Flexible Reality
Thursday, January 15, 2004
Don't Buy Me Wal-Mart for the Holidays
Note: An online petition to address Wal-Mart's business practices. Now if we could just get the authors of the petition to clean up their grammar.
"I pledge not to shop at Wal-Mart. And I promise to tell all my friends, "Don't buy me Wal-Mart for the holidays!""
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Bounding the Global War on Terrorism
Strategic Studies Institute/U.S. Army War College
Dr. Jeffrey Record
December 2003
The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
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SUMMARY
The author examines three features of the war on terrorism as currently defined and conducted: (1) the administration's postulation of the terrorist threat, (2) the scope and feasibility of U.S. war aims, and (3) the war's political, fiscal, and military sustainability. He believes that the war on terrorism--as opposed to the campaign against al-Qaeda--lacks strategic clarity, embraces unrealistic objectives, and may not be sustainable over the long haul. He calls for downsizing the scope of the war on terrorism to reflect concrete U.S. security interests and the limits of American military power.
The Awful Truth
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times
Published: January 13, 2004
People are saying terrible things about George Bush. They say that his officials weren't sincere about pledges to balance the budget. They say that the planning for an invasion of Iraq began seven months before 9/11, that there was never any good evidence that Iraq was a threat and that the war actually undermined the fight against terrorism.
But these irrational Bush haters are body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freaks who should go back where they came from: the executive offices of Alcoa, and the halls of the Army War College.
I was one of the few commentators who didn't celebrate Paul O'Neill's appointment as Treasury secretary. And I couldn't understand why, if Mr. O'Neill was the principled man his friends described, he didn't resign early from an administration that was clearly anything but honest.
But now he's showing the courage I missed back then, by giving us an invaluable, scathing insider's picture of the Bush administration.
Ron Suskind's new book "The Price of Loyalty" is based largely on interviews with and materials supplied by Mr. O'Neill. It portrays an administration in which political considerations — satisfying "the base" — trump policy analysis on every issue, from tax cuts to international trade policy and global warming. The money quote may be Dick Cheney's blithe declaration that "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." But there are many other revelations.
One is that Mr. O'Neill and Alan Greenspan knew that it was a mistake to lock in huge tax cuts based on questionable projections of future surpluses. In May 2001 Mr. Greenspan gloomily told Mr. O'Neill that because the first Bush tax cut didn't include triggers — it went forward regardless of how the budget turned out — it was "irresponsible fiscal policy." This was a time when critics of the tax cut were ridiculed for saying exactly the same thing.
Another is that Mr. Bush, who declared in the 2000 campaign that "the vast majority of my tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum," knew that this wasn't true. He worried that eliminating taxes on dividends would benefit only "top-rate people," asking his advisers, "Didn't we already give them a break at the top?"
Most startling of all, Donald Rumsfeld pushed the idea of regime change in Iraq as a way to transform the Middle East at a National Security Council meeting in February 2001.
There's much more in Mr. Suskind's book. All of it will dismay those who still want to believe that our leaders are wise and good. The question is whether this book will open the eyes of those who think that anyone who criticizes the tax cuts is a wild-eyed leftist, and that anyone who says the administration hyped the threat from Iraq is a conspiracy theorist.
The point is that the credentials of the critics just keep getting better. How can Howard Dean's assertion that the capture of Saddam hasn't made us safer be dismissed as bizarre, when a report published by the Army War College says that the war in Iraq was a "detour" that undermined the fight against terror? How can charges by Wesley Clark and others that the administration was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq be dismissed as paranoid in the light of Mr. O'Neill's revelations?
So far administration officials have attacked Mr. O'Neill's character but haven't refuted any of his facts. They have, however, already opened an investigation into how a picture of a possibly classified document appeared during Mr. O'Neill's TV interview. This alacrity stands in sharp contrast with their evident lack of concern when a senior administration official, still unknown, blew the cover of a C.I.A. operative because her husband had revealed some politically inconvenient facts.
Some will say that none of this matters because Saddam is in custody, and the economy is growing. Even in the short run, however, these successes may not be all they're cracked up to be. More Americans were killed and wounded in the four weeks after Saddam's capture than in the four weeks before. The drop in the unemployment rate since its peak last summer doesn't reflect a greater availability of jobs, but rather a decline in the share of the population that is even looking for work.
More important, having a few months of good news doesn't excuse a consistent pattern of dishonest, irresponsible leadership. And that pattern keeps getting harder to deny.
Draft may be needed to rein in all-powerful military
Separate society squelches debate on national policy
By Diane H. Mazur
Chicago Tribune: Dec. 28th, 2003
Diane H. Mazur is a professor of law at the University of Florida and a former aircraft and munitions maintenance officer in the Air Force.
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When we lost the draft a generation ago, we lost a lot. We lost the ability to have a meaningful discussion about anything that involves the military. The Pentagon has begun significant call-ups for the next major rotation of troops in Iraq, but it has no realistic plan for covering our military and domestic security commitments without exhausting our reserve forces.
Yet we give no serious attention to a bill introduced almost a year ago by Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) to reactivate the draft. Any suggestion to reconsider the military status quo is met with a charge of not "supporting the troops." The military has become the new third rail of politics, scaring off anyone who dares to have an original thought about our armed forces.
Even Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark, a former Army general, tiptoed around the military when he proposed a new national reserve corps. His volunteers, he assured us, would be civilians, second-class defenders, even those assigned overseas.
How did this happen?
The Supreme Court is largely to blame for the decline in our civil-military relations. In 1974, a year after the draft was ended, the court discarded a legal tradition going back to the Civil War by which the military was expected to share the same constitutional values as the rest of us.
Of course, the Supreme Court didn't end the draft--Congress did. But the court took advantage of the draft's end to play games with civil-military relations, making changes it couldn't have gotten away with had the draft remained in place.
In a series of cases from 1974 to 1986, Parker vs. Levy, Rostker vs. Goldberg and Goldman vs. Weinberger, now-Chief Justice William Rehnquist designed a new legal doctrine requiring courts to defer to executive or congressional choices on military matters.
Military decisions no longer needed to be justified, or even explained, Rehnquist ruled, because the military was "a society apart" from America. The military was better than America, so it was exempt from the constitutional strictures that limit abuses of power in every other part of government.
Constitutional immunity is a dangerous intoxicant, particularly in a time of heated, partisan disagreement over how the Constitution should be interpreted. That intoxicant is particularly powerful when it gives the government an opening to disregard constitutional values of equality.
Rostker vs. Goldberg, for example, upheld Congress' power to bar women from even registering for a future draft, although all young men are required to register. In any other context, the court would have demanded that Congress justify why the registration of women would have hurt military effectiveness.
Under the new doctrine of deference on military issues, however, Congress got a free pass. It was allowed to exclude women just because it believed that the military was not the proper place for them.
Goldman vs. Weinberger was much the same. In that case, an Air Force psychologist who also was an Orthodox Jew was punished for wearing a yarmulke indoors while in uniform. Just as Congress did not have to give equal respect and dignity to women in military matters, the military did not have to give equal respect and dignity to members of minority religions.
The 1st Amendment normally would require the government to give a good reason why Capt. S. Simcha Goldman's yarmulke interfered with military effectiveness. Instead, the deference doctrine allowed the military to ignore the Constitution and assert, without evidence, that it was a big problem if Air Force personnel did not all look the same. (This from a military that permits more different kinds of "uniform" headgear than one can count.)
There is absolutely no basis in the Constitution for the idea that the military is a constitutionally separate society. But the Supreme Court drove the military in that direction and caused lasting damage. Together with the demise of the draft, which ended the natural exchange of experience between the military and civilian worlds, the court's rulings increased the distance between civilians and military people. The military increasingly viewed itself as separate, distant, morally superior and exempt from constitutional expectations of equality.
That separatist mind-set changed the mix of those who joined the military. Without the leavening effect of the draft, we lost an ideologically and politically diverse military. It was no coincidence that the all-volunteer era saw the military discard its traditional professional ethic of political neutrality, openly aligning with the Republican Party.
Conveniently, policy positions taken by the GOP dovetailed neatly with a military that was allowed to operate outside the Constitution. Congress openly relied on the military's constitutional immunity in 1993 when it enacted "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," which allowed the armed forces to continue keeping openly gay citizens from serving in our defense.
Just after the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court wrote in Greer vs. Spock that civilian control of the military could not be strong unless the military avoided "both the reality and the appearance of acting as a handmaiden for partisan political causes." (No one seemed to remember that admonition during the 2000 presidential campaign and its absentee-ballot aftermath.)
The court once understood that civil-military relations suffer when the military ties its fortunes to political and ideological partisanship. It no longer understands that.
Why doesn't anyone ever talk about how much our military has changed? Or about how weak our civil-military relations have become, preventing honest discussion of matters important to the military and to national security? It is because, with the help of the Supreme Court, we have come to view military concerns as being, for most of us, none of our business.
When military service no longer is seen as a shared obligation, civilian America is reluctant, and maybe a little embarrassed, to offer a voice on matters of military concern. We need to talk about how we choose who serves in our military and who carries the obligation for our shared defense.
When we lost the draft, we lost the strong sense of civilian control of the military that came from citizens who had the knowledge and the willingness to engage in serious debate on military issues. We admire the military more than any other public institution, but our admiration is an empty patriotism.
A true constitutional patriotism is found in a civilian society that has a connection with military service strong enough to enable its citizens to contribute to the constitutional responsibility of civilian control.
We need to return to a time in which all parts of society--liberal and conservative, privileged and unprivileged--feel they have a voice in how our military is built and how it is used. Civilian control of the military is weak when political partisanship interferes with that discussion.
We will never achieve the patriotism conceived by our Constitution with an all-volunteer force alienated from civilian society, especially when the military is the only part of America asked to sacrifice in its defense.
This op-ed appeared in The Chicago Tribune Dec. 28. A shorter version also appeared in New York Newsday Jan. 2. The piece also ran in The Detroit News on Jan. 6 and The Stars & Stripes on Jan. 7.
Monday, January 12, 2004
From Greenleap Online
Jan. 12, 2004
Scientists Find Water Produces Raw Electricity...
This week researchers at the University of Alberta, Canada reported the discovery of a clean way to generate electricity. The new process works on the fact that energy is created when a flowing liquid meets a solid surface. Scientists involved were able to power a small light bulb by squeezing a syringe of tap water through a glass tube fitted with microscopic-sized holes. As the water passed through the tiny holes of the glass tube, it became both positively and negatively charged. By harnessing those distinct charges, the scientists were then able to refine the energy into electricity. If tested further and proven practical, the new method of "clean" electrical generation could eventually be used in place of batteries that power such devices as mobile phones, cars and just about anything else.
