September 2004 Archives

I make a special point of reading the opinions of people I disagree with because I believe, like Abraham Lincoln did, that it is the first step in refuting their position.

So when I saw this report about Justice Antonin Scalia's speech at Harvard, I read it and enjoyed it immensely. I disagree with everything he says, but he'd be a worthy debate opponent and one you'd better be well-prepared for:

“What the Fourth Amendment prohibits is ‘unnecessary’ search and seizure,” the justice said. “Is it racial profiling prohibited by the Fourth Amendment for the police to go looking for a white man with blue eyes? Do you want to stop little old ladies with tennis shoes?”

The eccentric justice launched into a parody of a police radio dispatch under a scenario in which profiling were prohibited. “The suspect is 5’10, we know what he looks like, but we can’t tell you,” Scalia quipped—drawing laughter from the audience.

[...]

An audience member later rose to ask Scalia “whether you have any gay friends, and—if not—whether you’d like to be my friend.”

“I probably do have some gay friends,” Scalia said. “I’ve never pressed the point.”

But Scalia said his personal views on social issues have no bearing on his courtroom decisions.

“I even take the position that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged,” Scalia said.

“But it is blindingly clear that judges have no greater capacity than the rest of us to decide what is moral.”

[...]

Dunster House resident Zachary D. Liscow ’05 rose during the question-and-answer session to suggest that Scalia’s own vote in the controversial 2000 presidential election case could be viewed as an example of the “judicial activism” Scalia deplores.

“I do not mean by [‘judicial activism’] judges actively doing what they’re supposed to do,” Scalia responded. He said the Florida Supreme Court’s decision to order a recount in Miami-Dade County—a decision Scalia and his colleagues overruled—amounted to a “clear violation of the federal constitution.”

And while conservative justices have been criticized for effectively deciding the 2000 election themselves, Scalia quipped: “Would you rather have the president of the United States decided by the Supreme Court of Florida?”

[...]

In one of the more bizarre moments of the evening, Scalia mentioned—in passing—that he thought the 17th Amendment was “a bad idea.”

The 17th Amendment provides for the direct election of senators.

Discuss.

A while back I asked you to submit your debate questions. There were some excellent ones which you can see here in the comments.

Now, here's mine:

"Mr. President, we are spending more in four days of war in Iraq than we've spent protecting all our ports for the last three years. Statistics show that there were more terrorist attacks in the world last year than the year before. Your own Secretary of Defense wonders whether the insurgents in Iraq are recruiting, training, and deploying more terrorists than we're capturing or killing. Your staunchest ally in the war on terror says that the war in Iraq has brought more bad than good.

"Despite all of this, you say that the world is a safer place because of the war in Iraq.

"Well, tonight you have a chance to speak to the American people and so I'd like to ask you, what objective proof do you have that the world is a safer place now because of the war in Iraq?"

Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young.

Here's what he says about the war in Iraq:

We have prosecuted the war and the counter-insurgency war that followed with too few soldiers on the ground and seemingly no strategy for victory. Today, there are three options:

1. We double the number of boots on the ground, from today's 150,000 troops to 300,000, and pursue a much more vigorous attack on the foreign and domestic guerrillas. To double the force would require a major buildup in our Army and Marine troop strength, which no one seems prepared to pursue.

2. We continue as we are now, holding defensive positions and taking a steady stream of casualties while the insurgents get stronger and bolder.

3. We get out.

A suggestion in one of my recent columns that we begin the withdrawal by establishing American enclaves on the Iraq borders has gained some traction and is being discussed by Army planners, we are told....

It would be a bitter pill for the Bush administration to swallow and one they are unwilling to discuss until the November election is out of the way. But if they win another four years, swallow it they must or see the war and the American casualties drag on endlessly without resolution.

A withdrawal from Iraq would allow us to reinforce and re-energize the effort in Afghanistan and bolster our ally, Gen. Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, as he and his army pursue a bloody campaign to clean out pockets of foreign terrorists in Waziristan on the Afghan border.

The United States needs to bolster security and reconstruction in Afghanistan and prevent the overthrow of Musharraf and the rise to power of Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan, which is a nuclear power.

Think of Osama bin Laden with his hands on a nuclear bomb. Now that would be a very real threat to the United States and its people.

Why aren't we talking about this more? Because, apparently, Pres. Bush believes that winning the election is more important than winning the war.

(HT to DemFromCT)

Michael Hirsch writes this in the Post:

For the administration, winning means discarding the German model and adopting one that in the best case looks more like Bosnia, where U.S. and NATO forces today act as quasi-permanent control rods to prevent the kind of chain reaction of violence that leads to civil war.

It means acknowledging that we must plan for a large U.S.-dominated occupation force that could remain there for several years at least, and we must spend tens of billions of dollars more than the Bush administration is doing now. If we don't, the next rotation into Iraq could begin to "break" the Army, one general worries, provoking an exodus of the military's professional officer corps.

Confronting reality in Iraq, and reducing expectations, also means backing whatever sources of stability we can find, even if they are anti-American. This may be the only way to salvage the minimal goal of leaving behind an Iraq that does not threaten us or its neighbors.

That means, effectively, two options. One is a "little Saddam," a strongman who can consolidate control through non-democratic means. The other is to pursue a democracy largely shaped by anti-American mullahs, hopefully somewhat moderate ones like Sistani.

What's not available any longer is the Iraqi equivalent of Konrad Adenauer, the German politician who was jailed by the Nazis and who later, after becoming the first chancellor of West Germany, nurtured good relations with France and the United States. Even Allawi must defer to Sistani. Washington must swallow the likelihood that Iraq will enter some drawn-out Islamic phase before it ever turns into a secular democratic model.

For the Americans who went to war in Iraq hoping for historic change, those options are pretty much all that's left on the table. That is what "winning" in Iraq will look like for years to come. It's the best we can do right now, even if it looks like losing.

Give a listen, Pres. Bush: it's time to grow up and get real.

(HT to DemFromCT)

From Juan Cole:

President Bush said Tuesday that...things are improving in [Iraq].

What would America look like if it were in Iraq's current situation?

The population of the US is over 11 times that of Iraq...[so if] violence killed 300 Iraqis last week, [that would be the] equivalent proportionately of 3,300 Americans.

What if 3,300 Americans had died in car bombings, grenade and rocket attacks, machine gun spray, and aerial bombardment in the last week? That is a number greater than the deaths on September 11, and if America were Iraq, it would be an ongoing, weekly or monthly toll.

And what if those deaths occurred all over the country, including in the capital of Washington, DC, but mainly above the Mason Dixon line, in Boston, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco?

What if the grounds of the White House and the government buildings near the Mall were constantly taking mortar fire? What if almost nobody in the State Department at Foggy Bottom, the White House, or the Pentagon dared venture out of their buildings, and considered it dangerous to go over to Crystal City or Alexandria?

Dick Armitage seems to think so. At a news conference on Friday, he said that insurgents have stepped up their deadly assaults in Iraq because they want to "influence the election against President Bush."

Cam Simpson has the story:

Asked whether he meant that insurgents or terrorists were working for Kerry, Armitage replied, "I didn't say that. What I said was that they were trying to influence the election against President Bush."

David Wade, a spokesman for Kerry's campaign, fired back Friday.

"These comments are an outrage and an offense to all Americans," Wade said.

Here's the thing: Armitage is pretty naive if he thinks the terrorists are afraid of a second Bush term.

The fact is, the terrorists have never had it so good. Three years after 9/11, Iraq has turned out to be a tremendous breeding ground for their despicable kind, not a magnet like Bush claims. For every one we kill, another 10 spring up to replace them.

In other words, Bush has been good for business.

So why on earth would they be afraid of his second term?

I've often said that POTUS was either a liar or a dope when it came to WMD. And, not-so-secretly, I always hoped that he was the former and not the latter.

Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh expands on that idea in an interview with Salon Magazine:

...[D]o you realize how much better off we would be if they really were cynical, and they really were lying about it, because, yes, behind the invasion would be something real, like support for Israel or oil.

But it's not! It's not about oil. It's about utopia. I guess you could call it idealism. But it's idealism that's dead wrong. It's like one of the far-right Christian credos. It's a faith-based policy. Only it wasn't a religious faith. It was the faith that democracy would flourish....Is there anything worse than idealism that doesn't conform to reality?

Like Sen. Kerry said about Bush, "Not even failure can change his mind."

President Bush:"A government takeover of health care with an enormous price tag...What else do you expect from a Senator from Massachusetts?"

Is there some way to interpret that sentence so that it doesn't insult most of the people from one state? Can you remember any major-party presidential nominee (not named Bush) who has ever said anything like that?

Whatever.

Here you go, President Bush: this one's for you, dude.

Last year on this day, I posted this quote from Abraham Lincoln on the front page of this blog:

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion.

As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation."

But I couldn't do it again this year. Because three years after 9/11, I'm afraid we've lost our way.

Where we once had the world's support and sympathy, we are now reviled. Where we once had national unity and resolve, we now have distraction and fear-mongering.

I'll be blunt: this is a failure of leadership. And in our system we have the opportunity to change that leadership in an orderly way. We must exercise that opportunity now. We must have new leadership that understands that we can and will defeat those that attacked us on 9/11. We must have new leadership that can bring us together again. We must have new leadership that understands that strength in the world begins at home.

Whatever it takes, we will not lose our way, we will not lose our faith, we will stay strong to defeat those forces that attacked us on 9/11. And we will demand that our leadership show the same strength and have the same vision. And if they cannot show that strength, if they cannot see the way, we must replace them with leadership that will find the will and the way to rebuild our strength at home and abroad.

"And the fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation."