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Closing
the Case For weeks, both supporters and opponents of war with Iraq have urged that the administration "make the case" for the military action it is presumed to favor. From the opponents, the demand was mostly disingenuous: No case can be made that would win their support. But supporters reckoned that the administration was unwise to sit out the debate that it had spawned by talking about "regime change." By signaling that he was unsure of what he wanted to do, President Bush had given opponents of war — abroad, in Congress, and within his own administration — an incentive to hold out and, indeed, to lobby against a war. Public support for war with Iraq, as measured in polls, has fallen over the course of the year (although a small majority still favors it). In late August, the administration entered the debate in a substantial way. Vice President Cheney made a speech claiming that Saddam Hussein is intent on developing deliverable weapons of mass destruction and that he might be close to achieving that goal. He echoed the president's contention that "time is not on our side." Cheney argued, against some critics, that it would be irresponsible to wait until the regime had those weapons before moving against it. It was not enough, he said, to insist on the Iraqis' compliance with weapons inspections. They had worked around such inspections before. ("We often learned more as the result of defections than from the inspection regime," Cheney noted, and Saddam tested missiles "almost literally under the noses of the U.N. inspectors.") War against Iraq is necessary to avert grave dangers, he argued; but it would also yield great opportunities. American victory in the war would increase our standing in the region generally: "Moderates throughout the region would take heart. And our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced, just as it was following the liberation of Kuwait in 1991." A liberated Iraq would undermine tyranny throughout the Arab world. Although Cheney was too politic to say it himself, the Saudis, the Egyptians, and the Jordanians would also have greater reason to fear the United States and would adjust their behavior accordingly. Cheney makes a strong case. He will have to keep making it — and he will have to be joined by the president himself. If Bush asks for congressional support, he is likely to get it. We should, of course, also seek the support of our European allies. The administration should make it clear that its most serious consultations will be with those countries that are willing to commit troops to the battle. If we show that we are willing to act without them, they will face the prospect of being shown — to themselves, to us, and to others — to be superfluous: unable to block American action and unnecessary for its success. Above all, we should move quickly. "Time is not on our side" is one way of putting it; President Lincoln put it another way, when he warned General McClellan: "Your enemies will probably use time as advantageously as you can.".
Lesson
Plans The National Education Association is under fire for its advice to teachers on how to spend the anniversary of September 11. The critics say that the NEA's lesson plans are too relativistic and insufficiently patriotic. Students would hear a lot about "intolerance": the need to avoid it, America's shameful history of same. The critics would like students to learn more about America's virtues and about our enemies' deadly intolerance. The critics both overstate and understate their indictment. The NEA compiled a list of lesson plans, many of them developed by others: the American Red Cross, the National Association of School Psychologists, PBS. There is not a lot of blame-America stuff in the plans. There are, indeed, links to America's founding documents. Overall, the mood is mildly adversarial toward Americans, who are assumed to be constantly on the verge of committing ethnic pogroms. But this assumption is now widespread among Americans who sincerely regard themselves as patriots. In any case, the focus of the lesson plans is less social than psychological. Students would be asked to talk a lot about feelings: their own feelings, their fellow students' feelings, and their feelings about their feelings. They would be told that it's okay to feel a variety of emotions and not to judge others. If they are in grades 6 through 12, they may be asked to perform a group exercise called "Remember to Laugh." What the critics have uncovered, in other words, is not the NEA's lack of patriotism. It is modern liberal culture's shallowness. For that culture, September 11 cannot be understood as an historical event. History is consulted only to the extent that it teaches us that people in previous eras have had feelings of grief and anger after disasters, too, and that these feelings have been expressed in more and less healthy ways. The history of the Middle East is not mentioned anywhere. Islam is a source of "diversity," and the only thing students need know about Muslims is that they are not all alike. These have been the culture's lesson plans for adults as well as schoolchildren. The media will, on September 11, talk more about heroes and losses than about terrorism. Our elected leaders have discouraged any deeper engagement with Islam than the NEA recommends. In one of the NEA's links, the school psychologists warn that "[i]ntensive,
detailed coverage of the attacks, the terrorists, and/or the threat of
future attacks can raise children's anxiety levels." Understanding
that we have enemies that mean to do us harm can raise adults' anxiety
levels, too, and should. Tolerance, diversity, and psychological well-being
are all fine things if they are rightly understood. But a country needs
other things to defend itself: things like courage, confidence, endurance,
manliness, intelligence. Neither our school curricula nor our public culture
is designed to cultivate those qualities. We need better lessons, and
not from the NEA.
One
Year Later September 11 aroused Americans from a deep coma induced by a long and luxurious calm. On the anniversary of the attack, we should take stock of just how much the world has changed — before we decide upon the nature and means of commemoration. Almost all the assumptions about human nature that were staples of our schools and academic culture have been exploded, and we have returned, sobered, to a more tragic than therapeutic understanding of the human condition. A half-century of American policy in the Middle East has been found wanting, as we keep 5,000 troops defending a Saudi regime that subsidizes a deadly anti-Americanism. "Allies" in Europe turn out to be merely fair-weather friends who in times of war triangulate and equi vocate. Yet amid this depressing chaos remains the startling American response to the catastrophe of 9/11 — the passengers' heroics on the fourth doomed jetliner, the bravery of the New York firemen and police, the Herculean efforts to clear away in less than a year the debris from the World Trade Center site, and to repair the Pentagon. In early October, the world was talking of the Afghan winter and its warlord culture as the graveyard of foreign armies; by December, the burqas were off and the terrorist thugs in hiding or dead — with a legitimate government in their place. Thousands of Americans in full mobilization across the globe and here at home have thwarted terrorists. All that is something to reflect upon this September 11. More formally, how can we commemorate our losses? How can we do so in a manner that expresses not merely sorrow, but our resolution that the lives and memory of the dead will not be forgotten? Our schools, of course, will set aside periods for thought and discussion. But we must hope that such sessions will avoid the politically correct "Why did they do this to us?" hand-wringing that will undermine the solemnity of the occasion and deflect blame from the killers to the innocent. There are 364 days in the year to instruct our children in the beauties of diversity, the mystery of the Koran, collective guilt for the sins of humanity, and pacifism. September 11 is not one of them. Teachers need not be bellicose or chauvinistic in leading discussions on the unique culture and history of the United States, or in reminding students that those who killed our fellow Americans came from societies where there are no free citizens, no open elections, no independent courts, and no equality for women. Nor were they poor or uneducated — leaving us with the unsettling truth that evil can arise from causes other than ignorance and deprivation. It might be wise also to reflect on the fact that a free society is not immune to the attentions of retrograde forces such as superstition, tribalism, and the like. If anything, we have learned that our affluence, hospitality, and liberality were magnets to the killers, whose hatred and sense of frustration grew in proportion to their own desires to travel, be schooled, and enjoy the West. Students should be reminded that, if we had no real armed forces — or if we had reduced our military to the levels of Europe — the Taliban would still be in power, al-Qaeda would freely be planning more destruction, and hostile regimes would be providing terrorists with havens, all without worry over American force. There are probably already too many national holidays, but we should commemorate September 11 for what it was: the worst attack on American citizens on their home soil ever — and a turning point in our national life. The attack was worse than Pearl Harbor, not merely because of the toll of 3,000 dead, but because it struck so unexpectedly at innocent civilians in our major cities, without signs of conventional military tension. In response, on the morning of September 11, 2002, the country should stop all public activities and observe an official period of silence, the first of a yearly institutionalized hour of remembrance. Numbers and dates carry symbolic weight, which is why battle leaders have often looked to the calendar to find historical resonance — the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month ended World War I; the 100th hour marked the close of the Gulf War. We should choose the eleventh of any of the upcoming months as the proper date to settle with Iraq, thereby reminding the world that the consequences of murder by terrorists are not confined to a few ragtag thugs, but must be borne by regimes that fund such killers and are themselves terror states. With this in mind, the plans for rebuilding the World Trade Center site should be unveiled on the one-year anniversary of the disaster, with promises of a completion date of, say, September 11, 2004. One hopes for a majestic and iconic building as tall as the collapsed towers, not so much out of brashness, but out of a sense of place and history. A single obelisk-shaped tower might convey the idea that the two fallen buildings are now one in our memory and emphasize that they rose and fell together. The names of the dead, together with an enormous bas-relief portraying the past World Trade Center in its last hours as firemen made their way up the stairs, could, like the Elgin Marbles, lead all around the base of the building. The nation needs some unifying national symbol of both our loss and our will to resist. I suggest the creation of a new national cemetery in the Washington area. Arlington National Cem etery is facing serious space problems, and is a resting place for veterans. Why not a similar national memorial park for all American heroes — dedicated to the memory of the 9/11 fatalities — with a central tomb commemorating those who perished during the attack? Such a cemetery would not be confined to military personnel, but would serve as a cemetery for Americans with distinguished government service, as well as reporters and civilians who died as a result of the hatred of our national enemies. Some of the great ideas of Western civilization have been articulated in funeral speeches — what the Greeks called epitaphioi, or words spoken over the dead as summations of national culture. From Pericles' Funeral Oration to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, leaders have sought to make sense of the loss of life by reflecting upon the larger culture of which the fallen were part. What could President Bush possibly say in a few words that has been left unsaid in some 2,500 years of Western warring and sacrifice? He could remind us that we must not be blinded by the chaff of modernity — the professions of utopian internationalists, the shrill demand for absolute moral perfection, and the trust in cultural relativism and moral equivalence. We should not cower before the charges levied by enemies and friends alike of "unilateralism" and "exceptionalism," because, in fact, the promotion of freedom and equality is often lonely and exceptional — and so we must wear those intended slurs as badges of honor. Finally, the president should connect our present strivings with those of our past, explaining to Americans that the freedom we enjoy was won with the blood of our ancestors and can be protected only through occasional sacrifice on our part. To fail to do so would be to break faith with all those who died in the filth of Shiloh, Okinawa, and Korea. In some sense, our present task is harder than that of our forefathers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when poverty, early death, and physical ordeal were daily reminders of the fragility of the human condition. Appreciation of America's unique greatness came more easily to the families of immigrants and settlers than it does to disconnected suburbanites and office workers. The former felt lucky to wake up in a land where there was food, freedom, and security — blessings the latter take for granted. For all of our wealth and prosperity, for all of the unfathomable military might that resides in the Pentagon, and for all of the technological know-how that provides our citizens high up in the sky at work with cell phones and instantaneous worldwide communication, we remain, alas, frail human beings. As we saw on September 11, our aspirations can be snuffed out in a second by modern incarnations of our age-old adversaries whose essence remains barbarous and cruel. The only constant, then, in our brief corporal existence is our commitment to values that transcend our materially rich but nevertheless finite lives. And if we are to pass on the civilization that we have inherited, we must remain immune to the sophistry that is the present twin of affluence. The ghastliness of September 11 must somehow provide the spark for a new burst of American faith in consensual government and freedom, both here and abroad. The dead must not have left us in vain.
Do
Christians Bleed? An Indonesian man with a lined, anxious face hands me a photograph from a magazine report on events in his homeland. I am looking at a photograph of the burned and decapitated corpse of a Christian man who was murdered in a Christmas Eve pogrom in his village. His killers were members of Laskar Jihad, a heavily armed Islamist terror group. "They cut off his genitals too," the Indonesian man explains. "He died at his church." My informant, a Christian human-rights activist who refused to be identified, in order to protect his family, has photographs of Christian villages burned to the ground by Laskar Jihad. Numerous sources say the group has killed as many as 10,000 Indonesian Christians, forcibly converted thousands more, and demolished hundreds of churches. Activists say the Jakarta regime has only sporadically shown an interest in protecting the nation's Chris tian minority, and some accuse elements of the government and military of sympathy with the jihadists. "I was in Indonesia when 9/11 happened, and I followed the statements of Muslim political leaders," says my informant. "They were encouraging Muslims to help Osama bin Laden. I was crying in my heart for New York, but I'm telling you, 9/11 happened once in New York, but it's happening every day to Christian villages in Indo nesia." Ann Buwalda, head of the Washington-based Jubilee Campaign USA, an international human-rights organization, says that between 50,000 and 60,000 Christians are now concentrated in the Tentena region, disarmed and surrounded by Laskar Jihad encampments. The besieged Christian community spent August awaiting a jihad assault rumored to be coming any day. Says Buwalda, "In the event that the government continues to do nothing against Laskar Jihad, these Christians will be slaughtered." Indonesian Christians are not alone in suffering under this barbarism. Minority Christian populations through out the Islamic world endure persecution in varying degrees. From southeast Asia through Arab lands and into northern Africa, Christians and believers in other minority religions live with degradation, discrimination, and worse. By consensus, Sudan continues to be the worst of a bad lot. The Arab Islamic government in the north continues its genocidal war upon the black Christians and animists in the south. Freedom House, the venerable human-rights organization, estimates that in the past 17 years, two million Chris tians and animists have been slaughtered by the Islamist regime, with over twice that number turned into refugees. Churches continue to be bombed, women and children raped, and non-Muslims kidnapped and forced into slavery. Nigeria has been in the news lately because an Islamic court in the country's north sentenced to death by stoning a woman who gave birth out of wedlock; she will be executed when she weans her baby, the jurists decided. Pakistan, which has been home to a small Christian population for almost as long as there have been Christians, has been the site of grisly anti-Christian pogroms. In Saudi Arabia, foreigners are deported for practicing Christianity, and Saudi Christians, if caught, are beheaded. Even Egypt treats its Coptic Chris tian minority as second-class citizens, and is rather less than vigilant about protecting them from attack by Islamic extremists. The Copts dare not complain, figuring they're better off living under the regime of president-for-life Hosni Mubarak than under the extremist Muslim Brotherhood. It's a humiliating choice, but it guarantees their survival, for now. Paul Marshall, senior fellow at Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom, says violent Islamic persecution of Christians is a relatively recent phenomenon. He blames it on the rise of extremist Islam of the sort bankrolled by the Saudis, which gained a foothold in many of these countries as European colonizers withdrew. "Ano ther factor is that the previous secular gods — socialism and Arab nationalism — have failed," says Marshall, author of the forthcoming Islam at the Crossroads. "If you don't like the spread of Western cultural commodities around the world, where do you turn? To Islam. The movement we're looking at is the move for the restoration of a radical Islamic cali phate." But Bat Ye'or, the preeminent scholar of dhimmitude — the condition of second-class status with which Jews and Christians have historically had to live under Islamic rule — insists that persecution is the normal state of relations between the dhimmis and their Muslim rulers. In effect, European conquerors suspended history in those lands when they abolished Islamic shari'a law and the dhimmitude it mandated, and imposed Western concepts of equality under the law. "Dhimmitude was a dehumanizing system, bordering on slavery," Ye'or says. "After decolonization, dhimmitude for Christians and other non-Muslims is coming back with the return of shari'a rule. It is a repetition of the past, because it follows the traditional pattern of Islamic history and jurisdiction." In her new book, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide, Ye'or details how European governments have a history of selling out Christian and Jewish populations in the Muslim world in order to curry favor with Islamic regimes. Says Ye'or, "Their priority was a policy of appeasement with the Muslim world, for political and economic interests. They aban doned the Christians, hoping they would integrate in Muslim majorities." This continues even today. To cite but one example from Ye'or's book, in 1999, U.N. delegations from France, Italy, and Spain refused to stand in the way of an alliance of Islamic states seeking to remove the non-governmental-organization status of Christian Soli darity International, a relief group devoted to helping the enslaved Christians of Sudan. CSI's John Eibner, who has personally undertaken a number of death-defying missions to Sudan to rescue slaves, blamed Europe's desperation to appease Muslim governments. Says a frustrated Ann Buwalda, "I was in Brussels in April, trying to wake up the European Parliament to the fact that 10,000 Christians have been killed in Maluku [Indonesia], but all they wanted to talk about was the Jenin refugee camp, where Israel was supposed to have massacred all these Palestinians — it was a lie anyway. I think because this situation involves Christians, it's not popular." Indeed, Freedom House's Marshall has a list of recent examples of Western media coverage in which massacres and torture of Christians at the hands of Muslims are downplayed, if reported at all. Says Marshall, "There's still an image among many in the media of Christians as white male Westerners. It doesn't compute that Christians would be victims." This is not a new story, but it has taken on a new salience since Sep tember 11 brought jihad to America in spectacular fashion. Marshall says the war on terror can help those Christians remaining under the Muslim yoke if the U.S. and its allies decisively defeat Islamic extremism and encourage moderate Muslims to take power. While Ye'or disputes the degree to which moderate Islam — meaning an Islam that doesn't seek to subjugate non-Muslims — can be said to exist, she agrees with Marshall's view that there do exist tolerant Muslims who won't speak publicly against jihad out of real fear of losing their lives. "Under a regime of terror and a culture of hate, people are afraid for themselves, their children, and their beloved," she says. "The situation exists in Europe as well. People do not feel safe and are afraid to speak. It is the free world which must speak up, but the free world remains mute." Meanwhile, people like Buwalda have the unenviable task of traveling to these countries to bear witness to the martyrdom, which so many Christians in America and Europe prefer not to see. "You try going over there and facing these Christians, like I did recently in Indonesia, and answering them when they ask, 'You're supposed to be our brother Christians, why aren't you doing anything? Why are you letting them kill us?'" says Buwalda. "You can see how angry and upset they are, and they're right to be. They say they just hope September 11 wakes us up to what they have to live with every day."
It’s
a War, Stupid Even as the terrorist attacks were taking place last September 11, President Bush made use of the extraordinary authority he has to protect Amer icans from enemy action. Had the heroes of United Flight 93 not prevented their hijacked plane from reaching Washing ton, F-16s — deployed by President Bush — would have shot down the plane full of American citizens. There is no question that this first defensive action taken by the president in the war on terrorism was a lawful exercise of his executive powers. Yet editorial writers and legal analysts who were untroubled by the president's awesome authority to sacrifice some American lives to safeguard others now argue that his equally well-established authority to detain enemy combatants in military custody poses a mon u mental threat to our liberties. The detention of Yaser Hamdi in a Navy brig in Norfolk, Va., has prompted hysterical commentary. The Rocky Mountain News declared, "The Bush Adminis tration is making a breathtaking assertion of its right to imprison an American citizen indefinitely, without access to a court or a lawyer, simply by designating the citizen an 'enemy combatant.'" Because this "breathtaking assertion" is accurate as a matter of law, such editorial outrage is usually accompanied by either citations to inapplicable legal authority or no mention of any controlling law at all. The critics are confusing the procedural safeguards that apply to criminal detention with the wartime precedents that govern military custody of enemy combatants — and their propaganda risks damaging the president's ability to protect American lives. Federal district judge Robert G. Doumar, who is presiding over Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, shares this confusion. Hamdi, armed with a Kalashnikov rifle, was captured in Afghanistan late last year when his Taliban unit surrendered to Northern Alliance forces. He told interrogators that he was a Saudi citizen, born in the U.S., who had come to Afghanistan the previous summer to train and fight with the Taliban. Hamdi was sent to Guantanamo Bay with other detainees, and later transferred to Norfolk when it was confirmed that he was born in Louisiana, where he lived with his Saudi parents until they returned to the Kingdom when he was three years old. Although critics hammer John Ashc roft over the detention of Hamdi, the Taliban fighter is actually in defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's custody-based on Hamdi's classification as an unlawful enemy combatant. Clearly, lawful combatants held as POWs under the Geneva Convention can be held until the end of hostilities without the right to legal representation to challenge their detention. Such detainees face no criminal charges, and their detention is not punitive. They are imprisoned in order to prevent them from serving with the enemy's forces, and to permit our military to gather as much intelligence as possible from them. Once a lawyer counsels his client to remain silent, a crucial opportunity to glean intelligence is lost. Citizens and non-citizens alike can be classified as enemy combatants. Gaetano Territo, an American citizen, was captured fighting with the enemy in Italy during World War II. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that his citizenship had no bearing on his lawful detention, which had lasted three years by the time of the court's decision. Unlike the non-citizen combatants held at Guantanamo, Yaser Hamdi does have the right to have his habeas corpus petition considered. His supporters are arguing that his transfer to Norfolk should have been accompanied by the services of a Johnnie Cochran to defend his rights. Twice, Judge Doumar has issued unprecedented orders that this captured enemy combatant have private, unmonitored access to a lawyer, and twice the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has stayed his orders. The appeals court declared: "It has long been established that if Hamdi is indeed an 'enemy combatant' who was captured during hostilities in Afghanistan, the government's present detention of him is a lawful one." The court thus upheld what the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called the administration's "extraordinary claim." (The confused editorial allowed that Hamdi "is clearly an enemy combatant," but mistakenly cited the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel "in all criminal proceedings" as applicable to military detention.) The appeals court laid out the appropriate standard of review for the lower court in determining whether Hamdi was properly classified as an enemy combatant. The Fourth Circuit cited the Su preme Court's decision in the case of eight captured Nazi saboteurs, including at least two naturalized U.S. citizens, who traveled by submarine to Florida and Long Island, intending to attack military production facilities: "In World War II, the Court stated in no uncertain terms that the President's wartime detention decisions are to be accorded great deference from the courts." In contrast to today's editorial opinions, which obsess over the alleged rights of enemy agents, editorialists 50 years ago directed their outrage at courts that intervened inappropriately in military affairs. When the Supreme Court decided to review the hasty, secret military trial of the Nazi saboteurs, the Detroit Free Press reacted angrily: "Realism calls for a stone wall and a firing squad, not a lot of holier-than-thou eyewash about extending the protection of civil rights to a group that came among us to blast, burn, and kill." Despite the higher court's determination that Judge Doumar was obliged to accord "great deference" to the Defense Department's classification of Hamdi as an enemy combatant, Doumar remains curious about all of the circumstances surrounding Hamdi's capture. He has continued to refuse to find the two-page declaration giving a factual account of Hamdi's surrender and admissions filed on behalf of Secretary Rumsfeld sufficient to establish a proper classification. Dou mar's desire to second-guess the military determination that an armed individual captured with enemy forces in a foreign land is an enemy combatant invites the "special hazards of judicial involvement in military decision-making" that the higher court warned him against. Critics argue that the administration's insistence that courts butt out of such military determinations threatens the separation of powers. But allowing a federal judge to substitute his own military expertise for that of the Defense Depart ment would do grave danger to the shared responsibility for military affairs that — as the Fourth Circuit pointed out in the Hamdi case — "Articles I and II prominently assign to Congress and the Presi dent." Given the lethal threat posed by terrorists in our midst, Americans should be reassured that during wartime the branches of government charged with waging war and protecting American lives take precedence over a judicial branch populated by lawyers dedicated to the proposition that it is better for 99 guilty individuals to go free than for one innocent to be improperly detained. Despite the thoroughly settled constitutional order governing military affairs, the normally sensible constitutional-law professor Jonathan Turley recently alleged — inaccurately — that Attorney Gen eral Ash croft has an "announced desire for camps for U.S. citizens he deems to be 'enemy combatants.'" Tellingly, even this law professor doesn't cite a single legal authority for his objection to the detention of Yaser Hamdi. Turley notes the different treatment accorded John Walker Lindh, who was given a lawyer and trial; but the fact that the administration elected not to charge Hamdi criminally doesn't render his military detention unlawful. The administration is also being harshly criticized for the military detention of Abdullah al-Muhajir, a.k.a. Jose Padilla, the Chicago native who trained with al-Qaeda and took part in discussions about plans to detonate a dirty bomb. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette thought the administration should be embarrassed to be taking such precautions with a "small fish" such as al-Muhajir. But should "small fish" Hani Hanjour also have been unworthy of caution on the part of authorities? Hanjour, a barely five-foot-tall, shy, pious-seeming Saudi who had no known affiliation with any Islamic extremists, trained at various American flight schools over a five-year period. Although he got his commercial pilot's license in 1999, his flying skills were so poor that in August 2001 a Maryland flight school refused to rent him a plane. A month later he flew American Flight 77 into the Pentagon. Terrorist masterminds aren't being dispatched to kill Americans. The likes of Abdullah al-Muhajir and Yaser Hamdi are the kind of detainees the government must hope will reveal information that will prevent future attacks and lead to the capture of fellow foot soldiers. It is the president's responsibility to do everything in his power to defend American lives, and that authority includes detaining en emy agents. Our lives depend on it.
The
Muslim Wave When most people think of immigrants today, they think chiefly of those from Latin America or East Asia. But while most immigrants still come from those regions, an increasing number are coming from a less traditional source: the Middle East. The number of Middle Eastern immigrants in the U.S. has grown nearly eightfold from 1970 to 2000, and is expected to double again by 2010. This growth could have significant repercussions for our homeland security — and our support for Israel. The Center for Immigration Studies has just issued a study of this group of immigrants, based on new Census Bureau data. (We defined the Middle East broadly, as running roughly from Morocco to Pakistan.) While the overall size of the foreign-born population has tripled since 1970 and now stands at 31 million, the number of immigrants from the Middle East has grown more than twice as fast — from fewer than 200,000 in 1970 to nearly 1.5 million in 2000. Of this population roughly 10 percent, or about 150,000, are illegal aliens (based on INS estimates). The new Middle Eastern immigration is not just more numerous than the old, but also very different in religion. While the Mideast itself is overwhelmingly Muslim, historically this has not been true of the region's immigrants to the U.S. Up until the 1960s, Middle Eastern immigrants were mostly Christian Arabs from Lebanon, or Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and other Christian minorities fleeing predominantly Muslim countries. In 1970, roughly 15 percent of Middle Eastern immigrants were Muslim; by 2000, almost 73 percent were. Muslim immigrants and their progeny now number some 2 million. Add in today's perhaps 1 million American converts to Islam — mostly blacks — and you have a total Muslim population of about 3 million. The estimates put out by Muslim advocacy groups of 6 or even 12 million Muslims are almost certainly too high, but it is important to note that — absent a change in U.S. immigration policy — they almost certainly will become true. We know that interest in emigrating to the U.S. remains very strong in the Middle East. Even after the terror attacks, the State Department in October 2001 received some 1.5 million entries from the region for the visa lottery, which awards 50,000 green cards worldwide to those who win a random drawing. Assuming no change in immigration policy, we project that in just the next decade 1.1 million new immigrants (legal and illegal) from the Middle East will settle in the U.S. Looking forward a little further, within less than 20 years the number of Muslim immigrants and their progeny will grow to perhaps 6 million. What does this immigration mean for the U.S.? To begin with, immigrants from the Middle East are one of the most highly educated groups in America, with almost half having a bachelor's degree, compared with 28 percent of natives; these education levels should make it easier for them to assimilate. Their average income is higher than that of natives. Another positive sign is their high rates of citizenship: Half are U.S. citizens, compared with 38 percent of immigrants overall. One would think that radicalism would have relatively little appeal for this group, but there are troubling indicators as well. In 2000, nearly one in five Middle Eastern immigrants lived in poverty, compared with about one in ten natives, and 23 percent used at least one major welfare program, compared with only 15 percent of natives. Immigration from the Middle East is no longer an entirely elite phenomenon. Opinion polls indicate that Middle Eastern immigrants are highly dissatisfied with U.S. policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict and wish to see a tilt away from support for Israel. Given this, continued Mideast immigration appears likely to lead to changes in U.S. policy, as elected officials respond to Muslim Americans' growing electoral importance. Their increasing political influence was evident earlier this year when three Democratic House members from Michigan, whose districts contain fast-growing Arab immigrant communities, were among only 21 members voting against a resolution expressing solidarity with Israel against terrorism. On the domestic level, there are three general areas of concern about this influx into the U.S. First, large-scale Mideast immigration is a cause of overworked American consulates overseas. The State Department, by its own admission, is completely overwhelmed by the numbers. In such an environment, it is much more likely that the wrong person will get a visa. Less immigration, of course, would mean that each applicant could be more carefully scrutinized. Second, a large Middle Eastern immigrant population makes it easier for Is lamic extremists to operate within the U.S. The September 11 hijackers used Middle Eastern immigrant communities for cover. The Washington Post has reported that two 9/11 hijackers who lived in San Diego got help from "mosques and established members of [the city's] Islamic community" to "find housing, open a bank account, obtain car insurance — even, at one point, get a job." The New York Times has observed that one of the many reasons Islamic terrorists prefer Germany as a base is that it's easier to "blend into a society with a large Muslim population." Third, and perhaps most important, cultural adaptation poses a special problem for Middle Eastern Muslim immigrants. There has been and continues to be a debate within Islam about whether someone can be a good Muslim while living in the land of unbelievers. There is also a debate among Muslims about whether a good Muslim can give his political allegiance to a secular government, such as ours, that is composed of non-Muslims. Many Muslims can and do become loyal Americans; they have served with distinction in the U.S. military. But for some share of Muslims, coming to identify fully with America will be difficult. And this problem could become more pronounced over time. To date, the way Middle Eastern immigrants have navigated life in the U.S. reflects the group's relatively small size. A modestly sized group has to accommodate itself to American society, because there is not the critical mass necessary in most cities to support institutions that preserve group customs and identity — such as ethnic-based media outlets, schools, or political and social organizations. But this dynamic is changing as the group grows very rapidly as a result of immigration. The settlement of 1 million new Mideast immigrants by 2010 will overwhelmingly be the result of legal immigration — but levels of legal immigration can be changed by statute. For example, recently proposed legislation to eliminate the visa lottery would reduce Middle Eastern immigration, because many Mideast immigrants have been using this process to obtain their green cards. Alternatively, an amnesty for illegal aliens would increase Mideast immigration, by creating more legal immigrants who could then sponsor their relatives. Some conservatives have suggested doing away altogether with immigration from the region, at least until the war on terrorism is over. But such proposals are not really worth debating: Even after September 11, not a single member of Congress proposed cutting off Middle Eastern immigration. Congress would never single out one region of the world for exclusion from green cards. Consider Iraq: Although the U.S. was engaged in open hostilities with that country throughout the 1990s, census data show that 68,000 Iraqi immigrants were allowed into the U.S. during that decade. Moreover, all the countries on the State Department's list of sponsors of terrorism are eligible to send immigrants to the U.S. and have in fact sent hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants here over the last ten years. Congress has never questioned the wisdom of permitting this immigration. We could, of course, scrutinize visa applicants from some countries with greater care than we take in examining those from, say, Switzerland; it is even possible that Congress would curtail temporary visas in the wake of another attack. But it is politically inconceivable, in our equality-obsessed society, that we would ever return to the days prior to 1965 in which some regions of the world were allotted fewer green cards than others. Reducing legal immigration from the Mideast is a sensible policy, but the only way this could ever happen would be the enactment of an immigration cap that would apply across the board — to all immigrants, wherever they might hail from. The same holds for efforts to deal with illegal immigration: Given limited resources, in a time of war, it makes sense — over the short term — to pursue with special vigor those immigration-law violators who are Middle Easterners. But over the long term, such a policy would be unfair and politically unsustainable. Reducing the overall immigration level is the wisest plan, for the decades to come.
Bad
List A terrible injustice was done to Ray Krone. In 1992, he was sentenced to death for the murder of Kim Ancona, a Phoenix cocktail waitress. He spent three years on Death Row before his first conviction was overturned. On retrial, he was sentenced to life in prison. All the while, he maintained that he was innocent. Eventually, DNA analysis proved that he was telling the truth: Another man had committed the crime. In April of this year, Krone was freed. In Washington, D.C., Sen. Russ Feingold marked the occasion. Krone, the Wisconsin Democrat said, was "the hundredth person to be released from Death Row in the modern death-penalty era" — since, that is, the Supreme Court allowed the practice to resume in 1976. "How many innocent Americans today sit in their prison cells wrongly accused, counting down the days until there are no more?" Feingold asked. "There have now been 100 exonerations and 766 executions since the early 1970s. In other words, for every seven to eight Death Row in mates executed by the states or federal government, one has been found innocent and released from Death Row. . . . One risk, one error, one mistake, is one too many. But 100 mistakes, proven mistakes, qualifies as a crisis. And a crisis calls for action." Feingold wants a national moratorium on the death penalty. Failing that, he favors his colleague Patrick Leahy's Innocence Protection Act, which backers say would improve the administration of the death penalty. Krone's case is certainly disturbing. But have there really been 100 such "proven mistakes," as Feingold put it, in the last quarter century? The senator, like the many others who make this claim, relies on the "Innocence List" compiled by the Death Penalty Infor mation Center, a group that opposes capital punishment. According to its list, the total number of people who spent time on Death Row but were later exonerated is now up to 102. But most of the cases on the list are very different from that of Ray Krone. Nobody is going to make a TV movie anytime soon about Jonathan Treadaway, another of DPIC's "Cases of Innocence." Treadaway was convicted in 1975 for sodomizing and murdering a six-year-old boy. His palm prints were found outside the victim's bedroom window, and he said that he could not explain their presence. Pubic hairs on the victim's body were similar to his. But the Arizona supreme court reversed his conviction. The trial court had admitted evidence that Treadaway had committed sexual acts with a 13-year-old boy three years before the murder. The court held that to be irrelevant without "expert medical testimony" that this act demonstrated a continuing propensity to commit such acts. The court also ordered that at Treadaway's retrial, his statements about the palm prints not be admitted. Treadaway had made those statements voluntarily, but without being advised of his Miranda rights or waiving those rights. Finally, the court excluded some evidence that three months before the murder, Treadaway had been found naked in a young boy's bedroom trying to strangle the boy. Treadaway didn't get off Death Row because it was proven that the cops had the wrong man. Technicalities spared him. Jeremy Sheets, another of DPIC's "innocents," got off Death Row because the key witness against him couldn't testify. That was his best friend, Adam Barnett, who told the police that the two of them — both white men — had been angry about all the white women they knew who were dating black men. To get even, they kidnapped and raped a black high-school student. Barnett said that Sheets had then stabbed her to death. Barnett committed suicide in jail. Sheets was sentenced to death on the basis of Barnett's taped confession (and Sheets's own testimony, which the jury found unbelievable). The Nebraska supreme court reversed his conviction because Sheets's lawyer had not been able to cross-examine the dead Barnett. Sheets walked. The lead police investigator in the case called the result a "travesty," but it was probably the right legal call. What it wasn't was an "exoneration" of Sheets. John Henry Knapp confessed to the arson-murder of his children and then recanted the confession. He was tried three times. Twice juries hung 7-5 for conviction; in between, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. Even tually the case was settled with a plea bargain. He's on the "Innocence List," too. In twelve of the cases on DPIC's list, DNA evidence indicates that the men on Death Row should never have been put there. In another 20 or so, there is other evidence to the same effect. In around 32 cases, then, it has been proven that men on Death Row were innocent of the crime charged. (That's out of more than 7,000 people on Death Row in the modern era.) No such thing has been proved in the other cases. In some of them, the details are sketchy. Some death sentences were reversed in unpublished opinions. Some cases had to be abandoned because evidence deteriorated with the passage of time. In other cases, people who had participated in murders were removed from Death Row because it was not known whether they had actually pulled the trigger or struck the fatal blow themselves. They were hardly "innocent." There are at least as many Treadaways as Krones on the list. All of them are treated by DPIC, equivalently, as "innocent" and "exonerated." Richard Dieter, executive director of DPIC, says that former Death Row inmates deserve a presumption of innocence when the charges against them are dismissed. They are indeed entitled to a legal presumption of innocence (in general: John Henry Knapp isn't). But the list leads people to think that innocence has been proven when the most that can be said is that the legal system cannot establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Most of the people who refer to the list clearly have no idea that many of the "innocents" on it are probably guilty. There's another problem with the "Innocence List." It's meant to be a critique of the death penalty as it's applied today. But the list includes death sentences that were imposed before today's system emerged. Some on the list got off Death Row because the Supreme Court invalidated the death-penalty statute under which they had been sentenced. The list is nonetheless widely cited as evidence that the risk of executing the innocent is high. Sen. Leahy wrote earlier this year that "nearly 100 innocent people have been released from Death Row since 1973." The New York Times, the ACLU, and George Will have relied on DPIC's list. It has even been cited, indirectly, at the Supreme Court: The Los Angeles Times did a story on Krone as the hundredth exonerated Death Row inmate, and Justice Stephen Breyer referred to the story in his opinion in a death-penalty case. Another piece of misinformation is widespread in the death-penalty debate: the claim, from a study led by Columbia University professor James Liebman, that death-penalty cases have a "68 percent error rate." It turns out that the study counts it as an "error" any time a death sentence is reversed at any stage of appellate review — even if the sentence is ultimately upheld. California was found to have an 87 percent "error rate," but half of it could be accounted for by the fact that for several years the chief justice of the state's supreme court was an opponent of the death penalty who kept issuing reversals. In most of the cases in the study, moreover, it was the death sentence that was (sometimes temporarily) overturned, not the murder con victions. The "over 100" and "68 percent" figures are being used to persuade people that the death penalty is being badly administered and needs to be reformed, if not abolished. The leading reform on offer is Leahy's Innocence Protection Act. In yet another distortion, media coverage of Leahy's bill mostly concerns its provisions to make it easier for Death Row inmates to obtain DNA tests that might prove their innocence. But there isn't much controversy about DNA testing. Most states that have capital punishment have been increasing their use of it. "If Leahy's bill were only about DNA, it would have passed three years ago," says one Senate Republican aide. The sticking point in the debate is that Leahy's bill would force states to reconfigure their systems for providing Death Row inmates with lawyers. Either states would have to comply with onerous federal mandates, or private organizations that represent such inmates would be given federal money. Opponents of the bill assume that the mandates were designed to be so onerous that states would go for Option Two: taxpayer funding of anti-death-penalty activists. People facing execution ought to have competent counsel. But there's no crisis calling out for a federal takeover of the area. In most of the 32 cases in which the wrong man faced execution, it wasn't the result of defense lawyers' mistakes. It was the result of gross misconduct by prosecutors and police, or of overreliance on the testimony of jailhouse snitches. Funding 50 miniature versions of the Death Penalty Information Center won't solve those problems. It may, however, lead to some people's release from Death Row — whether or not they're guilty — so that they can be added to the list.
'Agreat tragedy is fast unfolding," intones Gus Speth, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and one of the most respected figures in American environmentalism. "More than 20 years ago the alarm was sounded regarding threats to the global environment, but the environmental deterioration that stirred the international community then continues essentially unabated today." Population growth, affluence, and technology, Speth warns, are pushing us toward "a swift and appalling deterioration of the natural world. Only a response that in historical terms would be seen as revolutionary is likely to avert these changes." As we prepare for the latest U.N. environmental carnival — the "World Summit on Sustainable Development," to be held in Johannesburg over our Labor Day weekend — despair is indeed warranted. No, not despair over the state of the planet. Despair over the state of the world's intellectual elite. "Sustainable development" is widely defined as "that which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." It's essentially a call to maximize human welfare over time, although people seldom think of it this way. That's what economics is all about: Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations could fairly be called the world's first blueprint for sustainable development. Sustainable devel opment, that is to say, is in the eye of the beholder. There are some, of course, who would urge us to avoid any deterioration of the natural resource base. But the wealth created by exploiting resources is often more beneficial than the wealth preserved by "banking" those resources for future use. Is the world really a poorer place because past generations drew down stocks of oil, iron, and various other minerals and metals to make advanced satellites, modern industry, and — through the wealth created thereby-advanced medicines and hundreds of other life-enhancing technologies? Other environmentalists allow that we must use some resources, but call for us to leave them above a minimum critical level and to pass down the wealth gen erated by resource use to future generations, who would otherwise be "robbed" of their rightful inheri tance. But consider: If the only way we could have preserved the American bison beyond a "minimum critical level" was by leaving the Great Plains largely untouched by agriculture, would the sacrifice of what was to become the world's most productive cropland been in either the economic or the social interest of future generations? Issued without due consideration of both costs and benefits, the admonition is anti-human. Moreover, the claim that the proceeds of resource use must be preserved for future generations is redundant at best. Since all wealth is eventually inherited, there is simply no need for a special, state-supervised "account" to be established for the benefit of those to come. Indeed, the radical improvements in standard of living, life expectancy, and resource availability attained by each succeeding generation since the Industrial Revolution show that we don't need the Greens to watch over our children. You can look it up: Agricultural production continues to outpace population growth. Global forests are on net expanding, not contracting. Resources of almost all kinds — petroleum, natural gas, minerals, and foodstuffs — are becoming more abundant no matter how one chooses to measure them. Air and water quality in the most advanced industrial nations is improving at a truly jaw-dropping pace, while improvements in even the poorest of the world's na tions are demonstrably tied to levels of per capita income. The number of species living on the planet today is far greater than at any other period in the Earth's history. In a pinch, desalinization plants will ensure that we never run out of fresh water. And life expectancy continues to increase, proving at the most obvious level that the human environment is on a sustainable path. The future, moreover, is even sunnier than the present. Jesse Ausubel of Rock efeller University calculates that, given trends in agricultural productivity, an area the size of the Amazon basin will likely be returned to nature by 2070. Innovations in timber harvesting suggest that 10 percent of the world's forests will produce all our commercial needs by 2050. Advances in fisheries management promise a boom in marine productivity and a corresponding recovery of commercially valuable fish stocks. Growth in per capita income will im prove the quality of both our air and our water. Man's "footprint" on the planet is becoming both softer and smaller. Yet the Green mentality seems impervious to such facts, no matter how high the data are piled. My late colleague Julian Simon demonstrated this quite nicely at a forum some years ago. He began by asking, "How many of you think that pollution is in general getting worse and that resources are on the brink of exhaustion?" Nearly every hand in the audience went up. Then he asked, "What sort of evidence would you need to change your opinion?" No hands. "Is there anything that could change your mind — anything at all?" Again, nothing. "Well," he said, "let me apologize then. I'm not dressed for church." If the data are so clearly pointing in the right direction, what are we to make of the various stylized sustainability indices, regularly trotted out by the media, suggesting that doom is around the corner? In a word, they're cooked. Consider the "IPAT Identity." Introduced by Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, it postulates that Environmental Impact (I) = Population (P) x Affluence (A) x Technology (T). But the premises of IPAT are demonstrably false. Economists have found that for almost all pollutants, environmental quality will worsen with economic growth until per capita income reaches $3,000-$9,000 (depending on the pollutant), at which point environmental quality will improve with further growth. Technology can cut either for or against the environment, but environmental improvements in the 20th century suggest that "for" is much likelier. Population has proven no constraint on environmental quality. Greens, however, will hold on to the IPAT formula like grim death. A typical result is the "Environmental Sustainability Index," devised by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with Yale and Columbia universities. This index ranks each nation's "sustainability" according to 68 metrics — fewer than half of which have any bearing on environmental quality or resource availability. Typical questions include: How many cars are in circulation? How many agricultural chemicals are employed? How much seafood do people eat? How many organized environmental groups are there, and how large are their memberships? How willing are domestic companies to join international environmental coalitions? How much land does the government own? How many international treaties has it signed? The results are bizarre. If we posit that a more sustainable country is preferable to a less sustainable country, then Americans (living in a country with an "environmental sustainability index" of 53.2) ought to be clamoring to move to Botswana (61.8), Slovenia (58.8), Albania (57.9), Paraguay (57.8), Namibia (57.4), Laos (56.2), Gabon (54.9), Ar menia (54.8), Moldova (54.5), Congo (54.3), Mongolia (54.2), or even the Central African Republic (54.1). Other studies purport to measure our "ecological footprint" by assessing mankind's total demand on the planet against the supply of resources the planet has to provide. The World Wildlife Fund recently reported, for instance, that we are harvesting 20 percent more of the planet's resources than can be regenerated in a year and that we'll need to colonize two additional planets by 2050 if this continues. The media, predictably, went wild. But if resources are indeed becoming scarce, shouldn't prices for those resources be going up? In fact, they're going down. The study warns in particular that the amount of land we need to produce energy has doubled over 40 years — hence the dramatic warning that space colonization is necessary unless we cease and desist. What the authors calculated, however, was not how much land was being used to produce oil, gas, and coal (which is, in fact, trivial), but how much forestland was necessary to absorb the carbon dioxide generated by fossil-fuel consumption. Only by the wildest stretch of the imagination can one discern a human "footprint" on the wild and uninhabited forests that suck up carbon dioxide. If anything, those emissions are contributing to forest health by fertilizing them mightily — an argument that has been convincingly made by Sylvan Wittwer, former chairman of the National Research Council's Board on Agriculture. Moreover, this human "use" of forests as carbon sinks does not preclude any other ecological or economic use of forestland resources. Why do otherwise intelligent and well-educated people rush to crowd the pews in Johannesburg? For the same reason that otherwise intelligent and well-educated scientists in the Islamic world publish papers in peer-reviewed journals describing technologies to harness energy from Koranic djinni. Both are gripped by religious fervor, and scientific facts get left by the way.
Bowles’s
Luck In what state attorney general Richard Blumenthal described as a "virtually unprecedented" move, the State of Connecticut sued the investment firm Forstmann Little for losing more than $100 million in pension funds of state workers. Suing over disappeared dough is nothing new, but this lawsuit has two highly unusual aspects. First, the suit put the fear of God into general partners (GPs) at investment shops everywhere, because seven Forstmann GPs were separately named as individual defendants — putting them personally on the hook for any resulting liability for making lousy investments that tanked. Second, and more important, one of the GPs — someone who was present when all the bad investments were made, who was there while much of that cash evaporated, and who even sat on the board of one of two relevant companies that went bankrupt — went unnamed. Who was that mystery partner smiled on by Lady Luck? None other than Erskine Bowles, the multimillionaire former chief of staff for Bill Clinton and current Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in North Carolina. Bowles appears to have had more than luck in his corner. The two people responsible for filing the suit — state treasurer Denise Nappier and Attorney General Blumenthal — are both elected Demo crats. Like so many other scandals of late, Connecticut's dispute with Forstmann stems from faltering telecom investments. The two biggest bugaboos are the collective billions Forstmann poured into XO Communications — where Connecticut lost its entire $95 million stake — and McLeod USA, in which Connecticut lost 90 percent of its $31.4 million piece of the pie. Bowles disowns responsibility by saying, "I was there part-time on and off for a couple of years." He further notes that "over a 20-year period" — when Bowles was not a Forstmann partner — "[Forstmann Little] had a return on their investment of over 35 percent." Thus he embraces the period when he wasn't a partner and distances himself from the period when he was. Bowles's salary was $4.3 million a year — a sizable chunk of change for a part-timer. The two investments that have landed Forstmann in hot water, XO and McLeod, were both made in Bowles's time. And as a general partner, he would have been involved in significant decisions. Like many of their telecom brethren, XO and McLeod wrapped themselves in the cloak of bankruptcy protection, virtually eliminating the value of Connecticut's investments in them via Bowles's firm. Forstmann placed Connecticut's millions into two existing funds in which the state was one of several investors. The investment was intended as a conservative addition to Connecticut's overall portfolio, and the state says it was banking on Forstmann's prudent reputation. The state's lawsuit claims Forstmann promised a cautious investment strategy, taking over management of most of the companies in which it invested. In the XO debacle, Forstmann kept throwing good money after bad — into a company it didn't even control. Over 18 months, Forstmann's two funds with Connecticut cash invested a total of $1.5 billion, all of which was zeroed out less than two years after the first installment. In fairness, almost every high-tech stock plunged during that same span, but Forstmann kept tossing in more loot. The headline from the Wall Street Journal on April 27, 2001, sums it up: "XO Reports Wide Loss for First Quarter, Gets $250 Million in Addi tional Funding." With full knowledge of a nearly half-billion dollar loss — in just three months — Forstmann used money from a supposedly conservative fund filled with workers' retirement money to prop up a company that was fading fast. Forstmann's strategy with XO was akin to a desperate Vegas gambler who keeps doubling down, notes Wall Street professional Michael Madden of Questor Management. "It's like a poker game where you're so far into the pot, you keep ante-ing even if you don't have the strongest card." The other investment that crashed, McLeod, was less of a disaster for Forstmann itself, but arguably more of one for Erskine Bowles. He was on McLeod's board for two years, leaving only three months before the firm filed for bankruptcy. Although the contract Connecticut had with Forstmann appears to limit the firm to investing most of the money in companies where it assumes control of the management, the $1 billion investment in McLeod bought Forstmann only 12 percent of the company and two seats on the 13-seat board. (Bowles held one, and Ted Forstmann the other.) Thus, Forstmann Little clearly did not buy a controlling stake. It was a traditional equity investment, which is not what Connecticut says it agreed to. As a board member of McLeod and a partner at Forstmann, Bowles was in as good a position as anyone to realize the true nature of the investment — yet he is not named in Connecticut's suit. This is curious, to say the least. Bowles joined Forstmann fully eight months before the McLeod investment, and was a partner for almost the entire XO disaster, exiting only one month before Connecticut's stake in XO was completely wiped out. Still, he is unnamed. The omission could not be because Bowles is no longer with Forstmann — Steven Klinsky left the firm even before the bad investments were made, and he is named in the suit. In fact, another named defendant, Gordon Holmes, wasn't even a partner until after the bad investments had been made. One other GP besides Bowles — Joshua Lewis — is unnamed, but he was only a partner for about a year, starting after the McLeod deal and departing before the final XO investment. Bowles, on the other hand, was a partner during the time when all the investments in question were made. Bowles's campaign staff has no comment other than to say that there has been "absolutely" no contact between Bowles or anyone acting on his behalf and the State of Connecticut. State Treasurer Nappier has said that Bowles was on the original list of defendants, but his name was dropped by the outside counsel working with her office because of a lack of direct involvement in wrongdoing. Yet Bowles clearly had more involvement in McLeod than the five partners who are named defendants but did not sit on the company's board of directors. And, again, Klinsky and Holmes were not even partners when the investments were made. The most plausible answer is: pure politics. Neither Klinsky nor Holmes had the good sense to run for statewide office as a Democrat this year. Bill Simon, the Republican gubernatorial nominee in California, is in hot water because a company of which he is part-owner has been indicted. He could use a smile from Lady Luck. But Erskine Bowles has not just her: He has his fellow Democrats calling the shots.
On August 10, in a speech before the Democratic National Committee's summer meeting in Las Vegas, party chairman Terry McAuliffe demanded that President Bush make public records of the Securities and Exchange Commission's in vestigation into his sale of Harken Energy stock more than a decade ago (a probe that found no wrongdoing on Bush's part). "If you have nothing to hide, then release the documents," McAuliffe roared as the crowd cheered. "To paraphrase a Republican hero — Mr. President, tear down this stonewall!" The next morning, up early to appear on ABC's This Week program, McAuliffe was asked a question about his extraordinarily profitable relationship with Global Crossing, the bankrupt telecommunications company now under criminal investigation for alleged financial fraud. In 1997, when Global Crossing was still a private firm, its CEO (and former McAuliffe business partner) Gary Win nick gave McAuliffe an opportunity to invest $100,000 in the company. Two years later, McAuliffe sold his interest for a reported $18 million. On This Week, McAuliffe was in no mood to talk about the subject. "Well, first of all, you have no idea if I made one penny, Sam, or not," he told host Sam Donaldson. "Well, tell me," Donaldson responded. "I was merely an investor in a company," McAuliffe answered. The two appearances, just hours apart, highlight a dilemma McAuliffe is facing more and more frequently these days. He is perhaps the most aggressive and public critic of George W. Bush's record in business — just a few days before the Las Vegas speech, he urged the president to "set an example by coming clean on your past business dealings" — yet he faces continuing questions over his own business affairs. And the questions extend far beyond his $18 million windfall. According to sources on Capitol Hill, the House Energy and Commerce Committee's investigation of corporate wrongdoing — a probe that began with the collapse of Enron and has since expanded to include Global Crossing and other companies — has touched on a number of McAuliffe's business dealings. "His name has popped up time and time again in several of our in vestigations," says a source. For example, National Review has learned that as part of the Global Crossing probe, investigators have looked into the relationship between Global Crossing and a now-bankrupt Syracuse, N.Y., telecom firm called Telergy. McAuliffe, a native of Syracuse who knew some of Telergy's executives, played a key role in bringing the two companies together. McAuliffe joined Telergy's board of directors in August 1999. The next month, Global Crossing invested $40 million in Telergy. Telergy later reported to the SEC that it paid McAuliffe $1.2 million for "assisting us in raising equity capital." (That was not an insignificant amount; according to the SEC filing, $1.2 million was roughly equal to the combined salaries and bonuses of Telergy's top three officers for that year.) At the same time, September 1999, Telergy and Global Crossing also entered into an arrangement known as an IRU. The acronym stands for "indefeasible right to use" and refers to the practice of capacity swaps, in which telecom firms trade access to one another's transmission lines. Global Crossing would later become notorious for counting capacity swaps, which are essentially barter deals, as revenue, an accounting device that made the company look more prosperous than it was. Now investigators want to find out whether Telergy, with McAuliffe on its board of directors, engaged in similar practices. The Telergy deal will likely be part of hearings on Global Crossing that the Energy and Commerce Committee is preparing to hold in mid-to-late September. Sources say it is possi ble McAuliffe will be asked to testify. Should that happen, McAuliffe will find himself under oath, before cameras, facing questioners with considerably more clout than Sam Donaldson. And many of them will want to know just one thing: How did McAuliffe make all that money? ‘THAT’S
CAPITALISM’ But as much as McAuliffe's big payday has been discussed, it has never really been closely examined. Just how does one make $18 million — or even $9 million — from a $100,000 investment in the span of a couple of years? First of all, it's not something that any member of the public could do. According to Palmieri, McAuliffe bought his stock in August 1997. At that time, Global Crossing was a private company, and Winnick's invitation to McAuliffe to invest was an opportunity that was limited to a few select friends of the firm. McAuliffe still held his shares when Global Crossing went public in August 1998. On its first day of trading, the stock sold for $12.75 per share (that price is adjusted for a later split). By September, it had drifted down to $8 per share, its lowest point. Nine months later, on May 13, 1999, the stock hit its highest price, $64.25 per share. If an investor had been lucky enough to buy $100,000 worth of the stock at its lowest price and to sell at its highest price, the original investment would have grown to $803,125. That's a terrific profit, but nothing like what McAuliffe made — especially when one considers that McAuliffe, according to Palmieri, sold his stock in the fall of 1999, when the stock was well below its peak. So how did he do it? It's not possible to know how big an interest in the company McAuliffe received for his $100,000; he has declined to discuss it, and he was not required to file any public reports on his ownership. Still, it is possible, by charting the stock's price during the time McAuliffe owned it, to make some informed estimates. Say McAuliffe sold on October 1, 1999. On that day, Global Crossing shares sold for $26.06. In order to make $18 million, McAuliffe would have had to sell 690,714 shares. To have acquired that many shares from his original $100,000 investment, McAuliffe would have had to get the stock at a split-adjusted price of a little less than 15 cents per share. If, as McAuliffe says, he in fact made $9 million from the sale, that would mean he bought the shares at a split-adjusted price of a little less than 30 cents per share. But perhaps McAuliffe sold later, when the stock was rising. On November 1, Global Crossing shares sold for $35.75, meaning he would have had to sell 503,496 shares to make $18 million. To have acquired them for $100,000, McAuliffe would have had to get the stock at a split-adjusted price of a little less than 20 cents per share. If McAuliffe sold still later, say on December 1, when Global Crossing shares sold for $43.50 per share, he would have had to sell 413,793 shares of stock to make $18 million. That would mean he bought the stock at a split-adjusted price of a little more than 24 cents per share. And so on. Whatever the scenario, it seems likely that McAuliffe made his fortune by purchasing Global Crossing at just pennies per share. Perhaps his success was the result of particularly good business sense and a willingness to take risks. After all, if Global Crossing had done badly, McAuliffe might have lost money. "I bought stock and I sold stock. That's capitalism," McAuliffe explained on the Fox News Channel last January. "If you don't like it, leave the country and move to China." On the other hand, perhaps there's more to it than that. At the time of his dealings with Global Crossing, McAuliffe was the finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee — the party's top fundraiser. As such, he could help deliver the political access that Winnick needed to cut through the complex regulatory issues that are part of life in the telecom business. That access went all the way to the top. In 1999, as the value of his investment was growing, McAuliffe arranged for Winnick to play golf with Bill Clinton (he also arranged, separately, for Telergy's president, Kevin Kelly, to play a round with the president). It is not unreasonable to ask whether Global Crossing was pursuing political influence on a two-track basis: one, the old-fashioned way, by making political contributions to candidates and political parties, and two, by making the party finance chairman personally rich. In his defense, McAuliffe says that, unlike George W. Bush's career with Harken Energy, he had no management role in Global Crossing. "I never worked for [Global Crossing]," McAuliffe said on ABC. "I never went to a shareholder meeting. I wasn't on the board. There's a difference between being a mere investor, which millions of people are every single day in this country, and running the company, and making decisions that affect people's jobs and affect shareholder value." While that is true, it is also true that McAuliffe's closeness to Winnick and his well-timed investments suggest that McAuliffe might have enjoyed some of the benefits of insiderdom without its accompanying burdens (like having to file public notice when one buys or sells company stock). And it is not at all true in the case of Telergy, where McAuliffe was a member of the board of directors. (In August 2001, with Telergy in financial free fall and more than 100 employees laid off without severance pay, McAuliffe abruptly resigned from the board, along with the company's top management team and several other directors. Telergy filed for bankruptcy later that year.) Nevertheless, in the end, the biggest problem McAuliffe will likely face is not that his actions broke any laws, but that they fail the new test of business propriety that McAuliffe himself has established for George W. Bush. In his Las Vegas speech, McAuliffe said of Bush's efforts for corporate reform, "His own past leaves him unable to lead on this issue. How can he restore confidence to Wall Street when he has engaged in the same practices he condemns today?" One might as well ask the same question of McAuliffe. INT'L
BROTHERHOOD OF WHEELER-DEALERS In November 1990, McAuliffe pitched an investment proposal to a man named Jack Moore, who was a longtime official of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Moore ran the union's pension fund and had virtually unchallenged authority to choose where to invest its $6 billion store of capital. He had met McAuliffe a couple of years earlier when both men were supporters of Democratic representative Richard Gephardt's 1988 presidential campaign. McAuliffe wanted to create a partnership to buy a large block of commercial real estate in central Florida, including a shopping center and several apartment buildings. Moore agreed, and he and McAuliffe came up with an extraordinary arrangement. McAuliffe put up $100 for the purchase, and the pension fund put up $39 million. Despite the enormous disparity in investment, the deal called for both sides to split the profits 50-50, after the union received a modest initial return. The next year, McAuliffe proposed another venture for the partnership. This time, he wanted to buy a parcel of land near the apartment complexes and divide it into more than 500 single-family lots. Instead of another lopsided purchase arrangement, the pension fund offered to lend McAuliffe up to $10 million to buy the property, which was known as Country Run. As collateral, McAuliffe put up the land itself, plus his 50 percent interest in the apartment/shopping-center development. But not long afterward, McAuliffe got out of the first deal. In June 1992, the pension fund paid McAuliffe $450,000 for a portion of his 50 percent share. Then, in August 1993, the fund paid McAuliffe an additional $2 million for most of the rest of his share. McAuliffe's total return was $2.45 million on an original investment of $100. It was an unusually generous deal for the fund's officers to give McAuliffe, especially since it meant that McAuliffe no longer had the property which he had put up as collateral for the Country Run loan. In the years that followed, the Country Run project went nowhere; by the end of 1996, lot sales to homebuilders were less than half what had been projected. McAuliffe made no loan payments to the union from December 1992 until October 1997. Finally, in 1997, McAuliffe found another partner and bought out the loan. In the end, the electrical workers' pension fund got a relatively meager return on its money — significantly less than it would have earned in a more conservative investment. In the late 1990s, the deal came under investigation by the Clinton Labor Department, which filed suit against Moore and another union official named John Grau, alleging that they had endangered union members' savings by entering into questionable business arrangements with McAuliffe (the details in this story come from court documents in the case). "The fund lost money as a result of the [Country Run] loan in 1992 and the purchases of additional partnership interests from [McAuliffe] in 1992 and 1993," the Labor Department said. "In addition, if the fund had not made these investments, it would have had the money it invested in Country Run and the additional partnership purchases available to invest in prudent investments that would have earned a greater return." Last October, Moore and Grau agreed to pay a six-figure penalty for their role in the McAuliffe ventures, and the electrical-workers union was forced to reimburse the pension fund nearly $5 million for its officers' failure to act "with the care, skill, prudence, and diligence . . . that a prudent person acting in a like capacity and familiar with such matters would use." McAuliffe was not charged with any wrongdoing. ‘HE
ISN’T PRESIDENT’ Much of this might have escaped public notice had McAuliffe not chosen to attack George W. Bush on the issue of business ethics. Now, after months of such attacks, McAuliffe finds himself on the defensive. On his behalf, Jennifer Palmieri says, "We're holding Bush to Bush's standard, the standard he has laid out for corporate CEOs. He should follow that example." The unspoken implication of that argument is that McAuliffe should not be held to a similar standard. "He isn't president of the United States," Palmieri says. "He doesn't have the responsibility or the ability to restore confidence in the markets." Democrats have also defended McAuliffe by questioning Republican motives in the Global Crossing investigation. Palmieri says GOP inquiries about McAuliffe's business career are "clearly politically motivated to distract attention from Bush's problems and to try to have a chilling impact on Terry, so that he feels he can't talk about corporate responsibility, or they will go after him." Lastly, Democrats have suggested that McAuliffe did nothing worse than the first President Bush, who in early 1998 made a speech for Global Crossing and opted to forgo his usual $80,000 fee and instead accept Winnick's offer to be paid in stock. Bush sold the stock in November 1999 for $4.45 million — an extraordinarily lucrative deal, although not as rich as McAuliffe's. Altogether, it's not a terribly convincing defense. Holding a House committee hearing on the collapse of Global Crossing is a perfectly legitimate use of Congress's investigative authority, especially when one considers that there are nearly a dozen ongoing investigations of the Enron scandal underway (and considering that the Democratic-controlled Senate has shown no interest in Global Crossing). As for former President Bush, Democrats might score some points with that argument, but they know there is one key political difference between the two cases, and that is that the former president is not taking a highly public and combative role on the issue of corporate ethics. He hasn't entered the fray, and it might prove difficult to pull him into it. Finally, the Democrats' key defense of McAuliffe might prove to be a hard sell, too. Yes, McAuliffe isn't president, and yes, a president is subjected to more scrutiny than anyone else. But there is also significant precedent in Washington for a presidentaccusers to find themselves in the spotlight. In this case, it's probably safe to say that Terry McAuliffe, the head of the Democratic party, was closer to Gary Winnick than George W. Bush ever was to Kenneth Lay. How could one not ask questions about that? In July, not long after the story of the president's sale of Harken Energy stock appeared in the press, McAuliffe loudly proclaimed, "Every day, more questions arise." Now he's finding out that's true in more ways than one.
‘Everything
Changed’ In war, can there be such a thing as a victory that comes too cheap? Of course not: A victory in which not a single Amer ican life is lost should be the ideal. It's true, however, that an easy victory can sometimes have damaging consequences. After 9/11, did the seeming ease with which we defeated al-Qaeda and its Taliban landlords persuade Americans that the war on terrorism was basically over? And have we lost our sense of purpose as a result? We can perhaps judge this more clearly if we go back beyond the Afghan campaign to the weeks immediately following Sep tember 11. At that time, the U.S. benefited from the strong popular reactions to the terrorist attacks both at home and abroad. There was an overwhelming sense of national unity; a moral clarity that allowed most people to blame the terrorists rather than "root causes" for the attacks; and a genuine outpouring of support for America, especially from our European allies. Even when the popular feelings of outrage and vulnerability were still raw and vital, however, one could detect very subtle signs that not enough had changed. Let me mention two such signs. First, as soon as the legislation to strengthen security arrangements began to be discussed, the Democrats made it a rationalization for federalizing airport workers, and their house intellectuals broadened the argument to assert that 9/11 had changed America's mind about the need for big government. There was little evidence to support either proposition. After all, it was federal workers in the Immigration and Natur alization Service who had most spectacularly failed to protect the nation. And the government workers the public most admired after 9/11 were firemen, police, and soldiers — who incarnate the ideal of "small government," performing those minimal functions of government admitted to be necessary by all parties. But it was a hint that partisan politics would be carried on as usual under the guise of defending the public. The second sign was, if anything, more unsettling. It was the sudden outpouring of presidential and other appeals — solemnly echoed from pulpits and TV screens — that Americans should refrain from surging out and attacking innocent Muslims. In principle there is nothing wrong, and a great deal right, with such appeals. Americans regret that some European governments have not issued similar appeals on behalf of Jews under attack. But the difference is that Jews have been under attack in Europe, both physically and morally, in large numbers (largely, as it happens, by Muslims); whereas there was no sign whatsoever of general hostility to Muslims among Americans. Nine months later, indeed, only 51 cases of civil discrimination and 65 cases of criminal threats and violence against Muslims in the U.S. have been shown to have any basis in fact: a very small backlash indeed. Nor was there a corresponding presidential appeal to Muslims in the U.S. to condemn the 9/11 attack and to express their loyalty to the United States. Such an appeal would have been amply justified, since in the early weeks some mullahs were issuing highly qualified criticisms of Osama bin Laden, and others outright support. Yet the instinctive response of the political elite, including a Republican president, to a shattering terrorist attack was to worry that ordinary Americans would now molest any innocent Muslim they ran across. Underneath the patriotic unanimity, the political establishment harbored the fear that the American majority was racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic — and that others needed protection from it. Taken together, these two signs also indicated something else: namely, that insofar as 9/11 might establish new directions in government policy, it was likely to extend government regulation but not to strengthen either real security or the sense of national solidarity on which the war effort might ultimately depend. At the time, that seemed hardly to matter since national solidarity and that high sense of alertness born of present danger were everywhere. But a national mood can dissipate. What was needed to preserve its concrete benefits indefinitely was a national program for homeland security, a foreign policy that turned the sympathy of the allies into a permanent anti-terrorist front, and a cultural policy that made the mood of "United We Stand" into the basis of an inclusive American identity that would replace the uneasy multicultural theory of American nationhood. Then, before any of these things could be attempted, all eyes were suddenly on Afghanistan. A
LOSS OF PURPOSE Homeland security has degenerated into a bureaucratic reorganization within Washington and into the mindless application of unrealistic rules outside it. Within Washington, the president and his advisers have decided to bring together a slew of different agencies under one roof; but this huge effort to es tablish new bureaucratic relationships amounts to what psychologists call a displacement exercise — doing something point less in order to avoid doing something difficult. Outside Washington, homeland security has become notorious for such episodes as subjecting Al Gore to a "random" airport search because of rules that declare everyone equally likely to be a terrorist. Though they may be random, these absurdities are far from accidental. Transparently respectable citizens are subjected to long delays and inspections because Washington is unwilling to offend ethnic lobbies either by the larger solution of reducing immigration to levels compatible with national security or by the smaller one of confining searches to those passengers who fit a terrorist profile (which is not, incidentally, a racial profile, though it may include racial or national aspects). The airport checks, too, are a displacement exercise. Would these evasions have been acceptable if the national sense of urgency — tangible a year ago — still prevailed? On foreign policy, the administration has foolishly allowed the sympathy for America so prevalent a year ago to degenerate into mild hostility at best and outright opposition at worst. The explanation of this change is not that President Bush has pursued a unilateralist course on Kyoto and so on, as the Left argues, nor that all the Europeans are inveterate anti-Americans, as the Right argues. America's error was, rather, to seek to get its way without having argued its case (until Ambassador John Bolton began to do so relatively recently). That made the U.S. seem arrogant; the solution in future is to present the U.S. case reasonably, and at an early stage of the debate. As for the Europeans' being anti-democratic, some are and some ain't. An administration eager to bind Europe to itself in the war on terror would have subtly set about a strategy of "divide and rule," separating out those European nations willing to help. In order to do so, the U.S. would have had to undermine those aspects of the European Union that serve to unify "Europe" and to do so largely against U.S. policies. Nothing of the kind has happened. Instead, American policy continues on its postwar course of encouraging all European integration. It would be comforting to report that American conservatives had criticized and opposed this State Department drift. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, they have accepted the false picture of a Europe already unified in opposition to the U.S., denounced it in apocalyptic terms, and gone on to advance strategic fantasies of replacing NATO with an anti-Islamic alliance built on Turkey (an Islamic country), Russia (which just signed a trade deal with Iraq), India (which is violently hostile to America's client, President Musharraf of Pakistan), and Israel. It is, of course, an achievement of sorts to have produced a foreign policy even more unrealistic than that of the U.S. State Department. But the general public in most European countries is unconcerned about these elevated matters. What has harmed the U.S. with ordinary Europeans (and given the inveterate anti-Americans a political weapon) has been the impression Americans have sometimes given of not appreciating the allied support they got in Afghanistan and not wanting support against Iraq. Not very surprisingly, this elicits a reaction of hostile unconcern. And — unfortunately for the conservative argument that the U.S. can lightly dispense with European allies — skeptical or hostile European sentiments then strengthen American dissenters. What we have recently witnessed, until Vice President Cheney recovered the initiative for the administration, is the slow erosion of national fortitude by debate and criticism as indignation at 9/11 fades from memory. And that resolve has weakened in part because we have not maintained it among our allies — again until recently, when Condoleezza Rice directly addressed British opinion via the BBC. A
NEW NATIONAL IDENTITY In other words, there must be no stereotyping of Muslims in general because the terrorists who committed the crimes of 9/11 were Muslim, but the Americans can be reasonably blamed even for things that never happened, such as the backlash against Arab Americans during the Gulf War. We are the first ethnocentric masochists: We blame ourselves, and excuse others, for all crimes, ancient and modern. A "soft" version of this multicultural masochism has filtered down to schools, churches, and local institutions across America. When Iowa proposed to note in driver's licenses issued to foreigners that they were "Non-renewable: documentation required," a local lawyer immediately jumped up to compare this to the issuing of a yellow star to Jews by Nazis. Or when a primary school held a cultural festival at which the children were invited to attend in "their" ethnic costume, a young boy who felt himself to be American was sent home for coming dressed as a cowboy. This sternness does not apply in reverse. When the University of North Carolina required its incoming students to study the Koran for educational purposes, it issued them extracts and commentaries that omitted any bloodthirsty passages; the ACLU raised no objection to this state-enforced uncritical religious instruction. This syndrome afflicts most national institutions. The president himself is party to it — almost certainly because, as a good Christian man who recognizes the demands of charity, he imagines that the moral choice is one between multiculturalism and bigotry. In fact, the choice is between a national identity that brings all ethnic groups together under one "American" heading and a multicultural identity that separates them into distinct and possibly hostile cultural compartments. In weakening the springs of patriotic sentiment, this pathology ultimately erodes our determination to defeat the forces that attacked us a year ago. Immediately following 9/11, Bush had the opportunity to sweep away this multicultural masochism — because the healthy unifying patriotism that should replace it was welling up all around him. He neglected to do so then, and the same task will be harder in future. Eventually, however, it will have to be done — or we will have al-Qaedas germinating aggressively within the United States.
Hunting
Tiger The pressure on Tiger Woods is mounting, and it has nothing to do with golf: It's the pressure to blacken up — to be a social activist, a racial spokesman. Throughout his young career, Woods has resisted this, standing on individualism, and universalism. But it would be hard for even the strongest person not to crack. Right from the start, Woods was a breath of fresh air, not least "socially." When he appeared at the Masters as an amateur, Jim Nantz of CBS asked him whether he had a special obligation to be a role model for "minority kids." The expected answer was, "Yes, of course." The actual answer was, "No. I have an obligation to all kids." Later on, Larry King went at him on CNN. "Do you feel that you're an influence on young blacks?" Woods answered, "Young children." This seemed to annoy "the King": "Just 'young children'? Don't you think you've attracted a lot more blacks to the game?" Replied Woods, "Yeah, I think I've attracted minorities to the game, but you know what? Why limit it to just that? . . . Everybody should be in the fold." As the years passed, Woods held pretty firm, not allowing himself to be bullied, rarely submitting to racial-political games. ‘A
GOLFER AND A HUMAN BEING’ Thus did Powell come within an inch of calling Woods a Tom. Of course, there is much truth — social truth — to this "one drop" business in America. The old saying is, America's the only country in the world in which a white woman can give birth to a black baby but a black woman can't give birth to a white baby. André Watts is considered, everywhere, a black American pianist. Who cares that his mother was a Hungarian? Woods is certainly not unmindful of all of this. He has given ample proof that he doesn't have his head in the sand. But neither is he bound by other people's racial imperatives. Early in the game, he put out a "media statement" on what he called "my heritage," declaring that this would be "the final and only comment I will make regarding the issue" (fat chance — but the sentiment was nice). Woods said, in part, "The critical and fundamental point is that ethnic background and/or composition should NOT make a difference. It does NOT make a difference to me. The bottom line is that I am an American . . . and proud of it! That is who I am and what I am. Now, with your cooperation [meaning the media's], I hope I can just be a golfer and a human being." Again: Fat chance. After he won the Masters for the first time in 1997, Woods told Oprah Winfrey "I'm just who I am" — to hell with the "genetic code" — and the stuff hit the fan. Many people charged him with virtual race treason. Leonard Pitts Jr., a columnist for the Miami Herald, said candidly, "It's simple. I want to claim him. I want him for my side." Mary A. Mitchell in the Chicago Sun-Times all but accused Woods of passing, and said, "It is as if he thumbed his nose at an entire race of people." Ebony magazine commissioned an entire symposium on the subject, with much hand-wringing. In 2000, the NAACP asked Woods to boycott a PGA Tour event in South Carolina, in protest of the Confederate flag. Tiger wouldn't go along, saying, "I'm a golfer. That's their deal, not mine." This was taken as evidence of a lack of "social conscience," and many said that this young, cocky, selfish man would simply have to "mature" — would have to get hip to the American reality. Woods's friend Charles Barkley, the ex-NBA star, remarked, "Tiger likes to be okay with everybody, to appeal to all people. . . . [But] I tell him that Thai people don't get hate mail, black people do." (Barkley also took notice of Woods's fondness for scuba diving. "I don't get it," he joked. "Black people aren't supposed to scuba dive." He made no speculation about "buoyancy.") ‘DISGRACE’ Tiger was in a delicate position, as a three-time Masters winner and someone who, it seemed, did not equate a men-only policy with a whites-only policy. But the media class didn't see it his way, and flaunted their virtue by painting Woods as a near Ku Kluxer. Sally Jenkins, writing in the Washington Post, sicced Martin Luther King on him: "Those who sit at rest buy their quiet with disgrace." C. Jemal Horton, in the Indianapolis Star, sicced Malcolm X on him: "A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything" (and Woods's performance was "sickening," Horton said). The Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page suggested that Woods failed to win the British Open because "his conscience was bothering him." He further warned that the young man had better get "on the right side of history." Tiger, for his part, backpedaled somewhat, declaring on his website, "Would I like to see women members? Yes, that would be great, but I am only one voice. I'm not even a regular member." (A Masters champion is an honorary member.) At the recent PGA Tournament, on the general subject of political involvement, Woods observed, "It seems like the more putts I've holed and the lower my scores have become, the more knowledgeable I'm supposed to have gotten! . . . I can't be the leader in all causes. I'm still 26, and obviously I can probably do more as I get older and understand what I can and cannot give my time to. Right now, I'm very focused on my foundation's development and urban youth." That's what he clings to, when these questions come up: the Tiger Woods Foun dation, dedicated to underprivileged kids. That's what his defenders cling to, too. See, they say, he's doing his part! (Tiger has even used these words: "I've done my part. Thatwhat my foundation is all about. I'm trying to do my share.") And yet, what Tiger is doing more broadly — setting golf records, conducting himself in gentlemanly fashion, rising above racial-political madness — will do more for the "causes" than anything else. But what causes? Those of American unity, reason, good will. A
SPECIAL ROLE A few weeks ago, Jack Nicklaus — Tiger's predecessor, in many ways — got it exactly right (as usual). After playing an exhibition match with Woods, he said, "Tiger really got put on the spot with a question about, 'Why aren't you doing more for women?' It was all I could do to bite my tongue. I say, 'What more can he do?' Tiger Woods, just by being Tiger Woods, is doing a lot. He is doing a lot by the example he sets every day, the role model he is, the foundation he runs" (ah, there's that foundation again — a kind of security blanket). And Michael Wilbon, another Washington Post columnist, issued the Bear a helluva spanking. He said, "Jack Nicklaus doesn't get to frame this conversation because it isn't about golf or championship competition. It's about social conscience and obligation as a person of color in America, and in that area, Nicklaus is no expert; he's not even in the game." A more familiar way to put this is, "It's a black thing — you wouldn't understand." That, you can read on a T-shirt. There is no doubt that Tiger will never be "black" enough for some — for the "blacker-than-thou" crowd, as Thomas Sowell once put it. The other day, I read a headline out of the nation's capital: "D.C. mayor 'proud' of his term; [Anthony] Williams disputes he's not 'black enough' to lead city." There are some who hate colorblindness — they fairly spit out the word — more than they hate racism itself. At least racism is something they can understand, being a type of racial obsession. A wag once said, "Philo-Semitism is the higher anti-Semitism." We might contemplate something similar in the realm of race. Tiger, much against his will, is the rope in a kind of tug-of-war. All of us, indeed, want a piece of him. The racialists want to claim him — want him to be sort of the Maxine Waters of the fairways — and we anti-racialists want to claim him too. A lot of conservatives view him as one of them: He's devoted to excellence, he works in near solitude, he is utterly disciplined, he has a cussed streak, he asserts the right to be free from politics, he's hard to push around, he's financially shrewd ("tight," his father says), he despises whining, and — perhaps not least — he has a barely disguised contempt for the media! (At the PGA, a reporter asked him what was the "worst aspect" of being Tiger Woods. With a smile, Tiger pointed to the journos assembled for the press conference and said, "Easy: This.") Michael Wilbon writes, "Tiger so has our attention, he has no idea what an agent for change he can be." Oh? Perhaps Tiger, who has lived with teeming, demanding crowds since he was a tyke, knows a bit more about this than the rest of us do. And why can't he be an agent for change in a universalist, colorblind, anti-racialist direction? Why can't his change tend toward transcendence? Writes Wilbon, "There's every reason to believe, given his intelligence and who his father is, that Tiger will develop his own social conscience." How amazingly condescending. What do you think his protests for One America — "all children," "everybody should be in the fold" — are, if not a social conscience? Wilbon: "A lot of people in this world are waiting to hear his voice." You mean, you haven't heard it? The bottom line is that I am an American. I'm just who I am. A golfer and a human being. Wilbon: "I'm one of those who believe that, when it's time, Tiger's voice will be clear and unwavering." It has been. It's just that a lot of folks haven't liked it. And they will hound him and hound him until he falls into step. They will never leave him alone. Never, never. Can Tiger hold out, be true to himself and the ideals he has already articulated? That would be as amazing as his golf record. |
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