So Much for Sovereignty

Posted on by

This doesn’t sound good —

Roads and bridges built by U.S. taxpayers are starting to be sold off, and so far foreign-owned companies are doing the buying.

On a single day in June, an Australian-Spanish partnership paid $3.8 billion to lease the Indiana Toll Road. An Australian company bought a 99-year lease on Virginia’s Pocahontas Parkway, and Texas officials decided to let a Spanish-American partnership build and run a toll road from Austin to Seguin for 50 years.

Few people know that the tolls from the U.S. side of the tunnel between Detroit and Windsor, Canada, go to a subsidiary of an Australian company — which also owns a bridge in Alabama.

Some states and large cities are selling or leasing roads and bridges to private firms also. The “proceeds will pay for urgent projects such as road and bridge improvements.”

Washington is not likely to produce more money to build roads. The federal highway fund — which will have a balance of about $16 billion by the end of 2006 — will run out in 2009 or 2010, according to White House and congressional estimates.

About half the states now let companies build and operate roads. Many changed their laws recently to do so.

Maybe this is a good idea, but it feels like more evidence that our country is coming apart at the seams.

Just Wait

Posted on by

My only quibble with this New York Times editorial is in the first paragraph:

It is only now, nearly five years after Sept. 11, that the full picture of the Bush administration’s response to the terror attacks is becoming clear. Much of it, we can see now, had far less to do with fighting Osama bin Laden than with expanding presidential power.

Some of us realized what was going on a lot sooner. Like when Attorney General John Ashcroft suggested habeas corpus be suspended indefinitely. He wanted this written into the original version of the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act was introduced to Congress on September 19, 2001.

At the time, I thought Ashcroft was just being hysterical. The alarm bells went off for me, however, when President Bush issued an executive order allowing former presidents to keep their presidential records sealed indefinitely. In this case “indefinitely” means that former president’s life plus the life of anyone designated by that former president to act in his behalf postpartum. Bush signed this on November 1, 2001.

I figured at the time he was up to something. I don’t see any reason why a future president couldn’t countermand that executive order, but still … Anyway, back to the New York Times.

Over and over again, the same pattern emerges: Given a choice between following the rules or carving out some unprecedented executive power, the White House always shrugged off the legal constraints. Even when the only challenge was to get required approval from an ever-cooperative Congress, the president and his staff preferred to go it alone. While no one questions the determination of the White House to fight terrorism, the methods this administration has used to do it have been shaped by another, perverse determination: never to consult, never to ask and always to fight against any constraint on the executive branch.

One result has been a frayed democratic fabric in a country founded on a constitutional system of checks and balances. Another has been a less effective war on terror.

The editorial then goes into more detail on the way Bush handled the Guantánamo Bay Prison —

This whole sorry story has been on vivid display since the Supreme Court ruled that the Geneva Conventions and United States law both applied to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. For one brief, shining moment, it appeared that the administration realized it had met a check that it could not simply ignore. The White House sent out signals that the president was ready to work with Congress in creating a proper procedure for trying the hundreds of men who have spent years now locked up as suspected terrorists without any hope of due process.

But by week’s end it was clear that the president’s idea of cooperation was purely cosmetic. At hearings last week, the administration made it clear that it merely wanted Congress to legalize President Bush’s illegal actions — to amend the law to negate the court’s ruling instead of creating a system of justice within the law. As for the Geneva Conventions, administration witnesses and some of their more ideologically blinkered supporters in Congress want to scrap the international consensus that no prisoner may be robbed of basic human dignity. …

… The divide made it clear how little this all has to do with fighting terrorism. Undoing the Geneva Conventions would further endanger the life of every member of the American military who might ever be taken captive in the future. And if the prisoners scooped up in Afghanistan and sent to Guantánamo had been properly processed first — as military lawyers wanted to do — many would never have been kept in custody, a continuing reproach to the country that is holding them. Others would actually have been able to be tried under a fair system that would give the world a less perverse vision of American justice. The recent disbanding of the C.I.A. unit charged with finding Osama bin Laden is a reminder that the American people may never see anyone brought to trial for the terrible crimes of 9/11.

— and eavesdropping on Americans —

Once again, the early perception that the president was going to bend to the rules turned out to be premature.

The bill the president has agreed to accept would allow him to go on ignoring the eavesdropping law. It does not require the president to obtain warrants for the one domestic spying program we know about — or for any other program — from the special intelligence surveillance court. It makes that an option and sets the precedent of giving blanket approval to programs, rather than insisting on the individual warrants required by the Constitution. Once again, the president has refused to acknowledge that there are rules he is required to follow.

And while the bill would establish new rules that Mr. Bush could voluntarily follow, it strips the federal courts of the right to hear legal challenges to the president’s wiretapping authority. The Supreme Court made it clear in the Guantánamo Bay case that this sort of meddling is unconstitutional.

The editorial concludes with an assessment of the cost of executive arrogance.

The president’s constant efforts to assert his power to act without consent or consultation has warped the war on terror. The unity and sense of national purpose that followed 9/11 is gone, replaced by suspicion and divisiveness that never needed to emerge. The president had no need to go it alone — everyone wanted to go with him. Both parties in Congress were eager to show they were tough on terrorism. But the obsession with presidential prerogatives created fights where no fights needed to occur and made huge messes out of programs that could have functioned more efficiently within the rules. …

… To a disturbing degree, the horror of 9/11 became an excuse to take up this cause behind the shield of Americans’ deep insecurity. The results have been devastating. Americans’ civil liberties have been trampled. The nation’s image as a champion of human rights has been gravely harmed. Prisoners have been abused, tortured and even killed at the prisons we know about, while other prisons operate in secret. American agents “disappear” people, some entirely innocent, and send them off to torture chambers in distant lands. Hundreds of innocent men have been jailed at Guantánamo Bay without charges or rudimentary rights. And Congress has shirked its duty to correct this out of fear of being painted as pro-terrorist at election time.

The editorial also cites this article by Jane Mayer from the July 3 issue of The New Yorker on the “effort to undermine the constitutional separation of powers.”

If you google “New York Times treason” you get no end of anti-NY Times calumniation, and not all from the Right. Today the righties are linking to a Little Green Footballs post titled “The Media Are the Enemy.” (I don’t link to lgf, but it shouldn’t be hard to find if you really want to read it.) I gather from other rightie posts that a New York Times photographer took a photo of a Shiite militia sniper aiming at Americans, and the righties are outraged. Expect more calls for Times managers and staffers to be hunted down. And you know the bleepheads are taking their cues from the GOP and White House insiders.

I guess the Times editorial page just returned fire.

It’s a shame the reporting side isn’t so, um, uncompromised. Glenn Greenwald explains that the Times (and the Washington Post, and Time) mis-reported the Specter bill, making it sound as if the President were giving ground to Congress.

It wasn’t just the Post which fundamentally misled its readers about this bill. So, too, did Eric Lichtblau in his article in The New York Times (“The proposed legislation represents a middle-ground approach among the myriad proposals in Congress for dealing with the wiretapping controversy”).

Today’s editorial described the Senate hearings differently —

The hearings were supposed to produce a hopeful vision of a newly humbled and cooperative administration working with Congress to undo the mess it had created in stashing away hundreds of people, many with limited connections to terrorism at the most, without any plan for what to do with them over the long run. Instead, we saw an administration whose political core was still intent on hunkering down. The most embarrassing moment came when Bush loyalists argued that the United States could not follow the Geneva Conventions because Common Article Three, which has governed the treatment of wartime prisoners for more than half a century, was too vague. Which part of “civilized peoples,” “judicial guarantees” or “humiliating and degrading treatment” do they find confusing?

Today’s Washington Post carries amuch more docile article written by David Broder and Dan Balz titled “How Common Ground of 9/11 Gave Way to Partisan Split.” Instead of actually explaining how the common ground of 9/11 gave way to a partisan split, Broder and Balz delicately tiptoe around the elephant in the living room and blame, um, partisanship.

I say the effort is a waste of ink and paper, not to mention bandwidth. Joe Gandelman calls it a must-read, but I am not persuaded.

See also the Los Angeles Times, “License to Wiretap.”

The Leading Embarrassment of the Free World

Posted on by

If we can’t impeach him, maybe we can lock him up in the White House basement until 2009 so he’s not trotting around the world making a fool of himself. Dear Leader upstaged again:

During a press conference today at the G8 summit in Russia, President Bush told President Vladimir Putin that Americans want Russia to develop a free press and free religion “like Iraq.” To laughter and applause, Putin responded: “We certainly would not want to have same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq, quite honestly.” CNN’s Ed Henry called it a “tough jab.”

The exchange underscores how the war in Iraq has damaged the standing of the United States, to the point where even modest encouragement for democratic reform is met with ridicule.

I can’t think of any time another head of state ridiculed the President of the United States to his face.

So Much for “School Choice”

Posted on by

Everybody bookmark this. And be ready to retrieve it every time the righties wheeze about the “failing” public schools.

The Education Department reported on Friday that children in public schools generally performed as well or better in reading and mathematics than comparable children in private schools. The exception was in eighth-grade reading, where the private school counterparts fared better.

The report, which compared fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores in 2003 from nearly 7,000 public schools and more than 530 private schools, also found that conservative Christian schools lagged significantly behind public schools on eighth-grade math.

The study, carrying the imprimatur of the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the Education Department, was contracted to the Educational Testing Service and delivered to the department last year.

The Bushies put the study through extensive peer review. Apparently unable to dispute the presented facts, they’ve dismissed the report as being “of modest utility.” Of course, if the report had found that private schools were better … well, you know. The Republicans would be pushing for complete demolition of the public school system so that children can be herded into private schools and receive the proper religious indoctrination.

The report mirrors and expands on similar findings this year by Christopher and Sarah Theule Lubienski, a husband-and-wife team at the University of Illinois who examined just math scores. The new study looked at reading scores, too. …

… The two new studies put test scores in context by studying the children’s backgrounds and taking into account factors like race, ethnicity, income and parents’ educational backgrounds to make the comparisons more meaningful. The extended study of charter schools has not been released.

Interesting tidbit:

The report separated private schools by type and found that among private school students, those in Lutheran schools performed best, while those in conservative Christian schools did worst.

Reaction from anti-public school activist:

Joseph McTighe, executive director of the Council for American Private Education, an umbrella organization that represents 80 percent of private elementary and secondary schools, said the statistical analysis had little to do with parents’ choices on educating their children.

“In the real world, private school kids outperform public school kids,” Mr. McTighe said. “That’s the real world, and the way things actually are.”

In the real world, ideologues out-bloviate non-ideologues. They don’t need no steenking data to tell ’em what goes on in the real world, hombres.

Back in the 1950s, at least in the Bible Belt where I come from, conventional wisdom said that public schools were better than parochial schools. Somehow, the desegregation wars of the late 1950s and early 1960s caused a whole lot of white parents to change their minds. The school prayer flap of the 1960s added more alarm to the mix. Since then the movement to destroy the public school system (MtDtPSS) has moved on from its segregationist roots, and now it’s a movement to destroy the public school system because too many public school teachers are godless liberals. And in recent years, the MtDtPSS has come full circle; anti-public school activists have been working overtime to persuade African American parents to support voucher systems and send their kids to the proper indoctrination facilities private schools.

I’m not saying that all private schools exist for the purpose of indoctrination, but that that indoctrination is the essential motivation of the MtDtPSS.

Anti-private school activists argue that vouchers would create market competition and cause all schools to improve because they are competing. But Milwaukee has had vouchers for 15 years now, and that’s not how it’s worked out:

An investigation this June by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found problems in some voucher schools that–even to those numb to educational horror stories–break one’s heart. No matter how severe one’s criticisms of the Milwaukee Public Schools, nothing is as abysmal as the conditions at some voucher schools.

Some of them had high school graduates teaching students. Some were nothing more than refurbished, cramped storefronts. Some did not have any discernible curriculum and only a few books. Some did not teach evolution or anything else that might conflict with a literal interpretation of the Bible.

At one school, teacher and students were on their way to McDonald’s. At another, lights were turned off to save money. A third used the back alley as a playground.

One school is located in an old leather factory, another in a former tire store, a third is above a vacuum cleaner shop and hair salon. …

… The summaries show that a disturbing number of schools are beset by two overriding problems: inadequate facilities and unqualified teachers. (I’ll leave concerns about fraud and scams to the district attorney’s office.)

At the Sa’Rai and Zigler Upper Excellerated Academy …, principal Sa’Rai Nance doesn’t even have a teaching license. She said she opened the school after she had a vision from God. Nance also said that “excellerated” is a fusion word combining accelerated and excellent and is “spelled wrong on purpose.” The word “upper” refers to “the upper room where Jesus prayed.”

Carter’s Christian Academy … is described as “essentially a small storefront building with a couple of tiny rooms redone as classrooms. …There were no visible books or toys or paper.” The school’s two teachers have high school diplomas, and the highest-paid teacher makes $8 an hour.

At Grace Christian Academy (K4–7), one staff member privately told reporters “that there was no curriculum. Several classrooms were using worksheets downloaded from the Internet. …There were few books or schools materials on [the] shelves or anywhere in sight.” In at least one case, the summary continued, “the teacher was giving inaccurate scientific information to kids. [Principal Reginald] Armstrong says teachers use Biblical principles. He taught his class the story of Adam and Eve recently, from a literalist position.” Armstrong has a teaching license, but none of the other teachers do.

Among the several reasons Why Market Forces Don’t Work in this situation is that the really excellent private schools generally are way disinterested in taking voucher students. Conversely, private schools eager to get voucher money are, um, often not so hot.

See also Steve Gilliard and Echidne.

Update: Flaming idiot Pejman Yousefzadeh of RedState links to the same article and concludes it proves private schools are better than public schools. He manages to do this by extremely, um, selective editing — excerpting commentary by Kevin Drum, stripped of context, and leaving out the data that showed public schools outperform private schools.

Kevin notes that public school students do less well in secondary school than do private school students. There might be several reasons for this that have nothing to do with school performance however. Kevin Drum writes,

But what does seem to show up over and over again is the effect of concentrated poverty. Nearly everything I’ve read suggests that when the number of kids in poverty reaches about 50% in a school, teaching becomes nearly impossible — and that this matters much more in secondary school than in elementary school.

Private schools can dismiss disruptive students and expel non-performers. The poorest of the poor don’t go to private schools, vouchers or no vouchers. ESL students don’t go to private schools. Don’t bother trying to explain this to Yousefzadeh, who suffers a serious lack of critical thinking skills. Maybe he went to a private school.

Seriously, if you google for information about public versus private school you find all manner of “reports” claiming that private school students are “better prepared” or more likely to get advanced degrees than public school students. As for the first claim, there is always a curious lack of supporting data compiled from independent and disinterested sources.. As for the second — if you’re talking about elite “prep” schools like Phillips Academy, sure. If you’re talking about some of the places described above, like “Carter’s Christian Academy” — I doubt it.

Bushonomics

Posted on by

Taking a break from blogging World War III — Paul Krugman describes a typical “debate” on the economy with a rightie:

Bush supporter: “Why doesn’t President Bush get credit for a great economy? I blame liberal media bias.”

Informed economist: “But it’s not a great economy for most Americans. Many families are actually losing ground, and only a very few affluent people are doing really well.”

Bush supporter: “Why doesn’t President Bush get credit for a great economy? I blame liberal media bias.”

Ain’t it the truth?

“To a large extent,” Krugman continues, “this dialogue of the deaf reflects Upton Sinclair’s principle: it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” But there is data showing that, in fact, most people are not enjoying the benefits of our wondrous economy.

Here’s what happened in 2004. The U.S. economy grew 4.2 percent, a very good number. Yet last August the Census Bureau reported that real median family income — the purchasing power of the typical family — actually fell. Meanwhile, poverty increased, as did the number of Americans without health insurance. … growth didn’t just bypass the poor and the lower middle class, it bypassed the upper middle class too. Even people at the 95th percentile of the income distribution — that is, people richer than 19 out of 20 Americans — gained only modestly. The big increases went only to people who were already in the economic stratosphere.

Even the real income of college graduates fell in 2004; a college degree is no guarantee of shelter from a failing economy. Bottom line, it’s only a great economy “if you’re a high-level corporate executive or someone who owns a lot of stock. For most other Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.”

Ezra Klein provides an interesting analogy to describe what’s happening to our economy:

Growth is almost a misleading word for this phenomenon: When we think of growth, we imagine what happens to us during adolescence — we get bigger. But imagine if all the growth happened in your forehead. Limbs, torso, weight — all the exact same. But your forehead was now six inches long. Would you be excited about that change? Would you celebrate your newfound height? Would you categorize that as normal “growth”? …

…In fact, it’s no longer just the middle class and the poor who’re falling behind. The distribution has grown so uneven that the 95th percentile is making meager headway — even the merely rich are falling behind. It’s the richest of the rich making headway. But they now account for so much wealth and holdings that their acceleration can effortlessly outweigh everyone else’s deterioration.

Some of the best economic blogging on the web goes on at The Blogging of the President, provided by Stirling Newberry, Ian Welsh, and Hale Stewart. Last week Hale posted “Income Inequality In the US: A Primer.” He quotes the CIA World Factbook:

    “Among countries with modern economies, the United States is the clear leader in income inequality under the gini measure. Income inequality in the U.S. is more comparable to the third world.”

According to the CIA Factbook, the US has a Gini index of 45. By way of comparison, a large number of countries with a higher gini number are in South America and Africa. From South America: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Honduras, Nicaragua and Paraguay. From Africa: Botswana, Central African Republic, Lesotho, Namibia, Niger, Sierra Leone, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

FYI, according to the chart linked in the paragraph above, Hungary, Sweden, Norway, and Belgium have the least income inequality. Eastern Europe and Scandinavia generally are less economically unequal than most other parts of the planet.

In the United States, income inequality declined from 1947 to 1968; since 1968, inequality has increased. As these graphs show, however, inequality increased dramatically during the Reagan and Bush I Administrations (especially the Bush I Administration) and leveled off during the Clinton Administration.

(Remember “It’s the economy, stupid“? Republican folklore says that Bush I lost the 1992 election because he had reneged on his “no new taxes” pledge, but I have never believed that. The income shift from 1989 to 1992 was palpable, and Poppy clearly was oblivious to people’s concerns. I don’t think most folks who were not movement conservatives gave a hoohah about the tax increases.)

Via Economist’s View, a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities discusses recent trends:

The data show that income gains between 2003 and 2004 were particularly large for those at the very top of the income spectrum, resulting in a nearly unprecedented one-year increase in income concentration. …

  • From 2003 to 2004, the average incomes of the bottom 99 percent of households grew by less than 3 percent, after adjusting for inflation. In contrast, the average incomes of the top one percent of households experienced a jump of almost 17 percent, after adjusting for inflation. (Census data show that real median income fell between 2003 and 2004. …[T]he 3 percent rise among the bottom 99 percent seems to largely reflect gains by households in the top quintile of the income spectrum…)
  • The top one percent of households garnered 36 percent of the income gains in 2004.
  • This disparity produced an exceptional jump in income concentration in 2004. The share of the pre-tax income in the nation that goes to the top one percent of households increased from 17.5 percent in 2003 to 19.5 percent in 2004. Only five times since 1913 (the first year that this data set covers), and only twice since World War II has the top one percent’s share risen by as much in a single year (in percentage point terms). Each percentage point of income is equivalent to $68 billion in 2004.
  • The share of total U.S. income that the top one percent of households received in 2004 was greater than the share it received in any prior year since 1929, except for 1999 and 2000.

    • Income gains were even more pronounced among those with the very highest incomes. The incomes of the top one-tenth of one percent of households grew more rapidly than the incomes of the top one percent of households. The share of the national income received by the top one tenth of one percent of households increased by 1.3 percentage points from 2003 to 2004; in other words, more than half of the increased share of income going to the top one percent of households actually went to the top one-tenth of one percent of households.

    Here’s the punch line:

    In May 2006, CBO suggested that continued growth in income inequality may be one cause of the recent rapid growth in federal revenues. Increases in income inequality boost revenue growth, in part because high-income households are subject to higher federal income tax rates than are households of lesser means.

    In other words, the revenue increases Dubya is so proud of are a symptom of economic pathology.

    Finally,

    It should be noted that wage and salary growth has been unusually weak during this recovery, while the growth of corporate profits has been exceptionally strong. This contributes to growing income inequality, since high-income households own a highly disproportionate share of corporate assets and derive significant income from those assets. With weaker-than-normal wage growth and stronger-than-normal growth in corporate profits having continued into the first part of 2006, it is likely that the increase in income inequality that Piketty and Saez have documented through 2004 has continued since that time and that the nation’s already-large disparities in income are growing yet wider.

    As Hale points out, income disparities are a major cause of civil and political instability. “[N]ot only is the US a debtor nation in the tradition of Latin America circa the 1980s,” he says, “we are also following a similar path in the area of income distribution. It’s very important to ask ourselves: is this what we want?”

    This is not what most of us want, I suspect, but discussion of this issue by the MSM mostly consists of Chris Matthews chirping about how great the economy is. We as a nation aren’t exactly being asked what we want, are we? We’re just being told what we want by the VRWC echo chamber.

    See also: Hale Stewart, “Bush’s Historic Tax Revenues Aren’t So Historic” and “If the Deficit’s Decreasing, Why Is Total Debt Increasing?“

    Weenies at War

    Posted on by

    Hassan M. Fattah and Steven Erlanger report for the New York Times that “President Bush rebuffed a Lebanese request that he push Israel for a cease-fire.”

    In St. Petersburg, Russia, where President Bush arrived today for a weekend meeting of leaders of the Group of Eight major industrial nations, the White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters that Mr. Bush had spoken with Lebanon’s prime minister, Fouad Siniora, but would not press Israel for a ceasefire.

    Mr. Bush “believes the Israelis have the right to protect themselves, and that in doing so they should limit as much as possible so-called collateral damage, not only to facilities but also to human lives,” Mr. Snow said.

    Right.

    Asked specifically if Mr. Bush would call for a ceasefire, Mr. Snow said, “No. The president is not going to make military decisions for Israel.”

    Other world leaders condemned Israel’s actions. Prime Minister Jacques Chirac of France said that Israel appeared to “wish to destroy” Lebanon. Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, said that “all sides should immediately end their military actions” as a “starting point for resolving all other problems.”

    Since Bush won’t do it, I wonder if another world leader will emerge as the peace broker?

    Update: What Billmon says:

    There is something qualitatively different about the latest cycle of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, although I’m having trouble in my own mind hanging a label on it.

    Maybe it’s the fact that the Israelis have more or less abandoned the pretense that they’re fighting specific “terrorist” groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and are openly waging war on the Palestinian people (and now the Lebanese people) as a whole.

    Maybe it’s because the proximate triggers for the current fighting — the Palestinian raid on an Israeli outpost on the Gaza frontier and Hezbollah’s ambush of an Israeli patrol just inside the Israeli border — were both military attacks against legitimate military targets, instead of explicit acts of terrorism, like the 2000-2001 Palestinian suicide bomb offensive. This suggests a major change in both tactics and capabilities (although terrorism, in the form of rockets randomly shot into Israeli towns and cities, obviously remains a key part of the Hezbollah and Hamas arsenals)

    Maybe it’s simply the speed and scale of the escalation, which has progressed from a limited incursion in the Gaza Strip to the wholesale dismantling of the Hamas government to a full-scale blockade of Lebanon in just two weeks. If the Israeli expectation was that an initial display of overwhelming force would send a message to the other side that there are red lines that must not be crossed, then the operation has already failed. Indeed, the other side has sent some surprising messages of its own — one of which landed yesterday in downtown Haifa.

    If I had to pin it down, I would say the big difference between this crisis and similar past episodes is how completely off balance the Israelis seem to be — lurching from reaction to reaction without any clear plan or strategy. The Gaza incursion was thrown together, more or less on the fly, which led to some embarrassing public squabbling within the Israeli cabinet. The attempt to decapitate Hamas’s civilian leadership by arresting the entire Palestinian cabinet smacked of improvisation, and largely failed. Hezbollah’s intervention clearly took Jerusalem by surprise, which is probably why the response has been so disproportionate: the Israelis are rather desperately trying to regain the initiative.

    There’s more at Whiskey Bar.

    Hard Realities, Soft Buns

    Posted on by

    This morning’s news is that the violence in the Middle East is escalating. Via Laura Rozen, Michael Young suggests in today’s New York Times that Hezbollah’s aggression could be turned to Israel’s advantage:

    It would be far smarter for Israel, and America, to profit from Hezbollah’s having perhaps overplayed its hand. The popular mood here is one of extreme anger that the group has provoked a conflict Lebanon cannot win. The summer tourism season, a rare source of revenue for a country on the financial ropes, has been ruined. Even Hezbollah’s core supporters, the Shiite Muslims in the south, cannot be happy at seeing their towns and villages turned again into a killing field. …

    … The five permanent Security Council members, perhaps at this weekend’s Group of 8 meeting, should consider a larger initiative based on the resolution that would include: a proposal for the gradual collection of Hezbollah’s weapons; written guarantees by Israel that it will respect Lebanese sovereignty and pull its forces out of the contested Lebanese land in the Shebaa Farms; and the release of prisoners on both sides. Such a deal could find support among Lebanon’s anti-Syrian politicians, would substantially narrow Hezbollah’s ability to justify retaining its arms, and also send a signal to Syria and particularly Iran that the region is not theirs for the taking.

    David Ignatius, in general, agrees. He says that Israel and America need to realize they can’t shoot their way out of this crisis:

    Israeli and American doctrine is premised on the idea that military force will deter adversaries. But as more force has been used in recent years, the deterrent value has inevitably gone down. That’s the inner spring of this crisis: The Iranians (and their clients in Hezbollah and Hamas) watch the American military mired in Iraq and see weakness. They are emboldened rather than intimidated. The same is true for the Israelis in Gaza. Rather than reinforcing the image of strength, the use of force (short of outright, pulverizing invasion and occupation) has encouraged contempt.

    Instead of force …

    In responding to the Lebanon crisis, the United States should work closely with its allies at the Group of Eight summit and the United Nations. Iran and its proxies would like nothing more than to isolate America and Israel. They would like nothing less than a strong, international coalition of opposition.

    The Canadian National Post reports that the G8 leaders are at odds over the crisis, however. Or, more accurately, Russia is at odds with the other seven nations, which have defended Israel’s right to defend itself.

    Russia blasted Israel for its massive land, sea and air attacks on Lebanon, setting itself firmly in opposition with fellow G-8 members, including Canada and the United States, who it will be hosting at this weekend’s summit in St. Petersburg.

    ”One cannot justify the continued destruction by Israel in Lebanon and in Palestinian territory, involving disproportionate use of force in which the civilian population suffers,” Moscow said a statement Thursday. ”We firmly reaffirm support for Lebanon’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

    What does the President of the United States have to say to Russian President Vladimir Putin? Luke Harding reports for The Guardian:

    George Bush yesterday promised to bring up Russia’s human rights record during tomorrow’s G8 summit, but said he did not intend to “lecture” or “scold” his host, Vladimir Putin.

    President Bush, who was in Germany yesterday before he flies to St Petersburg today, said he would “respectfully” convey Washington’s message: that allowing political opposition, a free press and civil society was in Russia’s interests.

    “My job is continually to remind Russia that if she wants to have good relations … she has to share common values,” he said, adding: “My own view in dealing with President Putin is that nobody likes to be lectured a lot.”

    Yeah, just the thing.

    His remarks follow a distinct chilling in US-Russian relations, which began in May when the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, accused Russia of using its energy reserves “as a tool of intimidation and blackmail”. This week Mr Putin hit back, dismissing the criticism as “an unsuccessful hunting shot” – a reference to the errant shot fired by Mr Cheney on a hunting trip that wounded a colleague.

    “It was pretty clever,” Mr Bush said yesterday, when asked about the remark. “Actually, quite humorous – not to diss my friend, the vice-president.”

    The Prez picked a heck of a time to go from being a hot dog to being a weenie.

    More on Why We’re Screwed from Fred Kaplan at Slate:

    It’s a perfect storm out there, each crisis feeding into the others yet at the same time laden with unique origins and features, demanding unique approaches and solutions. George Marshall himself would have a hard time keeping his grip.

    The United States is hardly the only country at fault. Yet by its claims (“the sole superpower,” “the indispensable nation,” “we’re an empire now”) and by the objective facts (we are closer to being those things than any other country is), it does have the leverage—some would argue, the responsibility—to organize, mediate, and lead the way toward some solution. …

    … But this sort of neglect is but a side effect of the larger deficiencies at the top. Whatever else might be said of them, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld are not worldly men. They’re neither well-traveled nor curious about the world. They came into office believing that America had emerged from the Cold War as the only real power and, as such, they didn’t have to care about what other countries said. They didn’t understand that powerful countries—at least powerful democracies—have always acted through alliances, even if only by manipulating them. A powerful country doesn’t always need allies to get a job done—but it does need them to get a job done with legitimacy, to get it done and keep it done.

    One senior Bush adviser famously told Ron Suskind, back in those halcyon days shortly after Saddam fell: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” What’s happening now is that reality is roaring back.

    A quickie survey of the righties indicates they are torn between believing Bush will order attacks on Iran, but is waiting for the right time, and those who are baffled by the new weenie Bush and want a hot dog to take charge and attack Iran. It appears that war between the U.S. and Iran is a given on the Right. Like going to war has been working out so well in the recent past. (See also Liberal Oasis.)

    E.J. Dionne reminds us that the war in Iraq was supposed to prevent these little dust-ups:

    Installing a democratic government in Iraq would force a new dawn. Newly empowered Muslim democrats would reform their societies, negotiate peace with Israel and get on with the business of building prosperous, middle-class societies. …

    … “Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad,” Cheney said. “Moderates throughout the region would take heart, and our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced.”

    Today, with Israeli troops battling on their northern and southern borders, with Iran ignoring calls for negotiations on nuclear weapons, with Baghdad in flames and with many of Iraq’s moderates living in fear, those Cheney sentences stand as the most telling indictment of the administration’s failures.

    The fact that righties think more war is just the thing to straighten out the mess — and that the Bush Administration is just the crew to carry out the plan — sorta brings home the importance of reality. Some of us are living in it, and some of us, um, aren’t.

    Dionne writes that this is the time for bipartisan effort to face up to what’s gone wrong and come up with a plan to undo the damage. However,

    … those in charge of Republican campaigns this year have another idea. They have hit upon the brilliant strategy of pushing any serious discussion of the failure of American foreign policy past Election Day. For the next 3 1/2 months, they want the choice before the voters to be binary: staying the course and being “tough,” or breaking with President Bush’s policy and being “soft.” There are just two options on the ballot, they say: firmness or “cut and run.”

    Personally, given Bush’s blatant impotence to deal with the current crisis, I’d be turning that around on the Republicans — Bush is a weenie who lacks the moral courage to face his own obvious failures and do what is necessary to salvage anything worthwhile from the mess. Instead, he hides behind aphorisms and Condi Rice’s skirts.

    Hilzoy provides the backstory for those who came in late. See also Arianna Huffington on “Rummy’s Disease.“

    Where’s George?

    Posted on by

    The President seems to be having an ego implosion. Dan Froomkin writes,

    The Middle East is exploding and what is President Bush doing about it? Not much.

    Here’s the transcript of this morning’s joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in which Bush sounded more like a bystander on the world stage than the leader of its only superpower.

    Other than definitively supporting Israel’s right to defend itself, Bush was more timid and wishful than assertive. He spoke in unusually deferential terms about collaborating with other world leaders and pretty much ruled out military action against Iran. His comments about the current situation in Israel suggested a highly unrealistic notion of how well things were going there up until now, and a naiveté about the effect Israel’s actions may have on Lebanon’s embryonic democratic government.

    More than anything else, Froomkin writes, Bush was enthusiastic about tonight’s dinner menu — roast pig.

    Get this:

    One reporter asked Bush about Russian President Vladimir Putin, who yesterday mocked Vice President Cheney by likening Cheney’s recent criticisms of Russia to his accidental shooting of a hunting buddy in February. Bush’s reaction? He just giggled. “It was pretty clever. Actually, quite humorous — not to dis my friend, the Vice President.”

    Jeez, what a weenie.

    If you haven’t read this Michael Hirsch commentary (Blurb: “Burned by his bitter Iraq experience, Bush is eschewing leadership and hiding behind the skirts of multilateralism.”) — well, get busy —

    … for six years now, George W. Bush’s foreign policy has resembled a pendulum swinging out of control, lurching wildly from hubris to “help us.” Despite the “stay the course” rhetoric, there’s been little that is steady or dependable about it, and not surprisingly it has inspired little respect or trust around the world. In Bush’s first term, the pendulum swung too far toward in-your-face unilateralism. Now, in his second term it has swung dramatically back toward the most squeamish sort of multilateralism—the kind of thinking that says, “Without partners, I don’t dare make a move.” …

    … Why is our famously straight-talking president now beating around the bush? One problem, of course, is that the never-abating violence in Iraq is drawing all the strength and energy out of U.S. efforts elsewhere. But the main reason, in my view, is ideological paralysis. The president is still taking the same posture of his first term, that of a strong and dominant leader who does not deign to deal with “illegitimate” regimes such as Iran and North Korea, when he no longer has the power to do so. Unlike dealing with Iraq and Al Qaeda, when he had his options wide open, he really doesn’t want to attack either Iran or North Korea—both options would be very, very messy. And at the same time he no longer has the moral authority of the shock-and-awe era when America looked almighty. Iraq has exposed America’s vulnerabilities, and there’s no point in denying it.

    Janine Zacharia reports for Bloomberg:

    President George W. Bush and U.S. diplomats, distracted by threats from North Korea to Iraq, are playing a minor role as an escalating confrontation between Israelis and Arabs risks wider Middle East violence.

    David Welch, U.S. assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, and Elliott Abrams, deputy assistant to the president, only arrived in the region yesterday, 17 days after the abduction of an Israeli soldier in the Gaza Strip set off the crisis. Bush hasn’t spoken to any Middle Eastern leaders in the past couple of weeks, according to National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones.

    Let me repeat that — Bush hasn’t spoken to any Middle Eastern leaders in the past couple of weeks.

    What has the U.S. been doing? Well, in the UN Security Council we blocked an Arab-backed resolution condemning Israel. At the Washington Note, Steve Clemons reports,

    Although I do not have independent confirmation, I heard the rumor from a well-placed source that Secretary of State Rice attempted to increase pressure on Israel to stand down and to demonstrate “restraint”. The rumor is that she was told flatly by the Prime Minister’s office to “back off”.

    Rice is not one to be told to back off without the other party paying a price. Israel’s outrageous, over-the-top military escalations were exactly what the most militarist fanatics of Hamas wanted and exactly what Hezbollah wanted to prompt. Those in the middle of the extremists on all sides are getting crushed.

    Rupert Cornwell writes that U.S. policy in the Middle East is in “disarray.” Yet the White House appears unconcerned.

    The White House insists that its policies are on track. If there are “a lot of issues in motion,” according to Stephen Hadley, Mr. Bush’s National Security Adviser, “in some sense, it was destined to be. We have a president that wants to take on the big issues and see if he could solve them on his watch.”

    More probably an administration whose energies have been consumed by the war in Iraq, on which Mr. Bush has staked his presidency, may be simply overwhelmed. The separate crises amount to “a perfect storm,” Madeleine Albright, who was Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, told The Washington Post last week. “We have not been paying attention to a lot of these issues.”

    In the latest flare-up between Israel and its neighbors, Washington has been almost silent. Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, who is struggling to orchestrate the response to Iran’s defiance, merely blamed Hizbollah for upsetting “regional stability,” and urged Syria to rein in its radical protégés.

    But Washington’s rebukes are far less pointed than a year ago, in the aftermath of the St. Valentine’s Day assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri – when the talk here was of “regime change” in Damascus to follow that in Baghdad.

    The change reflects a growing, if tacit, acceptance that the unilateralist “Bush doctrine,” involving pre-emptive action if necessary to remove a threat, is beyond the power of even the US to implement on its own. Hence the President’s more restrained tone of late, encapsulated by Time magazine’s latest cover, proclaiming an end to “Cowboy Diplomacy.” The problems also reflect a failure to think its policies through. The irony is that Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine achieved their roles in government thanks to democratic elections – exactly what Washington has been advocating for the entire Middle East.

    Here and there on the Blogosphere there is speculation that the U.S. is somehow orchestrating this crisis with Israel as a prelude to invading Iran. While I’m not going to dismiss this out of hand, I think it’s more likely that the Middle East, including Israel, has finally figured out what a weenie Bush really is. And since we’ve squandered so much of our military strength in Iraq, everyone knows the U.S. doesn’t have the muscle to intervene.

    Attention

    Posted on by

    “All hell broke loose on Wednesday in the Mideast,” Juan Cole says, “with a Hizbullah attack on the Israeli army and Israeli reprisals, and the Israeli dropping of a 500 pound bomb on Gaza.”

    In short, among other actions, yesterday Israel bombed the Beirut airport; Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel.

    Professor Cole denounces Hezbollah’s attack as “criminal and stupid,” but he also criticizes Israel’s “disproportionate use of force.” In the long run Israel isn’t helping itself by causing chaos in Lebanon. He also writes,

    I continue to worry that this outbreak of war in the Levant will exacerbate tensions in Iraq and get more US troops killed. Iraqi Sunnis generally sympathize with the Palestinians. And hard line Shiites like the Sadr Movement and the Mahdi Army are close to Hizbullah. Israel’s wars could tip Iraq over into an unstoppable downward spiral.

    Bad news all around.

    I scanned news stories yesterday, trying to catch up to the past several days’ events. I don’t pay as much attention to the Israeli-Palestinian situation as I should; after all these years, it’s become background noise to me, I’m sorry to say. For once, the blogosphere wasn’t much help. Commentary from lefties was sparse. Righties, on the other hand, declared war and eagerly cheered the Israeli team. For example, Kim at Wizbang writes,

    Israel is proving to its enemies, who probably expected more capitulation, that it is prepared to engage in a two front war. … Now that Israeli government is finally responding to its enemies as it should have a long time ago, Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists would be advised, if they love their families that is, to hold their war planning meetings away from home.

    Flopping Aces writes,

    Oh, by the way…..where are all the lefty bloggers on this? Has anyone heard a peep out of them? Too busy defending Hezbollah and Hamas I guess.

    It’s a legitimate question, even though the conclusion is the usual inflammatory and childish tripe righties are known for. I can’t speak for everyone, but for my part, I don’t want this to be happening. And yesterday I wasn’t sure how big a deal this military action really is — the beginning of a war, or just another episode in the Israel-Palestine epoch?

    The more I read, the more disturbing these new developments become. Matt Yglesias quotes Yossi Klein Halevi:

    The next Middle East war–Israel against genocidal Islamism–has begun. The first stage of the war started two weeks ago, with the Israeli incursion into Gaza in response to the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier and the ongoing shelling of Israeli towns and kibbutzim; now, with Hezbollah’s latest attack, the war has spread to southern Lebanon. Ultimately, though, Israel’s antagonists won’t be Hamas and Hezbollah but their patrons, Iran and Syria. The war will go on for months, perhaps several years. There may be lulls in the fighting, perhaps even temporary agreements and prisoner exchanges. But those periods of calm will be mere respites. …

    … According to a very senior military source with whom I’ve spoken, Israel is still hoping that an international effort will stop a nuclear Iran; if that fails, then Israel is hoping for an American attack. But if the Bush administration is too weakened to take on Iran, then, as a last resort, Israel will have to act unilaterally. And, added the source, Israel has the operational capability to do so.

    As Matt says,

    This is sort of mind-boggling. Let me just go on the record as saying that as bad an idea as bombing Iran may be, doing so as part of a wildly impractical scheme for Israel to launch a general Middle Eastern war is significantly less appealing.

    From an editorial in the Boston Globe:

    The timing of the Hezbollah action could not be more revealing. Hezbollah commandos crossed into Israel on the same day that Iran was supposed to give its answer to the package of incentives that the five permanent Security Council members plus Germany offered to Iran if it will suspend uranium enrichment and enter negotiations to bring it into compliance with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Because no answer was forthcoming from Tehran, yesterday was also the day that the five permanent Security Council members expressed “profound disappointment” at Iran’s refusal to respond, and said they “have no choice but to return to the United Nations Security Council” to consider possible sanctions against Iran.

    Hezbollah’s attack on Israel serves not only to distract from Iran’s defiance of the international community. It also plays into a propaganda campaign that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has conducted in recent months, conflating the issue of Iran’s nuclear program with what he has condemned as the intolerable existence of Israel. Also, by having Hezbollah strike now at Israel, the Iranian regime clearly means to neutralize Arab regimes that are fearful of Iran’s spreading influence in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.

    President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt had just disclosed publicly that he had worked out a prisoner swap with Israel and Hamas, but that “other parties” he would not name forced Hamas to sabotage the deal. It can be assumed that Syria and Iran are the other parties, the two countries having signed a military cooperation agreement last month that Syria’s defense minister described as establishing “a joint front against Israel.”

    Knowing that Iran is behind Hezbollah’s act of war, Israeli leaders — who are openly warning of devastating strikes on Lebanon’s infrastructure — would be well advised to avoid a reflexive military response that lands Israel in an Iranian trap. If the regime in Tehran wants to provoke Israel to bomb Lebanese power plants, roads, and bridges, maybe this kind of military retaliation is not such a good idea.

    Maybe not.

    Steve Gilliard gets to the heart of the matter (emphasis added):

    Why are the Israelis being yanked around by their enemies? A kidnapping has created this insane risk of regional war. Every bomb dropped makes Hamas stronger. Every soldier kidnapped makes Israel react more violently.

    Fools mistake weakness for strength and strength for weakness. And, unfortunately, since the United States government is being run by a pack of fools, we are weaker now than we’ve been in many generations. Sidney Blumenthal writes,

    On Israel’s reoccupation of Gaza in response to Hamas’ terrorism, Bush has regressed to embracing no policy, just as he did when he first entered office. In the light of Bush’s failure to give Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas any tangible gains to show his electorate, Hamas’ victory was foretold. Now the withdrawal of the United States from any peace process is yielding a predictable downward spiral of mutual recrimination in the region.

    This might be the time to stop and reflect on how the Bush Administration’s chuckleheaded “foreign policy” may have enabled a Hamas victory in last January’s elections. The Bushies, so enamored of the simple-minded notion that elections equal liberty, can’t see that where people want an Islamic government, elections might not equal liberty. From the February New Yorker:

    But look around, Harari said: “In Jordan, too, wherever there are free elections––trade unions, student unions, professional guilds––the Islamists have the upper hand. If the Hashemite kings”––Hussein and Abdullah––“had not played all kinds of tricks, the Islamists would have had a large representation in parliament as well. And when Egypt held its American-inspired parliamentary elections recently, the number of seats won by the Muslim Brotherhood rose fivefold. Throughout the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood is the main power with grassroots support. The Islamists are less corrupt. They are the ones with integrity and compassion. They are of the people and they speak for the people. Today in the Arab world, the choice is clear between democratically elected Islamists and Western-leaning dictators.”

    Here in the West we see the Islamists as totalitarians, but if (for whatever reason) it’s the will of the people to be ruled by Islamists, then standing in the way of that, attempting to impose secular government because we think it is better, does not equal freedom. That’s the conundrum righties cannot wrap their heads around.

    Likewise, the Bush White House and its rightie admirers enabled Hezbollah to gain power in Syria, according to some observers. Robert Perry wrote last year,

    George W. Bush’s grab to take credit for a few democratic openings in the Middle East has endangered the region’s reformers while his two-year-old military adventure in Iraq continues to founder, a disaster sinking in the blood of Iraqi citizens and U.S. soldiers.

    That grim assessment is, of course, not the imagery favored by the U.S. news media as it resumes its role of courtier press, lavishing praise on Bush and his neoconservative advisers as heroic visionaries leading the Middle East to freedom. …

    … In the latest conventional wisdom about winds of freedom sweeping the Middle East, both mainstream and conservative commentators bought into the notion that Arabs were rallying to Bush’s orations about liberty and finally appreciating his conquest of Iraq. But the reality is that Bush remains one of the region’s most despised figures.

    So when Bush rushed to center stage ostensibly to urge on thousands of Lebanese demonstrators demanding Syrian military withdrawal – and implicitly to take credit for the developments – the U.S. news media missed the other story: that Bush’s grandstanding was putting those protesters and their cause in danger.

    One of the results was a backlash that saw pro-Syrian Hezbollah stage a counter rally of a half million people in Beirut on March 8, denouncing U.S. intervention in Lebanese politics and accusing Washington of regional “terrorism.” This massive outpouring emboldened Lebanon’s parliament to re-elect pro-Syrian Prime Minister Omar Karami, who had resigned just nine days earlier in face of the anti-Syrian protests.

    The twin developments were a stunning reversal for U.S. policy in Lebanon, putting the country’s political position back almost where it was when the anti-Syrian protests began following the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on Feb. 14. The heightened tensions also have complicated the United Nations’ strategy for pressuring Syria to withdraw its remaining 14,000 troops from Lebanon.

    Hezbollah, a radical Shiite Muslim party long denounced by the United States as a terrorist organization, was given a chance to demonstrate that Syria’s military presence, which began in the 1970s during Lebanon’s civil war, has the backing of a significant part of the Lebanese population.

    Hezbollah’s muscle-flexing also forced another retreat by Washington. “The United States has basically accepted the French view, echoed by others in Europe, that with Hezbollah emerging as such a force in very fractured Lebanon, it is dangerous to antagonize it right now,” according to a New York Times article by Steven R. Weisman. [NYT, March 10, 2005]

    An alert U.S. press corps might have pounced on the Bush administration for overplaying its hand, but virtually across the board the U.S. news media had hailed the pre-March 8 developments as vindication of Bush’s invasion of Iraq and the neoconservative strategy of using force to smash the Arab political structure. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Neocon Amorality” and “Bush’s Neocons Unbridled.”]

    Last year righties cheered the Lebanese who protested Syrian occupation, and they adopted the simple-minded but mistaken notion that the Lebanese were inspired by U.S. actions in Iraq to call for freedom. Today, some of the same bloggers who cheered for the people of Lebanon in 2005 (and complained that news media weren’t giving Bush enough credit) today condemn the New York Times for reporting that Israeli bombs killed Lebanese women and children. Sometimes their binary sorting system (good/bad, black/white, us/them) does create some discrepancies.

    A statement issued by the White House yesterday condemns Hezbollah, as well as Syria and Iran, for the escalating violence but does not ask Israel to show restraint.

    Hizballah’s terrorist operations threaten Lebanon’s security and are an affront to the sovereignty of the Lebanese Government.

    Bombing the the Beirut airport is not an affront to the sovereignty of the Lebanese government, however.

    Hizballah’s actions are not in the interest of the Lebanese people, whose welfare should not be held hostage to the interests of the Syrian and Iranian regimes.

    That sentence is true, of course. It’s absolutely true. I can’t argue with it. However, Israel’s actions could complicate the work of the U.S. military in Iraq and get more U.S. soldiers killed. Yet the White House does not call for Israel to show restraint. I assume they’re treading carefully so as not to disappoint their base. Politics first, you know.

    From Left I on the News:

    … both the U.S. and the E.U. have condemned Hizballah’s seizure of two Israeli soldiers, with the U.S. escalating its attack on governments it doesn’t like by blaming Iran and Syria, while at the same time no one–no one in the U.S. government, no prominent politician, no U.N. official–as far as I can tell, has said a word about Israel’s murder of nine civilians by intentionally dropping a bomb on their house, nor any other action taken by the Israeli government.

    Also:

    And as a representative example of the liberal response in the United States, the Huffington Post has more than 20 posts/essays on its front page as I write this, covering such important subjects as Bill O’Reilly, Karl Rove, Superman, and other topics (why there’s even one or two about Iraq). Not one even mentions Palestine.

    I don’t write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict much for several reasons. One, I have no unique insight into the conflict; there are plenty of other people who do, and I defer to them. Two, what insight I do have tells me everybody involved is wrong a large part of the time. I mean everybody. I don’t take sides; there’s wrong all over. Like most westerners my sympathies want to be with Israel. Like most westerners, I sincerely rejoice that centuries of diaspora ended with the establishment of Israel. But that doesn’t mean the Israeli government is always right (or, conservsely, that the Palestinians are always wrong), or that Israeli actions are always wise and justified. I can’t render the situation into a good guys v. bad guys melodrama, the way righties do.

    For years, my basic opinion was that I wished the hostilities would stop, but if not, I hoped the fools didn’t start World War III.

    But the righties, and Left I, have a point — we liberals do seem to be avoiding the subject. We shouldn’t be leaving this discussion entirely to the righties.

    Update:     Via Taylor Marsh — You must read this piece by Michael Hirsch at Newsweek.com.