Feb 9, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
Reports the Associated Press,
The U.N. chief weapons inspectors emerged from key talks with Iraq officials Sunday, saying they saw signs of a "change of heart" from Baghdad over disarmament demands and that further U.N. inspections were preferable to a quick U.S.-led military strike.
In two days of meetings with Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, Iraq officials handed over documents on anthrax, VX nerve gas and missile development....
Both Blix and ElBaradei avoided saying they were convinced Iraq now was ready to cooperate fully with the inspection program. Blix quipped that the "proof is in the pudding...."
And Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose country holds veto powers on the council--reiterated his strong opposition to military action against Baghdad.
"We are convinced that efforts for a peaceful resolution of the situation regarding Iraq should be persistently continued," Putin told journalists after talks with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in Berlin.
Putin also rejected U.S. goals of a "regime change" in Iraq. "The task of reckoning with Saddam Hussein does not stand before us," Putin said in an interview with France-3 television, part of which was aired on Russian television Sunday. "There is nothing in the U.N. Charter that would allow the U.N. Security Council to make a decision to change the political regime of one country or another -- whether we like that regime or not."
To such mentalities, a threat isn't real unless it has already been carried out, and effects can be obtained without addressing the causes. It's as if the police were arguing about apprehending a known criminal because "there wasn't enough evidence" that he would use his cache of automatic weapons--with the Russian position being tantamount to saying that at the utmost we might disarm the criminal, but on no account arrest him.
The agent's criminal nature is all the evidence that is needed to establish a threat and to warrant action. For those who say, "What evidence do you have that Saddam will use these weapons or pass them on to terrorism?" The response is: Such evidence is unnecessary and irrelevant. We had enough evidence long ago to prove he posed a threat. The only thing delay does is encourage this kind of irresponsible temporizing.Feb 8, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
From the Daily Tar Heel, [1/22/03]:
Protesters settled in front of Democratic U.S. Sen. John Edwards' Raleigh office Tuesday awaiting arrest for their efforts to make a statement that the senator has not gone far enough to oppose war with Iraq. But despite the fact that protesters were breaking the law by blocking an entrance into a government building, the police on site chose not to intervene. Three participating UNC students, Anna Carson-Dewitt and Sascha Bollag, both freshmen, and senior Scott O'Day, said they were disappointed when the police refused to arrest them. All three have prior arrests for civil disobedience. O'Day said the police response undermined the protest. "I am disappointed that the police de-escalated the situation to the point that we were not able to continue with the protest," he said. "We were more or less sure that we would be arrested, but the police weren't cooperating...." "If one action does not provoke arrest, we will step it up and step it up until we provoke arrest."
Civil disobedience means disobeying an unjust law to protest its injustice, and being willing to go to jail for it. But there is nothing unjust about laws against blocking entrance into buildings. These little thugs want to violate people's rights and then dress themselves up in the mantle of martyrdom by getting themselves arrested. But since the nature of this con is now clear to everyone, their arrests would gain them no moral respect from anyone who isn't stupid or dishonest. The police should just go ahead, and the law should impose punishment that would actually discourage such behavior.Feb 7, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
I sent the following letter to the New York Sun last weekend, in response to Michael Kinsley's column (from Slate.com) accusing George Bush of being "morally unserious" and confused in his State of the Union address. The Sun did not print the letter.
To the Editor:
As much as Michael Kinsley wants to show off how clever he is at George Bush's expense, it is Kinsley who is confused. That Saddam Hussein's regime is evil, maintaining itself by terror and repression, means that it has no claim to represent its people, no legitimacy, and no right to exist. Ethically, Saddam's "sovereignty" means nothing; it is morally permissible for any free country to topple him by force.
But we are not obliged to go to war merely because it is morally permissible to do so. Morality, properly conceived, is not a means of sacrificing our interests but a system of principles for upholding them. The need for us to take out Saddam Hussein arises not out of altruistic concern for Iraqis but out of the threat he poses to us. In this regard the president's position is moral, coherent and correct.
Feb 6, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
From the New York Sun, 2/5/03:
The five top men in power in Iran today--Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei; the president of the assembly on the discretion of the state, Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani; the head of the judiciary, Mohammad Hashemi Shahroudi; the secretary of the guardians council, Ayatollah Ahmad Janati, and President Mohammad Khatami--[have] occupied the highest positions in government for the past 24 years.
They held high positions when the American Embassy was taken over in Tehran in 1979 and 52 Americans were held hostage for 400 days; they held high positions when the American and French Embassies were attacked in Kuwait City in 1983, killing and wounding 91; they held high positions when a suicide bomb attack killed 49 and injured 120 at the American Embassy in Beirut that same year; they held high positions when 241 Americans and 56 French were killed at the American Marine base and French military barracks in Beirut in 1983; they held high positions when 16 Americans and seven others were killed as a result of a car bomb explosion next to the American Embassy annex in Beirut in 1984; they held high positions when in 1985 and 1986 a Kuwait Air flight, two TWA flights, and a Pan Am flight were hijacked in the Middle East, resulting in the death of 28 people, and they held high positions when the truck bomb explosion took place at the Khobar Towers, killing 19 American servicemen in 1996.
All of the above terrorist attacks were carried out at the instigation of Tehran's ruling mullahs....
Since the 1980s the mullah regime has sought to acquire long-range missiles and weapons of mass destruction. These include chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.... Today, North Koreans, Russians, and nuclear scientists and aeronautic engineers from other Eastern European and Central Asian countries are hard at work in Iran to make this dream come true....
The clerics are known to have executed over 120,000. According to Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, they executed 3,000 people in one night in 1988....
Today, more than 60% of Iranians live below the poverty line. Annual per capita income stands at $1,200.00. In 1978 it stood at $2,400.
The author of the column, Monouchehr Ganji, is founder and secretary-general of the Flag of Freedom Organization of Iran and author of Defying the Iranian Revolution.Feb 5, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
Writes John Diaz, in the San Francisco Chronicle, (2/4/03):
Several readers have called or written to complain about the selection of letters we have printed about the space shuttle Columbia tragedy.
Where, they asked, was the universal outpouring of grief for the seven brave astronauts and their families? Why were so many of the letters tinged with gratuitous bitterness toward President Bush or otherwise infused with cynicism or conspiracy theories?
Frankly, my colleagues and I were asking the same questions Saturday as we sorted through the several dozen e-mails and faxes that came in after the disastrous breakup of the shuttle on its final descent home....
Even more startling was the cynical, even hateful, tone of many of the letters. The outtakes were considerably harsher and more jaded than the selection we printed....
Perhaps it is idealistic to assume that a tragedy would prompt us to draw on our common humanity, rather than to trigger unprovoked animus based on racial, national or political differences. And these were not anonymous tirades. The above e-mails were sent for publication, with names, addresses and phone numbers.
This week I myself met a teenager who asked, "What's so special about the Space Shuttle disaster? If seven people had died in Africa nobody would be concerned about them."
I eventually realized the underlying egalitarian premise, telling her: "The difference is that we care more about some people than others." We don't rejoice in the death of seven Africans; but the Shuttle astronauts were engaged in an endeavor that is important to those of us who care about human achievement. It's not true that we should care about everyone equally; the idea that we should is yet another ugly consequence of the corrupt ethics of altruism.Feb 5, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
A perfect example of why the International Criminal Court represents an injustice and should be repudiated. The headline is, "Blair faces war crimes trial after Iraq war":
A group of lawyers aims to prosecute Prime Minister Tony Blair for war crimes at the new International Criminal Court (ICC) if an Iraqi war goes ahead....
"There is a 100 percent certainty that Blair will be investigated by the ICC for war crimes if he attacks Iraq," said Phil Shiner of the Public Interest Lawyers firm in Birmingham....
"The ICC brings a new international context to war -- Blair now has to consider his individual accountability...."
The United States fiercely opposes the ICC, saying it would infringe U.S. sovereignty, but Britain has ratified its treaty and would have to give up any citizen the court wanted to try.
Nicholas Grief of Bournemouth University, who specialises in international law, said November's U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 on Iraq did not authorise the use of force.
He said the resolution used the term "serious consequences" if Iraq did not comply with weapons inspectors, and not "use all necessary means", which has previously been used as a diplomatic code for authorising military force.... [Reuters, 2/5/03]
