Month: March 2010

"Dependence of one state upon another creates perverse incentives for both. The unconditional backing of one side in a conflict does not encourage compromise but devotion to maximalist positions. Likewise, if a patron receives no reciprocity for its support, only the client state benefits from the relationship, creating an increasingly untenable situation for the patron. Maximalist demands backed by a patron’s support tend to be detrimental even to the client state in the long run—because they shield the client from the consequences of its actions.

While successive Israeli governments have taken advantage of the relationship with the U.S., this is ultimately not Israel’s fault. Were our positions reversed, Americans would do the same. And while it may feel satisfying to blame Netanyahu’s government or the religious parties in his coalition for the latest incident, the U.S.’s predicament is largely of its own making. At one point during his speech, Biden said that America “has no better friend in the community of nations than Israel.”  In fact, many U.S. allies have been far more reliable over the years.

Indeed, this exaggerated claim about Israel is made precisely to conceal how little reciprocity Israel shows its benefactor. Israel’s dependence on the many forms of U.S. aid ought to make it one of the most easily influenced and accommodating of allies, but the certainty that the aid will never cease, and that no administration will risk accusations that it has “abandoned” Israel, has had the opposite effect. 

Washington created the conditions for its own embarrassment by creating a bilateral relationship defined by dependence and warped by unaccountability. If it is unwilling to place conditions on the support it provides to Israel, and unwilling to enforce them when it does, Washington will continue to find its pronouncements ignored and its efforts in the Near East frustrated," – Daniel Larison.

Yes, I know. "Excitable Andrew" is getting excitable again. The recent flurry of stories about sexual abuse and acting out in the Catholic church is just a flurry. The Pope is not Cardinal Law. The hierarchy remains entrenched in the developing world. Benedict's gamble – to double-down on denial about the celibate priesthood's sexual problems, to add more incense to the smoke-screen and more pageantry to the theater of it all – is working.

But it isn't. Let us review the recent evidence. The American church is still shell-shocked by abuse cases that have implicated the very top of the church hierarchy in recent years. Many Catholics – from the liberals to the arch-conservatives – will never feel the same way they once did about this institution, nor should we. The church in Ireland is in tatters, attendance cratering and vocations collapsing. Yes: Ireland. This is a function not just of the abuse crisis, but it has played a central role. We just found out that the current primate, Cardinal Sean Brady,

as a priest in 1975 … was at meetings where children signed vows of silence over complaints against pedophile priest Fr Brendan Smyth.

Brady refuses point-blank to resign:

The leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, Cardinal Sean Brady, said this week that he will only resign if he's personally asked to by the Pope. In Ireland increasing calls for his resignation have come amid allegations that he attended meetings were children were asked to sign vows of silence over the abuse they had suffered.

But if the Pope asked Brady to resign, wouldn't he also have to ask himself to resign? After all, the Pope was part of a similar cover-up in Germany in which then-cardinal Ratzinger knowingly assigned a pedophile priest to therapy, without informing the authorities that he knew that the priest had forced an eleven year old boy to fellate him, and then allowed that priest to continue in his career, with his finally being convicted of more child abuse six years later. He was only removed from pastoral duties a few days ago.

The current moral authority for all Catholics personally put the interests of the hierarchy above the welfare of vulnerable children. He heard a case of a priest forcing an eleven-year-old to perform oral sex on him, and he did not take that priest to the police, as he should have, or removed him from his duties immediately. He sent him to therapy and allowed him to continue molesting children in future parishes, and never informed the parents of the priest's past. Would you have done that? Would anyone you know have done that? Would anyone you know who had done that be able to sleep at night?

I don't know of many things I find as repugnant as knowingly putting the interests of an institution's public relations before children's protection from molestation. Yet this is the Pope we have. This is the moral judgment he made.

How can anyone retain confidence in that figurehead? How can any orthodox Catholic not find this repugnant? And what has the Pope done since this has been revealed? He has said nothing, and put out a p.r. campaign to accuse critics in Germany of being anti-Catholic.

In Mexico and beyond. the last Pope and this allowed a serial molester and cult-leader, Marcial Maciel, continue his predatory habits for decades, and postponed any serious investigation until it was too late. His theoconservative allies in America defended Maciel for years. Late theocon-in-chief, Richard John Neuhaus, attacked those investigating the abuse allegations and declared that it was "a moral certainty" that Maciel was innocent of all charges. Now, in Brazil, another dam is breaking. This new story beggars belief:

Brazilian authorities are investigating three priests accused of sexually abusing altar boys after a video allegedly showing one case of abuse was broadcast on television, police and church officials said Tuesday.

The case came to light after the SBT network aired a video purportedly showing an 82-year-old priest having sex with a 19-year-old altar boy who worked for him for four years. Other young men appeared on the report saying that they, too, had been abused by Monsignor Luiz Marques Barbosa.

Also under investigation are Monsignor Raimundo Gomes, 52, and Father Edilson Duarte, 43, for allegedly having sexual relations with boys and young men…

In its report last week, SBT showed footage of a man who looks like Barbosa having sex with the 19-year-old. It said the footage was secretly filmed in January 2009 by a 21-year-old man who charges Barbosa had abused him since age 12.

But here's what remains staggering:

An SBT reporter visited Barbosa's house to conduct an interview and confront him with the allegations.

Before raising the allegations of sexual abuse, the reporter asks if the priest had ever sinned.

"Who has never committed a sin?" Barbosa responds.

The priest is then asked if the region has problems with pedophilia.

"I think it is more (a problem) of homosexuality than pedophilia," Barbosa says.

Asked directly if he ever abused boys, Barbosa says he could only answer such a question "in confession."

How much more do we have to see, how much more damage has to be done to human beings, before the hierarchy cones to terms with its denial about homosexuality, its warped psyche on sexuality, the brutal consequences of its celibacy requirements … and the total iniquity of allowing children and teens in your care, entrusted to men of God, to be raped and abused and molested with impunity for years? 

When will this Pope step down?

(Photo: Pope Benedict XVI waves through a car window at the end of his visit to Rome's Lutheran church, on March 14, 2010. The Vatican fought attempts to link Pope Benedict XVI to child sex abuse in a counteroffensive on Saturday against widening paedophilia scandals. By Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty Images.)

One vote at a time.

Brookings' Ben Wildavsky cautions against throwing out the baby with the bathwater:

Ravitch sprinkles a range of “to be sures” throughout the book–yes, testing can be useful if it isn’t relied upon for onerous accountability penalties; yes, some charter schools have been remarkably successful–but she still rejects practically the entire enterprise of test-based accountability and choice. Instead, she says she'd like to see “a substantive national curriculum” covering the full range of subjects. But, while “end it, don’t mend it” seems to be Ravitch’s approach to the reform consensus, couldn’t one take the opposite tack and try to improve today’s top-down and bottom-up strategies rather than abandon them altogether?

Like other critics of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), Ravitch overstates the extent to which test prep crowds out all other subjects, even in the troubled urban schools whose students are furthest behind. Even if core skills do receive disproportionate attention at disadvantaged schools, one can make the case that this isn’t crazy: Ravitch herself acknowledges that reading, writing, and math are the building blocks for all other learning. Surely it would be possible to come up with an accountability regime that makes sure kids know the basics, exposes them to a broader range of subjects, and improves on the NCLB model, including removing perverse incentives for states to dumb down their standards.

Ravitch replies to Wildavsky.

Johann Hari again goes into the wilderness to find darkness:

Nurame was in her bed when she was woken by an angry mêlée. In her family's hut there were grown men – an incredible number, 10 or more, all in their 30s, all standing over her father, shouting. They reached for her. At night here, where there is no electricity, perfect darkness falls, and everything becomes a shadow-play of barely visible flickers. But even though she was eight years old, she suspected at once what was happening. She had heard whispers that, when a girl is considered ready for marriage, a man will seize her, and rape her, and then she must serve him for the rest of her life. "That was the culture," she says. But it wasn't her culture: like all the other little girls, she didn't want it. "I started screaming and tried to run out of the hut," she says. "I hid in the trees – hah! – but one of the men found me."

She was taken back to his home, held down in front of his family, raped, and taken to be married the next morning. Dazed, she signed the papers, and waited for a moment when she could flee.

Seattle, Washington, 8.30 am

Juan Cole defends it and attacks Goldblog. Jeffrey fires back. Ackerman's take here.

The man with the fax machine has declared that Petraeus' recent comments on Israel "[smack] of blaming the Jews for everything.” Yglesias yawns. Meanwhile, back on planet earth, Josh Marshall highlights the unavoidable truths Petraeus said in his prepared remarks to Congress this week:

The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR [CentCom Area of Responsibility]. Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas.

Josh comments:

In a sense, all of this is no more than commonsense, a given in many conversations about the US position in the world, especially in the arc of Muslim majority nations from the eastern Mediterranean to Indonesia. The continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict directly harms the vital interests of the United States. But if this is the consensus view at the highest levels of the US military, that's a very different world we're living in than the one we've been in heretofore.

What remains to be seen is whether this is a statement not to be acted upon or a strategic analysis that will inform Pentagon policy.

Reality is meeting a lobby. In Washington, that usually means the lobby wins. But this time, we are at war and America's vital interests are at stake. This will be a struggle – but that there is a struggle at all is progress in a way. I'd be more worried if no sparks were flying.