Under the Rug II

Posted on by

The story thus far — in the last post, we learned that Americans opposed to legal abortion have wildly unrealistic notions about what might happen if abortions became illegal. That means it’s up to us in the reality biz to face some facts.

And one of the facts we need to face is that if abortion becomes illegal women who abort will very likely face legal prosecution for it — possibly even homicide charges — in spite of what the Fetus People claim.

Allegedly the recently passed South Dakota abortion ban provides only for the punishment of abortion providers, not the women who abort. From the law:

Section 2. That chapter 22-17 be amended by adding thereto a NEW SECTION to read as follows:

No person may knowingly administer to, prescribe for, or procure for, or sell to any pregnant woman any medicine, drug, or other substance with the specific intent of causing or abetting the termination of the life of an unborn human being. No person may knowingly use or employ any instrument or procedure upon a pregnant woman with the specific intent of causing or abetting the termination of the life of an unborn human being.

Any violation of this section is a Class 5 felony.

What if a woman uses or employs an instrument or procedure upon herself? Wouldn’t that be a violation?

In the last post I mentioned a couple of young women in Colombia who aborted by taking an ulcer medication. They were arrested after being treated in a hospital emergency room for bleeding. Under the SD statute as I read it, whoever sold them the ulcer medication was liable, but it’s not clear to me that the young women wouldn’t have been liable also, since they medicated themselves. Perhaps someone with a legal background could comment on that.

But here’s another wrinkle: In Monday’s Houston Chronicle, Lynn Paltrow and Charon Asetoyer argue that

If the unborn are legal persons, as numerous South Dakota laws assert, then a pregnant woman who has an abortion can be prosecuted as a murderer under already existing homicide laws.

In other words, just because the abortion law itself doesn’t provide a legal liability for the mother doesn’t mean she wouldn’t be liable under another statute.

Farfetched? Not at all.

Prosecutors all over the country have been experimenting with this approach for years. In South Carolina, Regina McKnight is serving a 12-year sentence for homicide by child abuse. Why? Because she suffered an unintentional stillbirth. The prosecutors said she caused the stillbirth by using cocaine, yet, they did not charge her with having an illegal abortion — a crime that in South Carolina has a three-year sentence. Rather, they charged and convicted her of homicide — a crime with a 20- year sentence. They obtained this conviction in spite of evidence that McKnight’s stillbirth was caused by an infection.

Thus far, South Carolina is the only state whose courts have upheld the legitimacy of such prosecutions. But in fact, women in states across the country, including South Dakota, have already been arrested as child abusers or murderers — without any new legislation authorizing such arrests. In Oklahoma, Teresa Hernandez is sitting in jail on first-degree murder charges for having suffered an unintentional stillbirth. In Utah, a woman was charged with murder based on the claim that she caused a stillbirth by refusing to have a C-section earlier in her pregnancy.

If women are now being arrested as murderers for having suffered unintentional stillbirths, one should assume that in South Dakota’s post-Roe world intentional abortions would be punished just as seriously.

Yesterday in Slate William Saletan pointed out that the South Dakota law goes to great length to define a fertilized ovum as an “unborn human being.” Be warned.

Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column of April 7, 2004 (via Planned Parenthood of the Inland Northwest) provides a glimpse of abortion law enforcement in Portugal.

To understand what might happen in America if President Bush gets his way with the Supreme Court, consider recent events in Portugal.

Seven women were tried this year in the northern Portuguese fishing community of Aveiro for getting abortions. They were prosecuted — facing three-year prison sentences — along with 10 ”accomplices,” including husbands, boyfriends, parents and a taxi driver who had taken a pregnant woman to a clinic.

The police staked out gynecological clinics and investigated those who emerged looking as if they might have had abortions because they looked particularly pale, weak or upset. At the trial, the most intimate aspects of their gynecological history were revealed.

Think that can’t happen here? Remember a year ago, when the attorney general of Kansas subpoenaed abortion clinics for patients’ medical records? The Red State Chastity Police do not have much in the way of respect for privacy.

Kristof continues,

This was the second such mass abortion trial lately in Portugal. The previous one involved 42 defendants, including a girl who had been 16 at the time of the alleged abortion.

Both trials ended in acquittals, except for a nurse who was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for performing abortions. …

… Portugal offers a couple of sobering lessons for Americans who, like Mr. Bush, aim to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The first is that abortion laws are very difficult to enforce in a world as mobile as ours. Some 20,000 Portuguese women still get abortions each year, mostly by crossing the border into Spain. In the U.S., where an overturn of Roe v. Wade would probably mean bans on abortion only in a patchwork of Bible Belt states, pregnant women would travel to places like New York, California and Illinois for their abortions.

The second is that if states did criminalize abortion, they would face a backlash as the public focus shifted from the fetus to the woman. ”The fundamentalists have lost the debate” in Portugal, said Helena Pinto, president of UMAR, a Portuguese abortion rights group. ”Now the debate has shifted to the rights of women. Do we want to live in a country where women can be in jail for abortion?”

“There’s a growing sense that while abortion may be wrong, criminalization is worse,” Kristof writes. Let’s hope we don’t have to learn that lesson the hard way.

Update: See also Dr. Atrios about an abortion ban advocate who refused to answer a simple question about punishment for the mother who aborts.

Under the Rug

Posted on by

I want to elaborate on this post by Digby, which links to this video in which anti-abortion protesters are asked if women should be punished for having illegal abortions. The film reveals that most of the protesters had never even thought about it. One young woman had a hard time understanding the question; it clearly had never occurred to her that women would continue to get abortions if abortions were illegal. (Upon being pressed she allowed that maybe a few women would get abortions, but she didn’t think it would happen often.)

In many nations where abortion is illegal, women really do face penalty of law for getting abortions. In this post from December I linked to Juan Forero, “Push to Loosen Abortion Laws in Latin America ,” The New York Times, December 3, 2005:

PAMPLONA, Colombia – In this tradition-bound Roman Catholic town one day in April, two young women did what many here consider unthinkable: pregnant and scared, they took a cheap ulcer medication known to induce abortions. When the drug left them bleeding, they were treated at a local emergency room — then promptly arrested.

Like the sweetly innocent abortion protester in the first paragraph, the people of Pamplona are in denial.

Like much of Latin America, the people here in Pamplona have, until recently, talked little of the abortions that have taken place behind the town’s tranquil, buttoned-down facade. Yet, 68 students, most of them from the University of Pamplona, sought emergency treatment at the local public hospital last year after having abortions, hospital records showed.

Several students said that they had a liberal attitude toward sex. Condoms are readily available, and the so-called morning-after pill is sold over the counter in pharmacies.

Still, sex education focuses more on anatomy than behavior, and church and university officials preach abstinence. Shamed by the thought of having children without being married, many young women try to induce abortions by taking a drug called Cytotec, which is made for ulcers but also dilates the cervix.

Pharmacies in Pamplona are barred from selling the drug, but students can purchase it in cities nearby. It was Cytotec that the two young women took in April that left them bleeding and, ultimately, under arrest. But there have been others, court records showed.

Under questioning from prosecutors, all admitted their guilt and received suspended sentences.

Insisting that abortion was rare, Pamplona’s conservative leaders thought the case was over. Instead, the episode reverberated throughout Colombia and helped to galvanize a national movement to roll back laws that make abortion illegal, even to save a mother’s life.

Latin America holds some of the world’s most stringent abortion laws, yet it still has the developing world’s highest rate of abortions — a rate that is far higher even than in Western Europe, where abortion is widely and legally available.

In fact, as I pointed out yesterday, western Europe as a region has the lowest rates of abortion in the world. In western Europe the very lowest abortion rates are in The Netherlands, Belgium, the Scandanavian countries, Iceland, Germany — the crazy liberal Nordic fringe, in other words.

Yet while Latin America has a shockingly high rate of abortions, “Pamplona’s conservative leaders” think abortion is “rare.”

Forero of the New York Times continues,

Regional health officials increasingly argue that tough laws have done little to slow abortions. The rate of abortions in Latin America is 37 per 1,000 women of childbearing age, the highest outside Eastern Europe, according to United Nations figures. Four million abortions, most of them illegal, take place in Latin America annually, the United Nations reports, and up to 5,000 women are believed to die each year from complications from abortions.

The degree of denial among people opposed to legal abortions is stunning. Some of you might remember the recent Mahablog comment exchange with “Keith,” who dredged up a “scholarly work” underwritten by Americans United for Life insisting there had been fewer than 100,000 illegal abortions a year in the U.S. before Roe v. Wade.

Since we’re dealing with clandestine activity people didn’t exactly keep records; any number anyone comes up with is a guess. However, another estimate that relied in part on the number of hospital admissions for botched abortions, concluded there were 829,000 illegal or self-induced abortions in the U.S. in 1967. In 1962 alone, nearly 1,600 women were admitted to just one New York City hospital because of complications from illegal abortions. And emergency room admissions represented only a portion of the abortions being performed at the time. Thinking about this makes even the 829,000 number seem low to me.

And given the many innovations in abortion procedure since Roe, you know that if abortion became illegal in the U.S. there’d be a thriving underground abortion industry in place before you could say Mifepristone. Which I bet could be run across the border from Canada without too much trouble.

And there are coathangers in every closet.

So how will laws prohibiting abortion be enforced, exactly?

My internet access is cutting in and out this morning, so I’m going to post this while I can and will (I hope) elaborate on the punishment angle in the next post.

Striking a Balance?

Posted on by

A couple of significant stories from Knight Ridder — Ron Hutcheson reports that the Bush Administration is sending mixed messages on Iraq.

Vice President Dick Cheney said Tuesday that conditions in Iraq were improving steadily, but the American ambassador in Baghdad has said the U.S. invasion opened a “Pandora’s box” of ethnic and religious violence that could inflame the entire Middle East.

Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told the Los Angeles Times in an interview published Tuesday that the “potential is there” for a full-scale civil war in Iraq. Khalilzad, a highly regarded diplomat, warned that a victory by Islamic extremists “would make the Taliban in Afghanistan look like child’s play.”

The conflicting themes – Cheney emphasizing progress, Khalilzad stressing the difficulties and dangers – highlight the Bush administration’s struggle over how to deal with bad news from Iraq. Striking the right balance between optimism and realism could be crucial as Republicans head into the November elections with their control of Congress on the line.

Striking a balance, my ass. Cheney is delusional. Awhile back I stumbled on this paper about delusional thinking —

The DSM-IV defines delusions as “erroneous beliefs that usually involve a misinterpretation of perceptions or experiences.” Delusions may be bizarre, that is, “clearly implausible, not understandable, and not derived from ordinary life experiences” or nonbizarre, that is, involving “situations that can conceivably occur in real life.” …

… One common misconception about delusions–reflected in the DSM-IV definition–is that the thinking processes of delusional individuals are defective, or different from those of normal people. In fact, research suggests that delusional people use the same rules of reasoning as everyone else. Indeed, once a normal individual forms a belief, he or she is also reluctant to change it, and will actively seek out confirmatory evidence (“confirmation bias”) and ignore contradictory evidence.

Delusional people can appear to be completely normal and rational. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to diagnose delusion because the doctor doesn’t have any way to know that what the patient believes to be true isn’t true. The delusions may be obviously delusional or may seem entirely plausible. In general, delusional people don’t have visual or auditory hallucinations the way schizophrenics do. More commonly, they become fixated on some false belief and will look obsessively for evidence to confirm the belief. For example, a delusional vice president fixated on a belief that Saddam Hussein is plotting to destroy America might rattle cages all over Washington for evidence to back up the belief, ignoring whatever doesn’t back it up. Hypothetically.

Hutcheson continues,

In a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Cheney said that as Iraqi security forces grow and the political process advances, “we’ll be able to decrease troop levels.”

U.S. intelligence officials, who agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity because intelligence on Iraq is classified, said the broad consensus in the intelligence community was that while violence had subsided somewhat since the bombing of a major Shiite shrine last month in Samarra, a few more major incidents could plunge the country into full-scale civil war.

Cheney is nuttier than a pecan farm, I tell you.

The other story at Knight Ridder, by James Kuhnhenn, says that Senate Republicans today blocked an investigation into the NSA Spy program.

Senate Republicans blocked an investigation into President Bush’s secret domestic spying program on Tuesday, but agreed to expand congressional oversight of the surveillance system in the future.

At the same time, a group of four Senate Republicans began circulating legislation that would restrict the administration’s ability to eavesdrop on U.S. residents without court approval.

The legislation would require the administration to obtain warrants to eavesdrop on U.S. residents unless the attorney general certified to House and Senate intelligence subcommittees that seeking court approval would hurt intelligence gathering.
The legislation was sponsored by Sens. Mike DeWine of Ohio, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Olympia Snowe of Maine, all Republicans.

The legislation emerged as the Senate Intelligence Committee voted behind closed doors to block a Democratic demand for a full investigation into the program. The surveillance, which is carried out by the National Security Agency, tracks communications between al-Qaida suspects overseas and U.S. residents, according to the administration.

Right now I’m a little too tired to wrap my head around this, but it seems significant.

Abortions and Autonomy

Posted on by

William Saletan wrote a highly annoying article in Slate that argued “technology” would somehow resolve the abortion wars. I say “annoying” because it contains some misinformation — for example, he says that the gestational point of possible viability is earlier now than it was in 1973 when Roe was decided. It actually isn’t; the limit was 23 weeks in 1973, and it’s still pretty much 23 weeks now, “lifer” mythology to the contrary. Scott Lemieux has already written a good response to much of Saletan’s article; see also Amanda Marcotte.

For now, I want to pull out just one paragraph from the Saletan article to complain about. He writes of Roe v. Wade,

Politically, legally, and technologically, the 33-year-old court decision is increasingly obsolete as a framework for managing decisions about reproduction. But pro-lifers can’t launch the post-Roe era, because they’re determined to abolish its guarantee of individual autonomy, and the public won’t stand for that. Only pro-choicers can give the public what it wants: abortion reduction within a framework of autonomy.

What the hell does that mean? That pro-choicers have to be the grown-ups who find a compromise solution, because the little anti-choice children can’t?

Regarding reducing the number of abortions — it might be useful to take a look at which nations have the lowest abortion rates to see what they’re doing right. I found the chart below in this Alan Guttmacher report.

And look who has a way lower abortion rate than the U.S. — The Netherlands. Possibly the most liberal nation that ever was. I’m not sure if The Netherlands is still #1 as of most recent data (the chart dates from 1999), but on the whole the nations of western Europe have lower abortion rates than anywhere else on the planet. And the nations of eastern Europe have some of the highest rates, even though there isn’t a real big difference in abortion law between eastern and western Europe. As I argued here, there is no correlation whatsoever between abortion rate and abortion law.

The only effective way to reduce rates of abortion is to reduce rates of unintended pregnancies. Access to contraception is key. There is no getting around that. Limiting access to contraception is a sure-fire way to increase abortion rates, no matter how strict the abortion law is or how many clinics are closed down.

Somewhere there are probably lots of lovely social-psychological research studies, complete with p values and N squares, that show which values in a society might also lower abortion rates. Without those, however — if we look at The Netherlands and some of these other countries that are successful at reducing abortions we might form hypotheses. We might speculate that openness about sexuality is an abortion-reducing factor. People who are open about their sexuality are more likely to be prepared for it. This includes providing young people with factual information on contraception.

Hmm, so let’s see — who has been struggling for years to provide access to contraception and sex ed to young people? And who has been working against access to contraception and sex ed to young people (beyond “don’t do it”). Hmmm … Could it be that liberalism reduces abortion rates?

As Saletan points out, there have been some improvements in birth control methodology since 1973. But all the improvements in the world won’t help if the technology is banned, or if the local druggists won’t fill prescriptions, and young people become sexually active before they understand exactly how the baby gets into the cabbage patch.

Thus, I get a little tense when moralizers like Saletan wag their fingers and say you liberals are going to have to find a solution. I believe we already have. And I also believe there is no way to compromise with the anti-choice trogs and also lower abortion rates. So if that’s our assignment, we are doomed to fail.

Saletan says that we liberals must figure out how to achieve abortion reduction within a framework of autonomy. Seems to me the data indicate that’s the only way to achieve abortion reduction — within a framework of autonomy. Abortion reduction within a framework of authoritarianism and patriarchy ain’t happening anywhere, unless you count places like Ireland in which women who choose to abort are only a ferry ride away from British abortion providers.

Frankly, the only way to bring about the desired result –abortion reduction within a framework of autonomy– is to reduce the power of the trogs so that liberal reproduction policies might flourish throughout the land, unimpeded.

In recent years there’s been a lot of overheated rhetoric, much of it from Saletan, about how liberals can recapture the moral argument to abortion. But I think there’s an easier way. Just run the Bill Napoli virgin rant in television and radio ads, followed by a catchy closing line — something like “This guy wants to regulate your personal life. Is this OK with you?” Anyone who still cares about personal autonomy will get the hint.

The Tar Baby

Posted on by

The story thus far — a multinational diplomatic effort to resolve the Iran nuclear standoff, explained yesterday in this post, is still underway. Time is critical — the situation must be diffused before Tehran gets a bomb or Washington drops bombs.

As it’s unlikely Tehran has sufficient weapons-grade uranium to do much nuclear mischief right now, the latter outcome is the more immediate threat.

Simon Tisdall explains in today’s Guardian:

George Bush’s explanation of his volte-face over a proposed Iran-India gas pipeline project appeared slightly disingenuous. “Our beef with Iran is not the pipeline,” the US president said on Saturday after withdrawing previous objections and giving the go-ahead to Washington’s new friends in Delhi. “Our beef with Iran is the fact that they want to develop a nuclear weapon.”

But US fears about Iranian nukes, discussed in Vienna yesterday, are hardly the whole story. Washington is compiling a dossier of grievances against Tehran similar in scope and seriousness to the pre-war charge-sheet against Iraq. Other complaints include Iranian meddling in Iraq, support for Hamas in Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon, and human rights abuses.

Our meddling in Iraq and human rights abuses are an entirely different matter, of course.

Mr Bush regularly urges Iranians to seize the “freedom they seek and deserve”. In Tehran’s ministries, that sounds like a call for regime change. He has ignored past Iranian offers of talks and tightened US economic sanctions.

Official Washington’s quickening drumbeat of hostility is beginning to recall political offensives against Libya’s Muammar Gadafy, Panama’s Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein, which all ended in violence. Rightwing American media are urging action, deeming Iran “an intolerable threat” that is the “central crisis of the Bush presidency”. [emphasis added]

Lord, how many central crises can one administration stand?

Yesterday’s ABC News report that Iran is making roadside bombs known as IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices, which begs the question — how are they “improvised” if they are being manufactured?) and shipping them to Iraq for use against Americans has the righties worked up into a nice lather. The old war, with Iraq, just wasn’t much fun any more. But here is the promise of a bright, shiny new war to play with!

It’s “a casus belli, if we want it,” says Captain Ed.

“Gee, how convenient is that?” asks John Aravosis. “Suddenly after 3 years we conveniently find ‘evidence’ of Iran arming the Iraqi insurgents, only a mere weeks after Bush starts laying the groundwork for attacking Iran.”

An odd part of this story is that for now it remains an ABC exclusive; I haven’t found independent corroboration. This suggests a plant. (Or, it also could suggest stupidity — see Newshog for evidence it’s an old story that ABC has confused for a new story.) On the other hand, ABC quotes Richard Clarke as finding the evidence credible. So let’s assume for a moment it’s true.

The ABC report doesn’t make clear exactly which Iraqis the bombs are going to. Righties assume the bombs are going to “terrorists” which is a possibility. Or they might be going to insurgents. Or Shia militias. Or all of the above. What the righties never stop to consider is that Iran’s importing of bombs into Iraq is a consequence of our invasion of Iraq. In other words, we created the conditions that brought this about.

The moral is, he who lets slip the dogs of war is likely to get bit.

I see the Bushies and their hard-right base continuing to fight the Middle East tar baby until they get the desired outcome (can anyone explain what that is?) or until the keys to the war machine are wrestled from their hands. One can only imagine the unintended consequences of a U.S. bombing of Iran. Unfortunately, Bushies are famously imagination-challenged. Will we have to listen to Condi say, “No one could have anticipated we would start World War III”?

An Uncivil War

Posted on by

Jake Tapper reports for ABC News that Iraq is already in a civil war, and we’d all better accept this fact and adjust.

As Pentagon generals offered optimistic assessments that the sectarian violence in Iraq had dissipated this weekend, other military experts told ABC News that Sunni and Shiite groups in Iraq already are engaged in a civil war, and that the Iraqi government and U.S. military had better accept that fact and adapt accordingly.

“We’re in a civil war now; it’s just that not everybody’s joined in,” said retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, a former military commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina. “The failure to understand that the civil war is already taking place, just not necessarily at the maximum level, means that our counter measures are inadequate and therefore dangerous to our long-term interest.

“It’s our failure to understand reality that has caused us to be late throughout this experience of the last three years in Iraq,” added Nash, who is an ABC News consultant.

Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told ABC News, “If you talk to U.S. intelligence officers and military people privately, they’d say we’ve been involved in low level civil war with very slowly increasing intensity since the transfer of power in June 2004.”

From here let’s skip over to today’s Dan Froomkin column:

… even as the public increasingly sees the situation in Iraq headed toward all-out civil war, Bush’s official position is denial.

Just last week, ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas tried repeatedly to get Bush to address the issue. “What is the policy if, in fact, a civil war should break out or the sectarian violence continues?” she asked. “Are you willing to sacrifice American lives to get the Sunnis and the Shiites to stop killing each other?

Bush’s reply: “I don’t buy your premise that there’s going to be a civil war.”

Good thing Bush wasn’t president in 1861, huh?

Froomkin provides more links to commentary about the essential Bushie world view, which is a mix of ignorance and denial. See especially this Fareed Zakaria column. The Bushies have made one blunder after another in Iraq, and most of these blunders came about because the Bush Administration viewed Iraq through a prism of fantasy. Even now, the Administration remains unable to understand what’s happening in Iraq from an Iraqi point of view. For that reason the Bushies do not understand how their policy decisions actually impact Iraqis, and for this reason they misjudge Iraqi actions and reactions.

But Bush cannot learn from mistakes, because he won’t even admit mistakes. Zakaria writes,

In his State of the Union address in January, President Bush took a swipe at critics. “Hindsight alone is not wisdom,” he said. In fact, the tragedy of Iraq is that most of these critiques were made—by several people—at the time the policies were announced, often before. It’s the president who needs to look back and learn from his mistakes. Hindsight may not be the only wisdom, but it is a lot better than operating in the dark.

Intelligent people may disagree whether Iraq is engaged in civil war now or is just on the edge of one. But the White House position is that there is not now and never will be a civil war. Ronald Brownstein wrote in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times:

… the president gave no hint he’d considered how the widening gulf between Sunni and Shiite might alter America’s strategy. Instead, he summoned old sound bites, as if cueing them on tape. “The troops are chasing down terrorists,” he told Vargas. And: “As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.”

In other words, if there is a civil war in Iraq Bush will be the last to know. And for that reason our response is doomed to be a day late and a few billion dollars short.

I learned a long time ago never to say “it can’t get any worse.” Truly, there are no limits to how bad “it” can get. Hang on to your butts.

Sorta related: Interesting article by Niall Ferguson in today’s Los Angeles Times.

Avocado?

Posted on by

I know you’re all waiting for my Oscar commentary. I really did stay up and watch the show, even though I didn’t much care who won what this year. My observations:

Nobody else is saying this, so I’m saying it. J-Lo’s dress was ugly. It was an ugly color — reminded me of overripe avocado. Back in the 1960s they used to make appliances that color, and it was ugly then, too. And the way the fabric draped made her hips look bigger. Also, she needs to find a happy medium between Big Hair and Old Schoolteacher Bun.

Blondes should not wear nude-color gowns. They end up looking sort of monotone. Naomi Watts’s dress was an especially bad choice for that reason. It might be a pretty dress but the cameras weren’t picking up detail, and the effect was, unfortunately, unfortunate. She looked better in King Kong.

Charlize Theron’s dress was odd, but she overcame the handicap with sheer force of beautiousness.

I didn’t have a favorite gown this year, but other than the above-mentioned J-Lo and Watts, nobody I saw was a real disaster, either.

Also: Everybody in Hollywood should take personality lessons from George Clooney.

I thought Jon Stewart was fine. Andy Dehnart is right — the audience didn’t “get” him.

Well, that’s about it.

Wolf! Wolf!

Posted on by

The monumental waste of human protoplasm known as “John Bolton” is threatening a military action against Iran, according to Julian Borger of The Guardian.

The US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, has told British MPs that military action could bring Iran’s nuclear programme to a halt if all diplomatic efforts fail. The warning came ahead of a meeting today of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which will forward a report on Iran’s nuclear activities to the UN security council. …

…According to Eric Illsley, a Labour committee member, the envoy told the MPs: “They must know everything is on the table and they must understand what that means. We can hit different points along the line. You only have to take out one part of their nuclear operation to take the whole thing down.”

It is unusual for an administration official to go into detail about possible military action against Iran. To produce significant amounts of enriched uranium, Iran would have to set up a self-sustaining cycle of processes. Mr Bolton appeared to be suggesting that cycle could be hit at its most vulnerable point.

Elaine Shannon of Time magazine says that the Bushies are preparing a security briefing on Iran for the UN Security Council.

It will rely mainly on circumstantial evidence, much of it from documents found on a laptop purportedly purloined from an Iranian nuclear engineer and obtained by the CIA in 2004. U.S. officials insist the material is strong but concede they have no smoking gun.

They do, however, have diagrams that they believe show components of a nuclear bomb. According to a Western diplomat familiar with the U.S. intel brief, a Farsi-language PowerPoint presentation on the laptop has “catchy graphics,” including diagrams of a hollow metallic sphere 2 ft. in diameter and weighing about 440 lbs. Other documents show a sphere-shaped array of tiny detonators. No file specifically refers to a nuclear bomb, but U.S. officials say the design of the sphere–an outer shell studded with small chemical-explosive charges meant to detonate inward, which would squeeze an inner core of material into a critical mass–is akin to that of classic devices like Fat Man, the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki during World War II. “Because of the size and weight and the power source going into it and height-of-burst requirements,” says the diplomat, Western experts have concluded that the design “is only intended to contain a nuclear weapon. There’s no other munition which would work.”

Iran claims much of the laptop evidence is fabricated. Let it be noted I don’t trust Iran, either.

Yesterday the London Times reported that NATO would help US airstrikes on Iran, which suggests to me that the plans for such airstrikes are complete and are just waiting for implementation. You might remember that over a year ago Seymour Hersh said plans for U.S. airstrikes in Iran were in the works.

The Guardian article says that the CIA and the U.S. State Department do not appear to support airstrikes, but favor a diplomatic approach. The fact that the Bush Administration is not speaking with one voice brings us back to the question of who’s in charge? Condi takes her orders from Bush. Is Bolton getting orders from Cheney? Or is he a loose cannon?

Today the IAEA is meeting to determine if Iran should be reported to the UN Security Council. Not that anything the IAEA or the UN Security Council decide really matters to the Bushies.

Unlike Iraq, Iran really does have the capability to process uranium. It is engaged in small-scale processing right now. The question is, is the processing resulting in weapons-grade uranium? Iran says it needs nuclear reactors for energy. The U.S. says this is just a front for making bombs. Over the past several years most of the rest of the world has been trying to work with Iran to allow it to have energy-producing reactors but preventing Iran from engaging in the additional refinement of uranium required to produce weapons. A Russian-built power-generating reactor in Iran is scheduled to go online later this year.

So now a race is on — not only to resolve the situation before Iran has bombs, but to resolve it before the Bush Administration charges ahead with airstrikes that would further destabilize the Middle East. Good luck, planet Earth.

Both Tehran and Washington are playing this issue for political leverage at home. In the VRWC echo chamber the Bushies portray themselves as the only people on the planet with the wisdom and guts to stand up to Iran. The UN, the IAEA, Europe — all a pack of girly wusses who aren’t smart enough to see how dangerous Iran is. So the Lone Ranger and Tonto (probably Israel this time, not Britain) must go in alone to shoot it out with the bad guys while the tenderfeet hide out in the saloon.

Meanwhile, as this New York Times editorial explains, Bush is Iran’s best friend.

At the rate that President Bush is going, Iran will be a global superpower before too long. For all of the axis-of-evil rhetoric that has come out of the White House, the reality is that the Bush administration has done more to empower Iran than its most ambitious ayatollah could have dared to imagine. Tehran will be able to look back at the Bush years as a golden era full of boosts from America, its unlikely ally.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

Update: Former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami says that Islam is the enemy the West needs.

Anticipate This

Posted on by

“I’m trying to think differently,” President Bush said in New Dehli. If that doesn’t give you the willies, nothin’ will.

Yes, folks, the same crack (or on crack) foreign policy team that pushed North Korea back into the plutonium processing business, didn’t anticipate Hamas would win the Palestinian election even though their own poll said it would, and whose crowning achievement is the war in Iraq, has taken us another step closer to destroying civilization as we know it. David Sanger writes in the New York Times (emphasis added):

Mr. Bush took a step in his efforts to rewrite the world’s longstanding rules that for more than 30 years have forbidden providing nuclear technology to countries that do not sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

“I’m trying to think differently,” Mr. Bush said in New Delhi, referring to the administration’s argument that a new system is needed. But in treating India as a special case — a “strategic relationship” — he has so far declined to define general rules for everyone.

In essence, Mr. Bush is making a huge gamble — critics say a dangerous one — that the United States can control proliferation by single-handedly rewarding nuclear states it considers “responsible,” and punishing those it declares irresponsible. For those keeping a scorecard, India is in the first camp, Iran is in the second, and no one in the administration wants to talk, at least on the record, about Israel or Pakistan — two allies that have embraced the bomb, but not the treaty.

At WaPo, David Von Drehle writes,

In case you missed the memo, the world is multipolar now.

Gone are the days of go-it-alone foreign policy, of unilateral preemption and epoch-making events scheduled solely “at a time and place of our choosing.” That’s all so 2002, back at the climax of what columnist Charles Krauthammer calls “the unipolar moment” of unlimited American power. Unipolar means the big dog, Uncle Sam, bears the burdens and thus calls the shots.

These days, America is into “regional partnerships,” as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice explained earlier this year, because “emerging nations like India and China and Brazil and Egypt and Indonesia and South Africa are increasingly shaping the course of history.”

Condi Rice. The course of history. Be afraid.

A few weeks ago Sebastian Mallaby pointed out that Condi Rice’s foreign policy theories are a work in progress.

In January 2000, as the Bush campaign got underway, Rice published a manifesto in Foreign Affairs that laid out the classic “realist” position: American diplomacy should “focus on power relationships and great-power politics” rather than on other countries’ internal affairs. “Some worry that this view of the world ignores the role of values, particularly human rights and the promotion of democracy,” she acknowledged. But the priority for U.S. foreign policy was to deal with powerful governments, whose “fits of anger or acts of beneficence affect hundreds of millions of people.”

The “great-power politics” perspective was, I assume, the basis of the Bush Administration’s decision to dismiss the importance of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden in March 2001. Another Bush foreign policy triumph. Mallaby continues,

Even six years ago, this was an outdated position. The Clinton administration was certainly preoccupied with powers such as Russia and China, but it was also tracking Islamic terrorists who had already attacked the World Trade Center. The importance of other non-state actors, from rebels to environmentalists to bond traders, had become a cliche of globalization commentary; AIDS had been recognized as a security threat. The era of great-power politics was widely thought to have ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Rice seemed like a Sovietologist who hadn’t quite caught up.

Kissinger-style realpolitik is so 1970s, Mallaby writes. The realists were on the wrong side of history — American support for the Shah of Iran is just one example. “Time and again, the idea that diplomacy consisted mainly of relations with powerful governments proved wrong,” Mallaby writes. “As a rising cadre of neoconservative Republicans argued, diplomacy was often about judging the currents within countries — and backing democratic ones.”

Mallaby explains that recently Rice seems to have caught up with the 1990s consensus that weak, destabilized states can prove to be dangerous, and in the long run the best hope for world peace is a world of stable democracies. And I can’t argue with that. The question is, how does that theory translate into policy?

The Bush Administration seems to think that if the all-powerful U.S. can just find the right combination of carrots and sticks, plus the right message strategy, it can re-shape the world to its liking. Robert Fisk provided a glimpse into this thinking recently:

Last week’s visit to Beirut by one of the blindest of George Bush’s bats – his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice – was indicative of the cruelty that now pervades Washington. She brazenly talked about the burgeoning “democracies” of the Middle East while utterly ignoring the bloodbaths in Iraq and the growing sectarian tensions of Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Perhaps the key to her indifference can be found in her evidence to the Senate Committee on International Affairs where she denounced Iran as “the greatest strategic challenge” facing the US in the region, because Iran uses policies that “contradict the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by the United States”.

As Bouthaina Shaaban, one of the brightest of Syria’s not always very bright team of government ministers, noted: “What is the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by the United States? Should Middle East states adapt themselves to that nature, designed oceans away?”

Fisk quotes Maureen Dowd: Bush “believes in self-determination only if he’s doing the determining.” Heh. David Von Drehle writes,

But can a unipolar president find happiness in a multipolar world? We got a few hints last week, as President Bush visited one of Rice’s emerging shapers of history, India. Like a clumsy groom who has learned precisely one dance for his wedding day, Bush went carefully through the steps of multipolar diplomacy, yet there was no mistaking his natural tendencies. You got the feeling that if George W. Bush is going to embrace “partnership,” it’s going to be on his terms, pardner.

Now the Bushies are playing Santa Claus and deciding who’s naughty or nice. And the Bush/Cheney/Rice team now decides on its own which nations deserve nuclear arms and which don’t. And they do so on the basis of their dumbly one-dimensional world view that attempts to sort all people into neat binary categories — good or bad, friend or foe — without taking in the complexity of nations and their multifaceted relationships with each other. How will the India deal affect the dicey relationship between India and Pakistan? Between Pakistan and the U.S.? Between Pakistan and the terrorists who live there? What about Israel? And what about China? The deal with India is supposed to help counter the power of China. But some critics of the deal point out that India’s economic relations with China are critical to New Dehli. If, someday, India found itself having to choose between China and the U.S. … well, Santa comes but once a year; China is on their border all the time.

In other words, this deal could have all manner of bad outcomes that even smart people might not anticipate. Which means you can assume the anticipation-challenged Bushies haven’t considered them.

See also: Ron Beasley and upyernoz.

Update: Great cartoon.