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Saddam and the
Terrorists From 1993 to 1998, the Clinton administration politicized intelligence on global terrorism and the rising power of al Qaeda to such an extent that serious opportunities to dismantle Osama bin Laden's enterprise, and even capture him, were either ignored or purposely botched. I know, because I negotiated more than one opportunity — including with Sudan — and witnessed firsthand the games the Clinton White House played with the threats to our national security. So it is fair game, today, to ask whether the Bush administration did the same. Did we go to war with inadequate justification? President Bush's political opponents are making the most of the failure — so far — to find the WMD. But they are missing the larger picture. Finding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction may be a political imperative in Washington, but bin Laden's unholy alliance with Saddam was the most important reason to destroy Saddam's regime. And evidence uncovered after the Iraq war proves this alliance, and its potential purposes, beyond any reasonable doubt.
In early May, the Institute on Religion and Democracy sent a letter to President Bush, prompted by South Korean president Roh Moo Hyun's visit to Washington. The letter — spearheaded by Christian conservatives — issued a plea in behalf of Roh's suffering neighbors: "We call on you to give voice to desperate cries for freedom from the tormented people of North Korea." The liberal National Council of Churches received a very different letter, concerning its work in North Korea: The head of a North Korean government-approved Christian church group thanked the Council for siding with the "international solidarity movement for peace" and condemned America's "high-handed and imprudent acts." Liberal religious groups, which once enjoyed a monopoly on the issue of human rights, are largely silent about abuses not only in North Korea but in many other repressive states, including Cuba, China, Sudan, Nigeria, and Iran. In recent years, religious conservatives have become the most effective international human-rights crusaders.
The Center for Global Development recently announced that the United States ranks 20th out of 21 countries when it comes to helping poorer nations. Take just one category, peacekeeping: Greece scores a perfect 9.0; the Netherlands more than doubles the U.S. score (3.5 to 1.5). Greece scores high because it has placed 2,000 soldiers in Bosnia and Kosovo. The fact that these countries are on Greece's doorstep is not considered relevant. (The CGD does, however, consider strategic interest whenever any U.S. military action is scored.) And the Netherlands? Only a year ago the entire Dutch government resigned in disgrace because Dutch peacekeepers had allowed 8,000 Bosnian Muslims to be slaughtered right before their eyes. In the CGD's world, the gesture is everything. It was only after American power beat the Serbs into submission that the region became safe enough for Dutch and Greek peacekeepers — but we receive no points for that.
Those who claim that research into new, low-yield nuclear weapons represents a move away from the goal of deterring war fail to grasp the most basic realities of deterrence. To begin with, if we want to deter an opponent from attacking, the opponent must actually believe our threats to some degree. This is not a complicated issue. Threats that are known — or thought — to be empty just don't work; ask any parent or police officer. Our existing arsenal's generally high yields and limited precision could inflict so many innocent casualties that enemies may believe the U.S. president would be paralyzed by "self-deterrence." America's popular aversion to causing "collateral damage" is well known. Precision, low-yield weapons that would inflict a much lower level of civilian casualties — or that could be made capable against hardened, deeply buried facilities, such as might house an opponent's biological weapons — will appear much more credible to some opponents, and thus constitute a better deterrent to war.
Indigent adults receive cash payments of $320 to $395 a month, with only a nominal work requirement for the able-bodied. Supplemented by a little panhandling, this is a tidy sum in the agreeable Northern California climate. When I wrote about the situation on this magazine's website, I got e-mails from people in neighboring towns and counties saying: "Please don't write about this. We're happy with things just as they are. San Francisco takes in all our homeless people, so we're spared the problem..." Naturally this logic is lost on the city's irredeemably liberal Board of Supervisors and their soulmates in the local press. Ilene Lelchuk of the San Francisco Chronicle recently began a sentence thus: "With San Francisco's homeless population growing despite the millions of dollars the city spends annually to help its most desperate residents..." What a strange and wonderful thing is the liberal mind! (Recall the similarly clueless New York Times headline: "Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling.") Health-Care
Symposium The problem today isn't that conservatives lack sound proposals to address the public's concerns. Bush himself was an early convert to such ideas as tax fairness for individual health care and market-based solutions to the insolvency of Medicare. But these issues, understandably, haven't been on the front burner, and as a result, the public still isn't buying what Republicans are selling. We have a choice now to think and act boldly about freedom and personal responsibility in health care — or just cede the issue to the other side and hope that voters will be distracted by world events. But keep this in mind: In an April poll for the Kaiser Family Foundation, 36 percent of Americans said they were "very worried" about the cost of health care and insurance, with 24 percent "very worried" about getting the health care they need. In the same poll, only 14 percent were "very worried" about a terrorist attack. Health-Care
Symposium During the hearing, Robert Reischauer — the former director of the Congressional Budget Office and now a budget expert at the Urban Institute — stated that "If you could tell me that we could design a health system in America that would provide coverage to everyone so we didn't have 34 million people uninsured, but the price of that would be that we would, in 1999, have to live with 1997 medicine, I would say, fine, as long as the 1997 medicine continued each year." But is it really "fine" to impose that sort of bargain on Americans? Pharmaceutical innovation not only allows people with diseases to live longer (and indeed those suffering from AIDS, certain forms of cancer, or rare childhood disorders to live at all), it also reduces the cost of treating disease. Indeed, according to economist Frank Lichtenberg, for each additional dollar spent on newer medicines, total health-care spending is reduced by $6.17. Health-Care
Symposium Passing a drug bill is a top priority for the Republican leadership in both houses, and the White House is pushing hard for the bill to allow not only for a drug benefit but also for modernization of Medicare itself. As both sides begin to look at details of the latest agreement, the test for conservatives will be whether the bill veers too far from the goals of injecting viable market competition into the Medicare program. The ClintonCare battles of 1993-94 showed that most Americans don't want the government to control their health care. But it already controls Medicare, which covers those over age 65 and the disabled. Medicare is our version of a single-payer health-care system, and as such is particularly vulnerable to expansion of government control. It's crucial that the final legislation take a hands-off approach to program updates. Health-Care
Symposium Four months ago, the British health secretary, Alan Milburn, revealed that he was planning to introduce a health-care voucher. He didn't call it that, of course — vouchers are a nasty right-wing idea. As Mr. Milburn put it: "From December 2005… [patients] will be offered choice at the point the [general practitioner] refers them to hospital. Patients needing elective surgery will be able to select from at least four or five different hospitals, again including both [National Health Service] and private-sector providers." The cost of the patients' treatment will be quantified and made available to competing health-care providers. Prices are to be set for procedures, and anyone who wants to will be able to compete for that business. That is the essence of the voucher, first enunciated by Milton Friedman in 1955 — and announced by Alan Milburn to zero fanfare. It was almost as if he was ashamed of it. Health-Care
Symposium Twelve years ago, Canadians were scandalized to learn that a Toronto hospital was using its CT scanner to do brain examinations on dogs for $300 (Cdn.) a pop. Meanwhile, patients were waiting up to three months to get checked out. When did Canadian health care go to the dogs? CT scans are considered "medically necessary." According to the Canada Health Act — the law that completed the socialization of Canadian health care in 1984 — procedures deemed medically necessary fall under the government monopoly. Cosmetic plastic surgery, on the other hand, is not subject to government rationing — which means the free market kicks in and waiting lines all but disappear. But when a Canadian citizen needs to get a CT scan of his brain, he has to wait until the government is good and ready to give him one. Dogs, however, are free to shop around. And things have not changed for the better since 1991 — when the dog scandal broke.
Justice O'Connor gets her way more often than the chief justice does. As the "swing vote" on the Court, O'Connor is in the majority more often than any of her colleagues. Legal briefs in important cases are written to appeal, above all, to her. As a result of her position at the center of the Court, she can be a powerful voice for conservatives when she is with them. When the Court upheld school choice last year, it was her unqualified endorsement of the decision in a concurring opinion, as much as the majority opinion itself, that conferred solidity to the ruling. But it is disturbing to reflect that, given the power the Supreme Court has assumed, O'Connor has become the most powerful woman in America. Excluding foreign policy, indeed, one could even say that she is the most powerful person in America.
Far from recognizing these seeds of genocide for what they are, the Islamist fellow-traveling Left has figured the Palestine-Israel conflict into a cause mobilizing blind commitment reminiscent of the Spanish Civil War in the Thirties. Two British Muslims have been suicide bombers in Tel Aviv. José Saramago, a Nobel Prize winner, thinks that Israel ought not to exist. A British writer, A. N. Wilson, declares that the creation of the state of Israel was a mistake, now due to be redressed. Tom Paulin, a poet and English professor at Oxford, told the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram that American-born Jews on the West Bank ought to be shot. The German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, turns out to have attended in his revolutionary youth a PLO conference in Algiers devising strategies to attack Israel. In Holland, Dyab Abu Jahjah, founder of the Arab European League which hopes to rally the continent's millions of disaffected Muslims, states openly, "The Jews are the enemy we fight."
For eons now, liberals have teased conservatives about one thing (well, many things, but I'm thinking of one in particular): the fluoridation of water. "Oh, you work at National Review? What do you do, write editorials denouncing the fluoridation of the water supply?" Ha, ha, ha. (Actually, we spend our time advocating separate lunch counters for Negroes.) In many quarters, "fluoridation of water" is a code word for right-wing kookery. Well, imagine my surprise — and delight — when I was talking recently with a dentist friend of mine and the subject of water fluoridation came up: "We still have to fight on that, all over the country," he said. "What," I said, "you mean the Birchers are still at it?" "Oh, no," he replied. "It's the Left. The opposition comes from the environmentalist, earthy-crunchy, sandal-wearing Left." Well, well, well. Who's laughin' now, baby?
El Sid, Vicious — Byron York . . . The Clinton Wars, by Sidney Blumenthal Lost in the Male — John Derbyshire . . . The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism, by J. Michael Bailey Music: Rumors Greatly Exaggerated — Patrick Kavanaugh on the non-death of classical music. Shelf Life: Laughter and Remembering — Michael Potemra on George Orwell and others. City Desk: After the Fall — Richard Brookhiser on sad tales of today's Manhattan. |
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