodge of proposals the president advanced on Tuesday appears restrained. Grade: A
* The Speech He Wanted to Deliver: In 1992, President George H. W. Bush delivered one of the best speeches-within-a-speech in any State of the Union address, speaking with feeling about the end of the Cold War.
"[C]ommunism died this year," the elder Bush proclaimed. "There are still threats. But the long, drawn-out dread is over."
On Tuesday, President George W. Bush delivered a speech-within-a-speech of his own, devoting it to the war on terror. These first 25 minutes of his address proved beautifully written and powerfully delivered. "The work of building a new Iraq is hard, and it is right," the president declared. "And America has always been willing to do what it takes for what is right." Yet something was missing. Although the president provided a compelling defense of his actions in the 28 months since 9/11, he told us almost nothing about what comes next."[N]early two-thirds of [al Qaeda's] known leaders have now been captured or killed," the president stated. Did he mean to suggest that the war on terror is two-thirds over? If not, why not? At times the president spoke as if the war would end as soon as we caught "the remaining killers." At other times he spoke as if the war would continue until we had transformed the entire Arab world, remaking a region that "remains a place of tyranny and despair and anger." Which does he intend?
As he proved in his defiant address on Sept. 20, 2001, nine days after the terrorist attacks, George W. Bush knows how to sound Churchillian. In the State of the Union address, he should have told us whether the war on terror has reached the beginning of the end or only the end of the beginning. Grade: Incomplete
* "Good Enough": The president's failure to lay out our next objectives in the war on terror strikes me as serious. On the other hand, you can submit President Reagan's 1984 State of the Union address to the most minute scrutiny but find only the broadest hints about what he intended to do in a second term. Yet later that year he carried 49 out of 50 states -- and by the time he left office he had won the Cold War.
A pretty good speech is often good enough. Overall Grade: B+
Brian Klug, writing in theNation (Jan. 15, 2004):
In 1879 the German journalist Wilhelm Marr, a former socialist and anarchist, founded an organization that was novel in two ways. It was the first political party based on a platform of hostility to Jews. And it introduced the world to a new word: "anti-Semite."
Marr was an atheist, and the Antisemiten-Liga (League of Anti-Semites) was hostile to Jews on the secular grounds that they are an alien "race." However, his account of "Semitism" was not essentially different from the demonic conception of the Jew that had existed in Christian Europe for centuries. It boiled down to this: Jews are a people apart from the rest of humanity. They are the enemy. Wherever they go, they form a state within a state. Conspiring in secret, they work together to promote their own collective advantage at the expense of the nations or societies in whose midst they dwell and on whom they prey. Cunning and manipulative, they possess uncanny powers that enable them, despite their small numbers, to achieve their ends. The term "antiSemitism" has come to refer to this discourse, or variations on the themes it contains, because the same rhetoric persists whether Jewish identity is seen as religious, racial, national or ethnic. Sometimes this discourse is explicit; at other times it is the subtext of attacks on Jews. Anti-Semitism, thus defined, is not new.
But a spate of recent articles and books assert the rise of a "new anti-Semitism." This is the thrust of "Graffiti on History's Walls" by Mortimer Zuckerman, the cover story of the November 3, 2003, issue of U.S. News & World Report. In December New York magazine ran a similarly sensationalist cover story, titled "The Return of Anti-Semitism," which spoke of "a groundswell of hate" against Jews and suggested that Jew-hatred was now "politically correct" in Europe. At least three books recently published in English make the same claim: Never Again? by Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League; The New Anti-Semitism by feminist Phyllis Chesler; and The Case for Israel by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. Most of the contributors to A New Antisemitism?, edited by Paul Iganski and Barry Kosmin, take a similar view, with varying degrees of emphasis.
As the words "threat" and "crisis" in the subtitles of the books by Foxman and Chesler indicate, the "new anti-Semitism" is generally seen, by those who proclaim its existence, as a clear and present danger. Foxman believes that a "frightening coalition of anti-Jewish sentiment is forming on a global scale." Chesler goes even further: "Let me be clear: the war against the Jews is being waged on many fronts--militarily, politically, economically, and through propaganda--and on all continents." She even perceives a wider threat to Western civilization itself: "Who or what can loosen the madness that has gripped the world and that threatens to annihilate the Jews and the West?"
There is certainly reason to be concerned about a climate of hostility to Jews, including vicious physical attacks. On one Saturday this past November, for example, two synagogues in Istanbul were truck-bombed during Sabbath services, while an Orthodox Jewish school in a Paris suburb was largely destroyed by arson. Some researchers report a 60 percent worldwide increase in the number of assaults on Jews (or persons perceived to be Jewish) in 2002, compared with the previous year. At the same time, something is rotten in the state of public discourse. Anti-Jewish slogans and graphics have appeared on marches opposing the invasion of Iraq. Jewish conspiracy theories have been revived, such as the widely circulated "urban legend" that Jews were warned in advance to stay away from the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. And recently, certain public figures on both the right and the left have made negative generalizations about Jews and "Jewish influence."
The authors under review tend to lump all these facts together, along with a wealth of evidence for what they see as an explosion of bias against Israel: in the media, in the United Nations, on college campuses and elsewhere. They conclude that there is a single unified phenomenon, a "new antiSemitism." However, while the facts give cause for serious concern, the idea that they add up to a new kind of anti-Semitism is confused. Moreover, this confusion, combined with a McCarthyite tendency to see anti-Semites under every bed, arguably contributes to the climate of hostility toward Jews. The result is to make matters worse for the very people these authors mean to defend.
The claim that I am criticizing is not that there is a new outbreak of "old" antiSemitism but that there is an outbreak of anti-Semitism of a new kind. Thus the case in support of this claim is not merely cumulative: It does not consist simply in piling up one example after another. There is an organizing principle, a central idea that holds the case together. It is only in terms of this idea that many of the examples cited in the literature count as evidence of antiSemitism. Without this central idea, the case that is made with their help falls apart. So the question is this: What puts the "new" into "new anti-Semitism"?
Joanne Mariner, writing in findlaw.com (Jan. 21, 2004):
Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court opinion whose thirty-first anniversary falls on January 22, was not yet a decade old when I became pregnant. I was seventeen, living on my own, and the pregnancy was unwanted....
Even though, as the Supreme Court said in 1992, "an entire generation has come of age free to assume Roe's concept of liberty," the right to a safe and legal abortion remains under threat. According to NARAL Pro-Choice America, 335 anti-choice measures have been enacted since 1995. President George Bush has openly endorsed the goal of banning abortion, and some of his federal judicial picks have been anti-abortion zealots, a worrying indicator for his possible future nominees to the Supreme Court.
Publicly-funded abortion is not available in most states, except in narrow cases of rape, incest, or life endangerment. Since 1977, federal law has prohibited Medicaid from paying for the abortions of low-income women in most circumstances. Because fewer than half of all states offer supplemental funding that goes beyond these federal limitations, the possibility of abortion is foreclosed to many poor women.
Mandatory parental consent or notification rules, which exist in more than thirty states, deter many teenagers from exercising their constitutional right to a legal abortion. Minors with abusive parents may risk physical or emotional harm if required to disclose their pregnancy. Judicial bypass procedures, which the Supreme Court has ruled must be included in parental consent and notice laws, may be ineffective when the reviewing judge is hostile to abortion.
Numerous procedural restrictions continue to impede women's access to abortion. Now, in twenty states, women seeking abortion face mandatory delays in obtaining the procedure, a requirement that is often paired with the obligation of receiving state-dictated informational materials designed to discourage abortion. Such rules particularly burden women who live long distances from abortion providers, or whose transportation arrangements are difficult. Other state laws target doctors who perform abortions, imposing complicated regulatory schemes.
The latest effort to hobble reproductive rights has been to redefine what constitutes an abortion, via legislation like the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Although the Supreme Court struck down the most restrictive of these laws, adopted in Nebraska, others have passed lower court scrutiny. Although they are supposed to cover only late-term abortions, the imprecise and unscientific language of such laws means that their scope threatens to extend far beyond the situations cited by their supporters.
Malcolm A. Kline, writing for Accuracy in Academia (Dec. 2003):
The Kwanzaa controversy somehow bypassed me, until my African bride forced me to evaluate it. My wife can trace her ancestry directly to Shaka, who reigned over much of sub-Saharan Africa until defeated by the combination of the most powerful European armies at the turn of the last century and tribal leaders who had grown disenchanted with the Zulu king. One of these defecting tribal leaders was, in turn, one of my wife's more direct ancestors. Shaka, in turn, was related to many of these tribal leaders.
"As an African-American and Pan-African holiday celebrated by millions throughout the world African community," the official Kwanzaa web site tells us,"Kwanzaa brings a cultural message which speaks to the best of what it means to be African and human in the fullest sense."
You see, I took it for granted that it was an African holiday. When we were still engaged, I watched a Kwanzaa TV commercial in the living room of my fiancée's apartment while my bride-to-be attended to some errand or other elsewhere. As I watched the commercial, I panicked. My mind raced. After all, the official holiday web site gives us advice on gifts, Kwanzaa colors and decorations and the celebration of the holiday itself.
I wondered whether I needed to buy presents for all my future in-laws, whether we would all exchange gifts, whether I needed to send special Kwanzaa cards to every member of the family I was marrying into, whether we would have a special dinner. Would I have to learn some special Kwanzaa songs?
As I was lost in this reverie, my African-born fiancée came into the room, looked incredulously at the television set and said,"What in the hell is this Kwanzaa?"
Samson Mulugeta, writing in Newsday (Dec. 29, 2003):
For decades, former dictators' career paths have tended to lead to luxurious retirements, untroubled by trial or punishment. With his arrest this month, though, Iraq 's Saddam Hussein joins a small but growing group: former despots facing justice.
The trend is a new one. Uganda 's Idi Amin had an opulent life of exile in Saudi Arabia for decades until he died in August. Amin's successor, Milton Obote, reportedly lives undisturbed in Zambia .
Nigeria 's Ibrahim Babangida and Guatemala 's Efrain Rios Montt, former military strongmen, kept enough political power to avoid even the bother of exile. Both are influential and untried at home, despite allegations that they engaged in corruption and state-sponsored killing while in office.
But since the end of the Cold War, a number of retired dictators have been hauled into court or jail. The trend has been pushed by U.S.-led military interventions (they ousted Hussein, Panama's Manuel Noriega and Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic) and by the rise of United Nations-sponsored tribunals, which have tried Milosevic and former rulers of Rwanda and Sierra Leone.
Dictators also are under new threat from the willingness of courts in some countries, including the United States , Spain and Belgium , to hear charges against abusive leaders from other nations.
Independent of U.S. action, other peoples - notably in Africa - have moved more aggressively in recent years to prosecute their deposed autocrats.
In Africa, the former dictator of Chad , Hissene Habre, was comfortably exiled until Senegal agreed in 2001 to hold him for possible extradition to face trial in Belgium . Jean Kambanda, who as prime minister of Rwanda helped lead the 1994 genocide there, was sentenced to life in prison by a UN tribunal in 1998.
The most prominent previous attempt to jail a former dictator has been that against Chile 's Augusto Pinochet. His detention in Britain during 1998 and '99 came at the request of a Spanish judge and marked a growing "internationalization" of such cases. Pinochet was ultimately deemed too ill to stand trial and returned to Chile .
Also in Latin America , Argentines last year charged former military ruler Leopoldo Galtieri with human rights crimes. He died in January under house arrest.
Still, it seems that most deposed despots stay out of court. "Almost a century after the appearance of modern dictators, the world still doesn't have a template of how to handle these people," said historian Benjamin L. Apers, author of "Dictators, Democracy and American Political Culture."
Con Coughlin, writing in the Sunday Telegraph (London) (Dec. 28, 2003):
We are winning the war on terror. To some this statement might appear somewhat rash in view of how 2003 is drawing to a close. French flights to America cancelled because of a potential threat by al-Qaeda; a failed assassination attempt (the second this month) against President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan ; and yet more US troops killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq .
But just because al-Qaeda still possesses the ability to blow up the British consulate in Istanbul, or some such similar outrage, does not mean that we should draw the conclusion, as does Correlli Barnett, the eminent Second World War historian , writing in the latest edition of The Spectator, that the Islamic militants are winning.
While defeatism such as this undoubtedly lends encouragement to the disparate groups of Muslim extremists who believe they are engaged in a timeless jihad against the West, it is also based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the war on terror's stated objectives. Following the September 11 attacks, it was obvious that Washington would intensify its efforts to confront al-Qaeda. But in many respects this was merely an extension of the counter-terrorism campaign that had already been waged by the US against Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network since the mid-1990s, when bin Laden first showed his willingness to attack American targets. When President Clinton left office in 2001, plans were well advanced for the Americans to assassinate bin Laden.
The most significant policy shift to emerge in Washington and, to a lesser extent, in London following the September 11 attacks was the introduction of the policy of pre-emption - hitting your enemies hard before they have the chance to hit you. President George W Bush first outlined this new policy in his address to Congress nine days after the September 11 attacks. He declared that apart from targeting terrorist groups that possessed "global reach", the US was determined to take on any country that provided "aid or safe haven to terrorism". In his State of the Union address in January 2002, he extended this policy to include "terrorists and regimes who seek chemical, biological or nuclear weapons".
When assessed on the basis of these criteria, then, the war on terror does not appear to be quite the calamity that some of its critics would have us believe. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan , which for many years provided a safe haven for bin Laden and his followers, has been decisively defeated, and bin Laden's operational infrastructure uprooted.
Many of bin Laden's key aides have been killed while others are in American custody - including some of those responsible for planning the September 11 attacks - and have revealed many details about al-Qaeda's methods and infrastructure to their interrogators. This information has resulted in many terror attacks being foiled, including a planned attack on the British embassy in Yemen and a repeat run of the September 11 attacks, with a hijacked civilian airliner set to crash into Las Vegas over Christmas. Foiled terrorist attacks, of course, do not generate as much publicity as those that are successful, but even within the narrow confines of the war against al-Qaeda, the past two years have hardly been a wash-out.
