Month: May 2005

“We have now had one year of legal same-sex marriage in our state. Despite predictions, we have not witnessed any threat to so-called ‘traditional marriage.’ There has not been an attack on family, and almost all would admit that very little has changed. In fact, however, something has changed. Many of our citizens have experienced the joy of marriage for the first time where the laws of our state have said, ‘You are equal.’ We have seen that joy in our son. To take that away would be an injustice. It would be devastating for our family and the real values we believe family should represent.
After seven years in a committed relationship, our son and his partner exchanged vows in front of 125 friends and family members. It brought home the reality that marriage is about two people who love each other and who desire to commit to a life together. We now realize how far our entire family has come in 12 years. Those hopes and dreams we had for our son prior to June 1993 have, in fact, now been realized. What more could we have wished for than to have our son find happiness and share his life with someone he loves?” – the parents of a gay son, in the Boston Globe.

I haven’t tackled the fundamental question in Iraq for a while. No, Mickey hasn’t scared me into silence. Since the elections, it’s simply been hard to figure out exactly what’s going on. You can read the good news here. The demise of a complete Sunni boycott of the next political phase also has to be encouraging. Buit it would surely be dumb not to notice how resilient the insurgency still is, how it has capitalized on the political drift of the past few months, and how it is as lethal as ever. My old friend, Niall Ferguson, provides a longer view. Like me, he has long believed that the war was absurdly under-manned from the beginning. Like me, he wants it to work. But some things cannot change. This is the key point:

How, then, did the British crush the insurgency of 1920? Three lessons stand out. The first is that, unlike the American enterprise in Iraq today, they had enough men. In 1920, total British forces in Iraq numbered around 120,000, of whom around 34,000 were trained for actual fighting. During the insurgency, a further 15,000 men arrived as reinforcements. Coincidentally, that is very close to the number of American military personnel now in Iraq (around 138,000). The trouble is that the population of Iraq was just over three million in 1920, whereas today it is around 24 million. Thus, back then the ratio of Iraqis to foreign forces was, at most, 23 to 1. Today it is around 174 to 1. To arrive at a ratio of 23 to 1 today, about one million American troops would be needed.

We are fighting a global war with the manpower for a minor spat. Technology can only do so much. And when you further consider that, in order to win, we need to deal with Syria and Iran at the very least, you can see the scale of our problem. Solution? At this point, I can’t see any except a major dose of luck.

Thank God there are some sane grown-ups in the Senate. I don’t think, as I’ve said, that either side has behaved very admirably in all this. The Dems have to get used to the fact that this administration won the election, that today’s GOP is an essentially religious group and that hard right fundamentalists are going to become judges. I worry about people like Bill Pryor making rulings – but the president picked him, his party supports him, and he’s not incompetent or unqualified. If the Dems want to stop such people becoming judges, they can always try winning a presidential election. Equally, the Republicans have become a sour, ideological bunch, and the complete lack of consultation with the Democrats or indeed even the few sane Republicans left doesn’t help matters. I hope (but don’t expect) that this compromise helps both sides back down. But it is the president who should take most stock. He should nominate to the Supreme Court someone as moderate on his side as Bader Ginsburg and Breyer were for Clinton. Clinton could have picked hard-left nominees. By and large, he didn’t. Bush should not pick an extremist nominee for the Supreme Court; and he shouldn’t nominate Scalia or Thomas to Chief Justice. Give that to O’Connor, who is, in any case, the real compromise-manager on today’s court. In the end, the Republicans would thank him. If the GOP leadership continues to look as extremist as it has done lately, the Republicans are going to lose badly in the near future.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Regarding ‘Me and my virus’ and ‘The changing climate’: The disincentive to getting HIV is that it is still killing people, even people on the medications. My brother tested positive in 1993 and has developed resistance to every HIV medicine, one by one. He now somehow lives a halfway decent life with only a handful of T-cells and each day is a gift. If you can improve your viral loads with two pills a day, that is wonderful. But it doesn’t work that way for every HIV positive person. Each case is different.”

The website that devotes itself to seeking justice for those who claim they were molested by the Legion of Christ’s leader says that the investigation has not ended. I don’t know how to judge their claims. The website is a good resource, though, for learning more about this troubling matter.

HIV and I have had a relatively civil union these past twelve years. For eight of those years, I was on heavy-duty anti-HIV medication; three years ago, I decided to take a break from the meds, as their side-effects were taking a toll and I had unconsciously begun to miss some dosages. Amazingly, the virus never really bounded back, and my immune system maintained a very stable balance. (For the initiated, my viral load bobbed between 15,000 and 40,000 viral particles per milliliter of blood; and my CD4 cell count stayed in the 500 – 600 range. People without HIV have a count between 500 and 1500, with the majority around 1000. But you only get AIDS if you dip below 200). Until now, that is. My latest numbers show an all-time low for my immune system, 380 CD4 count, and an all-time high for the virus, clocking in at 140,000. It’s one data point, and I’ll get another before I go back on meds. But it seems to me that after three years, the virus has broken back out of its no-fly zone. Not too surprising.

THE CHANGING CLIMATE: But a couple of things struck me talking this through with my doc. First off, my new med regimen may well amount to a mere two pills once a day. Just two pills. By this fall, the drug companies will have simplified the regimen to one pill once a day. The side-effects are predicted to be minimal (I’ll keep you posted). Compared with what we pozzies were taking in the mid-1990s, this is an astonishing improvement. I was once taking up to 40 pills a day with crippling side effects. The broader point: Yet another disincentive to getting HIV has evaporated. How are you supposed to scare people when the treatment is this simple, this effective and this easy? Compare the kind of medical ramifications of testing positive for Type 2 diabetes with testing positive for HIV. Your life is not as definitively shortened with HIV as it is with diabetes; the treatment is far less onerous; the lifestyle changes are fewer, compared with daily injections, monitoring your diet, and so on. All of this poses a big challenge to those trying to craft safer sex messages. When the costs of infection are this low and the sexual benefits as immediate and attractive as they always are, the current strategy of scaring people to death won’t work. We have to find a better, more positive way to encourage safer sex.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “The ends never justify the means, because even if we do win in a fit of religious righteousness, ‘it will be a Pyrhhic victory.’ It will fundamentally tear away the wonderful secular and democratic protections the founders designed. As observers like Gary Hart have noted, the moral superiority of our ideals and values – the ‘fourth power’ as he calls it – is what will be the decisive factor in this war against Islamic fundamentalism. That power is the belief that all humanity, regardless of their allegiance to a particular God or any god, deserves basic and elemental protections because one’s own freedom and ability to believe in anything is not derived from the divine, but from the natural.
One of the reasons why I believe fascism fell without much of an attempt to rise again is that at Nuremberg the ethos was clear: even though your crimes are among the most vile ever recorded, you will be afforded a transparent process through which we will try your actions. This offered no legitimacy to the ideology of the Third Reich, but instead made a powerful statement to the rest of the world that even a systematic campaign to exterminate a group of people could not undermine the idea of justice.
And yet, what I am struck by the conception of justice borne out by Guantanamo and Bagram and Abu Ghraib and the logic of Yoo, Gonzales, and all the rest, is that our idea of justice ipso facto has been undermined. We are so fearful of legitimizing the ideology of al Qaeda, and in some way feel they have escaped the throws of humanity itself, that all of this is justified in so far as it all contributes to the “big war” against terror.
For my part, I’m not so sure. I think you have it exactly right. Osama and al-Zawahiri want this, precisely, because they cannot have a morally superior enemy, just as Hamas cannot accept the idea of a decent Israeli citizen. We, and they, are all pigs. It isn’t true of course, but exactly how do we make that case in the Middle East when this idea of justice has been taken to mean that the US can apprehend anyone, anywhere and then do anything with them without any due process or judicial oversight? How do we even make that case at home?
It all plays out like some Faustian tragedy.”

Bill Kristol and Stephen Schwartz get it right, I think. I should say that Bill Kristol has been pretty exemplary in the war on terror, with a few lapses. He hasn’t dismissed the abuse and torture allegations; he hasn’t turned a blind eye to Rumsfeld’s mismanagement of the post-war; he has kept an eye on the broader battle of ideas; he has backed a bigger military; and he has demanded more accountability from the Bush administration for its mistakes. No doubt he will soon be tagged as an anti-American lefty for these laudable criticisms. He wins kudos in my book.

Dan Drezner has the latest on the looming French referendum on the new EU constitution.

He has already scored a major victory for the perpetrators of minor-molestation. The proximate cause is that he has simply closed down the investigation into Father Maciel, very credibly accused of molestation in Mexico. The victory is that the press has barely noticed. The news was released on a Friday afternoon (yes, the Vatican has spin doctors too), and largely disappeared from view over the weekend. Even more remarkable, no reasons were given for the end of the inquiry, no judgments were made about the accusers or the accused. It was just an exercise of papal power in protecting the core leaders of the new ultra-orthodoxy. Money quote:

In Mexico, where the case against Maciel began, word about the end of the investigation made headlines in most daily newspapers over the weekend, and several victims many of them prominent professionals said they were incredulous that the Vatican would drop the case. Juan Vaca, one of men who accused Maciel, now an adjunct professor of psychology and sociology at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., said that the Vatican investigator, Monsignor Charles Scicluna, had told him and other victims he was convinced they were telling the truth.
“He even said, ‘The church owes you a public apology, because we failed to protect you,’ ” said Vaca, a former priest. “This will end the credibility of the Vatican, from the pope down. I don’t believe they are going to do such damage to the credibility of the Vatican.” In its news release, the Legionaries said that Maciel had “unambiguously affirmed his innocence.” Asked whether the Vatican’s decision not to bring legal proceedings amounted to an exoneration, Jay Dunlap, the communications director for the Legionaries North American region, said, “That’s what it sounds like to us.”

Maciel is a major voice in the burgeoning conservative nexus in Rome, the founder of the Legion of Christ, a Francoite body of far right views. That new power structure evidently matters more to this Pope than the victims of priestly abuse. This was always going to be a test-case. Benedict has failed – or succeeded – depending on your point of view. My point of view is that of the victims.

“Might it be that some conservatives are hesitant to say anything critical of the war-effort for fear that they will be perceived as ‘unconservative,’ as traitors to their cause and their philosophy? If this is so, the fact should give conservatives pause. It is possible for a movement to have too much esprit de corps; nor should conservatives fancy themselves immune from the intellectual stultification that has overwhelmed other orthodoxies during a spell of power. Success – political influence, well-connected donors, handsome endowments, elegantly provisioned awards dinners – is a mixed blessing for any movement that values intellectual suppleness, spontaneity of debate, and purity of spirit; and the vigorous iconoclasts, the prophets, and revolutionaries, of one phase of a group’s history may all too easily degenerate into the party-line hacks of another.” – Michael Knox Beran, in National Review online. Kudos to NRO for printing a vital essay. My concern is that in wielding our power, we may have become too impressed with our own rightness, too convinced of our own moral superiority. We may well have allowed practices and methods that, in effect, undermine our own moral position and thereby our ability to win this war. This war is both military and ideological. We cannot let prisoner abuse undermine the cause we are fighting for: democracy, secularism, freedom. We cannot become like the enemy. If we do, we will have denied ourselves victory. You can see the essence of the temptation in this passage from the Belmont Club blog:

Not only the treatment of the enemy combatants themselves, but their articles of religious worship have become the subject of such scrutiny that Korans must handled with actual gloves in a ceremonial fashion, a fact that must be triumph for the jihadi cause in and of itself.

No; no; no. It is insane to believe that maintaining America’s long-held respect for others’ religion, especially when those others are in the custody of the U.S., is somehow a victory for Jihadism. It is the opposite. It is a victory for our values that we do not stoop to their depraved understanding of what morality is. It is a victory for Jihadism to turn this battle into a fight between Islam and Christianity, or to watch our own military descend into the religious bigotry and intolerance we are fighting against. It is so sad to watch decent people like Glenn Reynolds or Wretchard descend into this moral abyss, even though their motives are doubtless good ones. They want to win the war. But if we win it the way they want us to, it will be a Pyrhhic victory. With great power comes great responsibility. Generations of American soldiers demand that we exercise it now, when the temptations of expediency are greatest.

Some fun with the amazing troops working in Iraq. It goes without saying, doesn’t it?, that criticisms of policies of abuse are designed not to undermine the war but to support the vast majority of ethical soldiers who do great work in incredibly tough circumstances. Well, in this case, they seem to be having a blast.