 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Immigrants know that once they have made it to Los Angeles, they will be quite safe from deportation; and their new employers know that no legal sanctions will be imposed against their employment. Our "porous" borders are a direct result of that political failure — and they will be made secure only when the U.S. government begins to enforce immigration law. That will necessarily be a sensitive and potentially disruptive matter, but it should begin with the serious enforcement of deportation law. After all, the U.S. has something else to consider. Our porous borders allow into the U.S. not only hard-working migrants but also resourceful terrorists. As long as the number of illegal immigrants remains so large, and the immigrant-smuggling networks exist unharried, they provide a kind of underground sea in which terrorists swim, as well as gardeners and nannies. That, too, is a reality.
In a letter to Republican senator George Allen, deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage wrote that, although he "sympathizes" with the victims' families, the frozen assets of terrorist states should not be spent to satisfy judgments won by "victims whose lawyers happened to be successful in obtaining judgments against foreign states at a particular point in time." Armitage further suggested that terrorism victims should be compensated — but by the U.S. taxpayer, not the regimes responsible for the terrorist attacks. Why? "There is no better example [of protecting national security] than the critical role blocked assets played in obtaining the release of the U.S. hostages in Tehran in 1981," he wrote. In other words, Armitage believes that State needs those funds to give back to the regimes in question if they are smart enough to kidnap American citizens and demand ransom payments.
Carina and hundreds of other American children will remain separated from their parents as long as the primary responsibility for these international criminal cases remains with State. The reason for this is simple: The unavoidable competing demands of international relations make it impossible for the State Department to elevate the rights of American parents and their children above its most pressing concern — good relations with foreign governments. To better guarantee the rights of individual citizens, responsibility for international abduction cases should be transferred to the Justice Department. While the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has helped to see that over 90 percent of children abducted to the United States are returned, the State Department has failed to act effectively on behalf of children abducted from it: Currently, American parents win the return of their children in fewer than 20 percent of the thousand cases reported each year.
A good deal of the current hatred in the Middle East for the United States springs from the unpredictability which followed the unexpected reprieve of Saddam. The United States suddenly became inscrutable — why had it allowed him to live to fight another day? Some believe Saddam must have been maintained in Baghdad as a secret agent. For others, though, the key to the puzzle is simpler. In Beirut in 1983, a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed 241 Marines sent to keep the peace there. When the entire force was then withdrawn in panic, a single terrorist appeared to be more powerful than the United States. Terrorists have since claimed around 400 American lives, provoking in response the ineffective firing of cruise missiles and lots of language as fierce as it was empty. Osama bin Laden and his kind, and Saddam Hussein and his kind, conclude that the United States is not the power it pretends to be.
Being able to pass on wealth to one's children is a strong incentive for wealth accumulation. By reducing that incentive, the estate tax reduces saving and investment. Republican staffers estimated in 1998 that the effect of the tax has been to reduce America's capital stock by half a trillion dollars. Moreover, in the late 1990s, estates worth between $2.5 and $5 million dollars actually paid a higher average tax rate than estates worth more than $20 million. Is the estate tax nevertheless necessary to raise funds? No. The estate tax brought in $26.5 billion — around 1.4 percent of federal revenues — last year. And that's an overestimate. In the 1980s, Stanford economist B. Douglas Bernheim concluded that because of its wealth-destroying effects, the estate tax probably caused federal revenues to be lower than they would be without the tax. Needless to say, the pro-tax pundits do not grapple with the possibility that the estate tax is a revenue loser.
The public might have remained in the dark about the ossuary, which emerged from the antiquities market rather than an archeological excavation. Somebody had looted it and sold it. But André Lemaire published his research in Biblical Archaeology Review, a maverick magazine that presents scholarly information to interested lay readers. Its editor, Hershel Shanks, abhors looting — as well as the attitudes of the professional organizations. "[Academics] need to realize that there are bad collectors and good collectors," says Shanks. "The bad collectors are the ones who buy things and stash them in their basements. The good ones open their collections to researchers and eventually donate what they own to public institutions." Demonizing collectors as a class simply encourages the good ones to turn bad and the bad ones to stay that way. If the marketplace were legitimized, more collectors would conduct their business in the public eye — and be able to place a greater emphasis on authenticated items.
For liberals, it's easier — and in a really sick way, more satisfying — to toss out the profile of the typical serial killer, to heap scorn on the experts, than to confront the witch's brew of paranoia, anti-Semitism, and political nonsense that sculpts a John Muhammad into a psychopath and that outfits like the New York Times indulge and pooh-pooh. Rather than focus on what the sniper killings really were about, the media liberals have decreed that they weren't about political rage or destructive paranoia, but about diversity. Turns out the guys were black! What excellent news! Just as there are now black doctors and lawyers and accountants and golf pros and everything else, now there are even black psycho killers! And you nasty Republicans want to dismantle affirmative action right when we're making such progress?
Canada is, quite simply, not a serious country anymore. It has internalized the assumptions of U.N.-ology: not just anti-Americanism but also the belief that Western nations don't need military might. As a consequence, they are simply unarmed. If al-Qaeda launched a September 11-style attack from Canadian soil, we would have only two choices: ask Canada to take charge, or take charge ourselves. The predictable — and necessary — U.S. action would spark outrage. We certainly don't need the burden of turning "the world's longest undefended border" into one of the world's longest defended ones. And that's why a little invasion is precisely what Canada needs. In the past, Canada has responded to real threats with courage and conviction (some say more Canadians went south to enlist for war in Vietnam than Americans went north to dodge it). If the U.S. were to launch a quick raid, blow up some symbolic but unoccupied structure — Toronto's CN Tower, or an empty hockey stadium — Canada would rearm overnight.
The North Korea disaster clearly strengthens the case for pre-emption, for once Saddam gets the bomb, options will shrink even as dangers rise. In the face of newly magnified risks, U.S. allies will discount American willingness to send conventional forces into harm's way; they will smell the air and adjust their postures, and America's political position will face inevitable erosion in consequence. To prevent all this from happening, we must go to war. But as all dilemmas have two parts, so does this one. While it is too dangerous to let Iraq acquire deliverable nuclear weapons, the very act of preventing it will send this untoward message worldwide: If you want to deter the United States from attacking you with irresistible conventional military force, better get a nuke — get it quick and get it quiet. Thus the multiple dangers of doing too little, too much, or too timidly transform the Iraq debate from one about "whether" to one about "how," and then right back again to one about "whether."
Giving the FBI the lead role against al-Qaeda violated the basic rule of warfare: Know thine enemy. Though the FBI is the best police force in the world, it is not geared to the assessment of international jihad. Asking veterans of bank robbery and child-porn cases to become scholars of comparative religion, to forecast trends in a clash of civilizations, was a conspicuous case of wishful thinking. In the end, the problem would be not so much bad analysis as the lack of any analysis at all. In July 2000, Freeh's deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, Terry Turchie, said, "Since 1995 the FBI has avoided issuing comprehensive assessments estimating the threat against U.S. interests. Given the range of potential threats . . . from terrorist organizations . . . such assessments would be inherently too broad-based to provide much practical value." In short: The lead agency for counterterrorism would not analyze the terrorist threat.
Bitter Sage
— Richard Brookhiser Lost-and Found?
— David Klinghoffer The Wolf in the
Door — James S. Robbins Music: Doing It Their Way — Jay Nordlinger on new albums from Renée Fleming, Midori, and more
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
<% dim printurl
printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%>
