Month: January 2009

Reports are coming in of a particularly grisly encounter at a school in Gaza. Maybe 40 dead in a U.N. school. For a glimpse of how these images are being seen in the global media – very different from American sources – check this story out. The carnage is a cable news 24 hour story:

The cycle begins with rooftop-mounted cameras, capturing the air raids live. After moments of quiet, thunderous bombing commences and plumes of smoke rise over the skyline.

Then, anguish on the streets. Panicked civilians run for cover as ambulances careen through narrow alleys. Rescue workers hurriedly pick through the rubble, often pulling out mangled bodies. Fathers with tears of rage hold dead children up to the cameras, vowing revenge. The wounded are carried out in stretchers, gushing with blood.

Later, local journalists visit the hospitals and more gruesome images, more dead children are broadcast. Doctors wrap up the tiny bodies and carry them into overflowing morgues. The survivors speak to reporters. Their distraught voices are heard around the region; the outflow of misery and destruction is constant.

First Ledeen, now Doug Feith and Richard Perle. Obama is scrambling things ideologically again. In a good way.

Jett Travolta’s body has been turned into ashes. No details of the autopsy – monitored by Travolta’s own physician – have been announced. Travolta himself piloted the plane as it landed in Florida with his son’s remains:

The plane was met by a large van with logos and insignia from the Church of Scientology on the tarmac, and a source said everyone who disembarked, got into the van.

Weigel studies the initial numbers from the Swing State Project’s tally of congressional districts’ voting habits:

In just the preliminary numbers put together by Swing State Project, there are 24 Republicans whose districts voted for Bush in 2004 and Obama in 2008. Lee Terry, a Nebraska Republican, now represents a "blue" district. So does Mary Bono Mack, whose Palm Springs, California district has not been at risk since her late husband, Sonny Bono, won it 14 years ago.

And Obama’s victory turned many swing seats into safer Democratic strongholds. In 2006, liberal newspaper publisher John Yarmuth scored an upset victory in Kentucky’s 2nd district, which contains the city of Louisville and had voted only 51-49 for Kerry. This year Yarmuth won a rematch with his 2006 opponent as Obama carried the district by 13 points. Freshman Democrat Chris Murphy represents a Connecticut district that split 49-49 between Kerry and Bush but went by 14 points for Obama. Seats like these fall off of Republican target lists – strategists from both parties mark them "safe" and move on.

What does it mean in the long term? After all, can’t the pendulum swing right back? Of course it can. But it doesn’t swing by itself. It needs to be pushed by something – by a crisis of faith in the ruling party, by reforms in the opposition party, by demographic shifts that give one party a leg up.

Republicans can no longer fool themselves into thinking the country is naturally slanted toward them, or that they have a built-in majority. If the Democrats can win Hastertland, the Republicans need to figure out how to take it back, or how to win somewhere else.

Petraeus gives an interesting interview to Foreign Policy. The interviewer asks whether Iraq and Afghanistan are fundamentally different from prior wars. Petraeus replies:

We looked at this issue closely when we were drafting the counterinsurgency manual. And we concluded that some aspects of contemporary extremist tactics are, indeed, new. If you look, as we did, at what [French military officer] David Galula faced in Algeria, you find, obviously, that he and his colleagues did not have to deal with a transnational extremist network enabled by access to the Internet. Today, extremist media cells recruit, exhort, train, share expertise, and generate resources in cyberspace. The incidence of very lethal suicide bombers and massive car bombs is vastly higher today. It seems as if suicide car bombs have become the precision-guided munition of modern insurgents and extremists. And while there has been a religious component in many insurgencies, the extremist nature of the particular enemy we face seems unprecedented in recent memory.

(Hat tip: Crowley)

A reader writes:

In your post, "Children, Sickness and Parents," you asked what rights children have when their parents seek to deny them medical care for religious or ideological reasons.  As the author of an article on this topic that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in April, 1995 ("Suffering Children and the Christian Science Church," ) and a subsequent book, God’s Perfect Child:  Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church (Metropolitan Books, 1999), I can answer that question. 

The 1944 U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Prince v. Massachusetts, which concerned a Jehovah’s Witness convicted of violating state child labor laws after insisting that her religious beliefs required her child to distribute Witness literature at night, that "the right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or child to communicable disease, or the latter to ill health or death… Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves.  But it does not follow they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children." 

Despite this ruling, however, the Christian Science Church has zealously pursued the passage of religious exemption laws in virtually every state in the country.  The Church teaches that the human body and the material world are illusions, encouraging believers to deny disease mentally and refuse medicine.  Many of the religious exemption laws that Scientists lobbied for continue to blur the rights not only of the children of Christian Scientists but also of those belonging to many other cults and fringe groups, such as the faith-healing Followers of Christ, who refuse all obstetrical and medical care.  A private cemetery outside of Portland, Oregon, contains the bodies of dozens of their children, dead of easily treatable infections and diabetes.  In an article in Pediatrics (April, 1998), Rita Swan, a former Christian Scientist whose infant son died of meningitis in 1977, and Seth Asser, a pediatrician, documented 170 children’s fatalities due to religion-based medical neglect in the U.S. between 1975 and 1995.  The majority of those deaths resulted from illnesses in which survival rates, with medical care, would have been better than 90 percent. Prosecutors sometimes file charges in such cases, in states where the law allows it, and Christian Scientists have been convicted on charges of manslaughter.  But many convictions have been overturned due to the ambiguity created by religious exemption laws. 

Ironically, while the Christian Science Church dwindles into obscurity and insignificance, gaining few new converts in an age when medicine continues to discover new and successful treatments, the laws it put on the books live on.  Until those laws are fully and finally removed from every state, children born into families that refuse medical care on religious or ideological grounds will not be safe. More information can be found at the website of a group founded by Rita Swan, Children’s Healthcare Is a Legal Duty, Inc.

Jay Lefkowitz provides a fascinating insider’s account. What’s impressive about it – and what the outgoing president should always be respected and admired for – is the combination of moral clarity and pragmatism. They genuinely tried to figure out what worked in Africa and went with it. Fauci and O’Neill also helped avoid some dead-ends, like the chimera of a vaccine, and focused on treatments that could and did save and restore countless lives. In the balance against the countless lives that ended because of decisions made by George W. Bush in wartime, these lives lived must also be taken into account. He was a torturer and a man who cared about the victims of AIDS.

Josh is onto something:

I’m not certain what I think about this appointment yet. But on first blush, the nature of the opposition makes me more inclined to support it.

That strikes me as exactly right. Feinstein and Rockefeller sense a real individual with real clout at the agency, whom they cannot control. There may have been a lack of foresight here in not phoning Feinstein ahead of time. But it is also indisputable that many leading intelligence Democrats were deeply complicit in the Bush torture program and his illegal wire-tapping. It was just as important for the president-elect to pick someone not beholden to them either.

Some are now citing Panetta’s appointment as somehow "political" rather than substantive. But it’s obvious that Obama has actually found someone both capable of running a bureaucracy as complex as the CIA, of a stature to be approved by the Congress and maintain good relations, and with the good sense to know how interrogation based on torture is never right and much less effective than legal methods.

It remains an inspired choice. And the critics help show why.

Max Boot explains:

The odds are that once Israeli troops leave, Hamas will rebuild its infrastructure, forcing the Israelis to go back in the future. This is the definition of a quagmire, yet Israel has no choice but to keep doing what it’s doing. Unlike the French in Algeria or the Americans in Vietnam, it cannot simply pack its bags and go home.

And where on this scale would Americans in today’s Iraq fall? Are we Israel in Gaza or France in Algeria? Or do we not really have as good an excuse as either?

Ross tackles just war theory:

My own view, though, is that just war theory has always been in crisis, and that modernity has only heightened the contradictions – because almost all of the standards the theory sets are so malleable in practice, and so difficult to apply consistently to the complexity of war and statecraft. Consider the Catechism’s definition: Who gets to define what sort of harm is "lasting, grave, and certain" enough to justify going to war? Who decides when all means of preventing conflict "have been shown to be impractical or ineffective"? Doesn’t almost everybody enter a war convinced they have "serious prospects of success"? …

This doesn’t make the theory useless by any stretch, but it’s useful primarily because it provides a broad framework of restraint: If you’re thinking about questions of justice, you’re less likely to commit an injustice, even if no perfect consensus exists on the distinction between a licit campaign and an illicit one.

And if you need to win an election … ?