A recent NY Times poll shows that 43% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks, a claim that “[n]either the Bush administration nor any other authority has alleged.”

Hussein and bin Laden provide useful ideological touchstones for each other – each can point to the other as fellow representatives of the Arab people fighting the American aggressor – but in reality, their interests and ideology diverge sharply. Hussein is a secular dictator who doesn’t want to share any power with religious clerics. Bin Laden, on the other hand, wants an exclusively religious state. The two can use each other to make ideological hay, but when it comes to actual cooperation they’re pretty much incompatible.

All of which the American public is completely unaware of. The NY Times poll shows how far out of whack U.S. public opinion is from what’s actually going on in the Middle East. Even so, 59% of those surveyed favored giving the UN more time to conduct inspections. If they actually knew what was going on in the Middle East, that figure would undoubtedly be even higher.

Bush’s policy of “compassionate conservatism” is extremely important to the President because it allows him to portray himself as a moderate politician who is concerned about the average citizen. Bush 41, whose core political beliefs were very similar to Bush 43’s, suffered from not being seen as sufficiently populist, and ultimately lost reelection because of this. The current President Bush has learned from his father’s mistakes, and has sought to put forth a kinder gentler George Bush than his father did. As part of this strategy, “compassionate conservatism” was much in evidence in Bush's most recent State of the Union speech. However, although Bush wants to be perceived as a man of the people, he doesn’t want to actually have to follow through on any of his proposals, which leads him to make grand-sounding promises that he later finds ways to renege on. The biggest example is the wave of corporate scandals that wracked the nation last year. Bush pledged to go after the corporate criminals and reform the accounting industry, but after the public and press stopped paying attention to the issue, he took back many of his promises. Now Bush is up to the same tricks again, as the following clip from Slate’s Today’s Papers shows.

A NYT editorial notices that Bush's proposed budget suggests he's not exactly racing to deliver on his promise of increased AIDS funding in Africa. In his State of the Union address, the president pledged $10 billion over five years; the proposed '04 budget only includes a $550 million increase. Oh, and most of that cash is balanced by cuts in international health-care programs for kids.

***

Thomas Friedman’s February 16 editorial in the NY Times is the kind of essay by a public intellectual that has the capacity to shape how this period in history is seen now and in the future. What makes this essay historic is Friedman’s identification of order and disorder as the defining political division in the world today, replacing earlier divisions such as capitalism/communism and democracy/totalitarianism.

The new world system is also bipolar, but instead of being divided between East and West, it is divided between the World of Order and the World of Disorder. The World of Order is built on four pillars: the U.S., E.U.-Russia, India and China, along with all the smaller powers around them. The World of Disorder comprises failed states (such as Liberia), rogue states (Iraq and North Korea), messy states — states that are too big to fail but too messy to work (Pakistan, Colombia, Indonesia, many Arab and African states) — and finally the terrorist and mafia networks that feed off the World of Disorder.

In other words, divisions between different economic (communism vs. capitalism) and political (democracy vs. totalitarianism) systems are no longer the key divisions in global relations. This is because a) there is no longer any viable, globally led alternative to democratic capitalism, and b) since there is no longer a bipolar economic/political world order, countries can form alliances with countries that don’t have the same economic and political structures they do without setting off major ideological conflicts. Thus, the U.S. can form an alliance with China, even though China is still non-democratic and (nominally) communist. What makes Friedman’s analysis insightful is that he identifies the order/disorder polarity as the replacement for the old divisions of democracy/totalitarianism and capitalism/communism. China and the U.S. have in common that they are both operational states governed (mostly) by the rule of law. Thus, they have interests in common as orderly states, and in this era of ideological leveling, the commonality of interests based on having an orderly society is dominant.

While the implosion of the USSR and the subsequent collapse of a global opposition to democracy and capitalism is a very positive development, there is also a downside to it, and that is that order is not the same thing as good government. We have to be careful that we do not fall into complacent acceptance of and support for order for the sake of order. We can’t support a regime simply because it represents order. That doesn’t mean that we can’t work with such a regime, we just can’t lose track of the distinction between the two. Despite this drawback, however, overall the position of both the U.S. and the world as a whole is superior to what it was during the Cold War.

While Friedman’s analysis of the current world situation is an instant classic, his analysis of the vicissitudes of America’s relationship with the world is misguided and short-sighted. Friedman writes:

[S]ome Chinese intellectuals, not to mention French and Russian, actually believe you all have more to fear from American power than from Osama, Kim or Saddam. That's nuts. If America has to manage the World of Disorder alone, the American people will quickly tire. And as Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins foreign policy expert, notes, "The real threat to world stability is not too much American power. It is too little American power." Too little American power will only lead to the World of Disorder expanding.

In other words, the rest of the world is either with us or against us. America is the lesser of two evils, so the rest of the world has an obligation – not an option, an obligation – to choose us. The onus is on them. We are better than terrorists, so we don’t have to change anything we do or engage in any self-criticism or self-analysis. Of course, this logic cuts both ways. The Europeans are better than terrorists, so by the same logic we should accept them as they are, warts and all, and not complain about anything they do. The truth is that, while America is better than terrorism, our foreign policy and our relationship with the world community could be better, and there are concrete changes in our policies and patterns of communication that could improve them, which it is sheer irresponsibility and self-destructiveness on our part to ignore. It’s okay for the U.S. to direct constructive criticism towards Europe, but it’s foolish and hypocritical not to direct – and, further, to declare as unpatriotic – any criticism of our own policies and decisions.

That said, it should be noted that the above criticisms apply to Friedman’s article this week. In his article the week before (February 12), he said the following.

The first rule of any Iraq invasion is the pottery store rule: You break it, you own it. We break Iraq, we own Iraq — and we own the primary responsibility for rebuilding a country of 23 million people that has more in common with Yugoslavia than with any other Arab nation. I am among those who believe this is a job worth doing, both for what it could do to liberate Iraqis from a terrible tyranny and to stimulate reform elsewhere in the Arab world.

We don't need a broad coalition to break Iraq. We can do that ourselves. But we do need a broad coalition to rebuild Iraq, so that the American taxpayer and Army do not have to bear that full burden or be exposed alone at the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. President Bush, if he alienates the allies from going to war — the part we can do alone — is depriving himself of allies for the peace — the part where we'll need all the friends we can get.

France, China and Russia have to get serious, but so do we. The Bush talk that we can fight this war with just a "coalition of the willing" — meaning Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — is dangerous nonsense.

***

President Bush has made a habit of blocking or pulling out of treaties that form the backbone of the international community. A partial list of treaties the U.S. has discarded and decisions it has made unilaterally includes the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Kyoto Accords, tariffs on steel imports, farm subsidies, and HIV and population control measures in Africa. Now the Bush administration has added another notch to its belt of infamy. As reported in The Economist:

In November, trade ministers meeting in Sydney appeared to come close to resolving the tricky question of poor countries’ access to new medicines. Many modern drugs are simply too expensive for developing countries and the search has been on for a formula that would provide such medicines to them at much-reduced prices—provided some watertight arrangement preventing their profitable resale in the industrial world could be agreed. Yet in subsequent meetings, America has continued to block a deal acceptable to everyone else.

Watching the Bush White House take on Alan Greenspan in a battle over economic policy is a bit like watching a midget trying to gnaw the shin off of an enormous giant. Bush and company are in damage control mode right now, following Greenspan’s statement that Bush’s “stimulus” package will do nothing to help the economy and that Bush’s economic reasoning is flawed. Ari Fleischer is trying to put out the fire by saying that Greenspan actually supports the centerpiece of the Bush plan, the repeal of the dividend tax. But what Greenspan actually said is that repealing the dividend tax would be a positive step as long as taxes were raised elsewhere so that the budget deficit would not increase. This goes directly against Bush’s policy, which is to put the government deeper into debt in order to make the wealthy even richer. In the context of Greenspan’s statement as well as the bipartisan skepticism towards the Bush tax plan, Fleischer’s statement that “I look forward to continue talking to you about [the controversy over Bush’s tax plan] as the signing ceremony takes place” looks particularly presumptuous.

The problem with Bush’s pressing need to go to war against Iraq is inconsistency. All the reasons that Bush cites as reasons to go to war against Iraq apply equally to numerous other countries. Yet Bush has fixated on Iraq as opposed to other countries that are also rogue states possessing and/or seeking weapons of mass destruction. The real reason Bush is interested in Iraq is simple: oil. And Bush is right to be concerned about who controls the throttle on the world’s oil supply. Saddam knows that he is sitting on one quarter of the oil supply of the world’s richest oil region. Invading Kuwait was his attempt to increase the amount of oil reserves he controls and to menace the largest oil reserve in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia. Bush and his advisers know this, but they can’t admit that that’s the real reason they want to invade Iraq, because no one - not the American public, and not the world community - would see that as an even remotely acceptable reason for going to war. That's why Bush is using 9/11 as an excuse for attacking Iraq, even though it is not a major player in the terrorism world. It's involved slightly, but there are a number of more important countries. In terms of terrorism, Saudi Arabia is much more important than Iraq, but Saudi Arabia is the U.S.'s oil ally, and that is what is really driving the issues here, not terrorism.

Amid all the talk by President Bush and his administration about how Saddam had already provided years ago with a casus belli by his continued violation of UN resolutions, there lurks an unsaid but ever-present fact. It is the pink elephant that everyone is afraid to point out: Israel’s continued violation of several UN resolutions calling for it to pull back to the pre-1967 Israel/Palestine borders. These resolutions have been violated for so long by Israel, and their violation defended for so long and with so much political, diplomatic, and military might by the U.S., that even mentioning them or writing about them has been taken off the table years ago. Through all the disturbances in the Middle East over the past two years and through all the debates about the role of UN resolutions there, no one has once dared mention the Israel government’s continued defiance of the UN. It seems that UN resolutions don’t apply equally to all countries. Some UN resolutions are casus belle. Others are verboten.

This is just another reminder that U.S. policy in the Middle East is anything but egalitarian. It is based on maximizing spheres of influence, not protecting democracy. Citizens of the Middle East, including U.S. allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have a right to feel hostile towards their governments. Americans, when their rights were denied by their British rulers, launched a rebellion against them. When a nation’s rights are violated, the contract between the people and the government is voided. If America did not provide military and economic assistance to its Middle East allies, they would not remain in power for very long. The Israeli violations of UN resolutions would be impossible without U.S support. Funny how the same country can simultaneously push the UN towards the sternest enforcement of its own resolutions and make others disappear off the face of the earth.

***

Bush administration officials continue to tout the mendacious “average tax refund” statistic first debunked by Thomas Friedman on Januarty 21 but nevertheless repeated by Bush in the State of the Union, reports Slate. This time the guilty party is Karl Rove, speaking in a meeting with reporters and filed in a January 28 Washington Post article by Dana Milbank.

***

The editorial by Buzz Aldrin in Today’s New York Times is a total non-entity. It doesn’t even deserve to be called an editorial. Aldrin discusses such pressing issues as the distinction between the fear and anxiety astronauts experience and anecdotes about missions he took part in during his career. The only reason for the Times to publish this piece is the name recognition of its author. Aldrin says absolutely nothing about issues relevant to the Columbia or NASA. This is consistent with the general level of journalistic coverage of the Columbia disaster. What the Times daid yesterday about Bush’s supposed commitment to the space program – that it has no real substance, in that Bush never paid any attention to it before Columbia exploded – goes for how the media has reacted to the disaster as well as how Bush has. It is completely right and appropriate for the President and the media to express sympathy for the astronauts and their families, and to mourn their loss, and to investigate what caused the accident. But it is absurd to elevate this to the level of importance that it has been portrayed as. In the realm of disasters, only natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes deserve to be major news stories, because they cause major loss of life and damage to property. Minor but sensational disasters such as airplane crashes and kidnappings of children are always portrayed out of all proportion to their actual likelihood.

Bob Herbert has a good critique of the State of the Union in the New York Times. The line that surprised me most from Bush’s speech was his pledge to spend $1.2 billion on research into hydrogen-powered cars. While this research is undoubtedly a good thing, Herbert makes the following point about the context for this allotment, Bush’s overall energy policy.

The hydrogen cars initiative was a particularly deft touch for a president who has been hammered for his environmental policies. Hydrogen-powered autos could make a difference in the long term, say 20 or 30 years from now, or more. But what is much more significant is that Mr. Bush has stood like a rock with the opponents of increased fuel efficiency for the cars we're driving right now.

Bush and his energy industry cronies are probably planning something that goes about like this: spend a billion dollars on research on hydrogen-powered cars now, knowing that it will take decades for the research to pay off; tell everyone that this shows that you’re pro-environment; in the meantime, keep cleaner fuel efficiency standards from being enacted; quietly phase out the hydrogen-energy research program a few years down the road; then claim that there’s no viable hydrogen-energy technology available; and continue maintaining your stranglehold on the U.S. energy supply and further damaging the environment.

Sounds like a plan.

***

A few other gems from Herbert’s article:

The president's prescription drug benefit, tempting at first glance, is tied to a restructuring of Medicare that will curtail, not enhance, the delivery of health services to the elderly. It was designed to look like an act of compassion. It's not.

…

The Bush administration is changing the nation in fundamental ways. However one feels about a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, over the long term a bullying, go-it-alone foreign policy wedded to a military doctrine of pre-emption is a recipe for destabilization and paranoia around the world.

…

As the most powerful nation on earth, and the world's only superpower, the United States has a particular obligation to use its might wisely abroad and to distribute its benefits fairly at home.

That is not an easy mission for a hard-right-wing administration, which is why the Bush administration puts such a premium on the rhetoric of compassion.

Behind the veil of rhetoric is a Darwinian political philosophy that, if clearly understood, would repel the majority of Americans.

***

What, exactly, is the current trajectory of Christopher Hitchens? Is this guy going neo-con on us? Has he already gone there, rented a room, and unpacked his underwear? In his latest article in Slate, Hitchens refers to “the numerous wimps and faint hearts who he [Bush] somehow appointed to his administration”, presumably referring to Colin Powell and the rest of the State Department, and “the assemblage of sissies and toadies who compose the majority of the United Nations”. These statements actually puts Hitchens to the right of Bush, somewhere over in Rumsfeld territory. Hitchen makes Colin Powell look like Ted Kennedy. Suspending for a moment my judgment of Hitchens’ opinions, let’s think for a minute about whether Hitchens is flying under false colors here. This is a journalist who used to write for The Nation and has published numerous books which take quite liberal positions. But is he currently a liberal? To judge by his recent articles, the answer is no. Hitchens seems to have made a very sudden, very fast switch in political affiliation. He has pulled the journalistic equivalent of a Jim Jeffords. What those of us who are still liberals have to do is to recognize that this switch has occurred and stop treating him as a prodigal son who is testing the waters of moderate politics. Hitchens has bypassed moderation and is now acting like an imaginary member of Bush’s kitchen cabinet.

***

Bush’s State of the Union speech contained a number of memorable half-truths. He tried saying again that Iraq bought aluminum tubes to use for refining plutonium, despite the fact that Mohamed El-Baradei, director of the IAEA, has said that the tubes aren’t suitable for that, and that this has been reported in all the major newspapers. He also said that Iraq tried to buy uranium in Africa, a statement for which there is no evidence. Another li(n)e from the speech claimed that the average tax refund resulting from his “stimulus package” will come to around $1000. Merely one day earlier, however, Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times that this average is skewed highly upwards by the large refunds that will go to the very wealthy. The median tax return is closer to a few hundred dollars.

The lines that take the cake, though, were the ones about Medicare that said, "We must work toward a system in which all Americans have a good insurance policy; choose their own doctors, and seniors and low-income Americans receive the help they need. Instead of bureaucrats, and trial lawyers, and HMOs, we must put doctors, and nurses, and patients back in charge of American medicine." The problem with this is that this is the exact opposite of what Bush’s plan actually is. Bush’s plan is to give seniors the option of switching from Medicare to – drum roll please – an HMO. Only by switching to an HMO, which Bush criticizes in his speech, can seniors receive prescription drug assistance.

***

American conservatives are fond of sneering at the European economy for “lagging behind” America. But Europe’s lagging growth rate is due to the fact that European workers receive substantially better benefits than their American counterparts. European workers get 5 weeks of vacation a year and have universal health care. That doesn’t sound so bad to me. It’s true that the European economy may grow a couple percentage points slower than America’s, but that’s because they spend more money on employee benefits. They succeed in providing compensation that any American worker would be jealous of. And isn’t that the whole point of the economy? To provide a living? The American economy grows fast, but the separation between the rich and the poor is getting wider all the time. America is spending its extra growth on its richest members. Europe sacrifices its extra growth to give their workers a better living. Doesn’t their way make more sense?

Four days ago, The New Republic posted another of its anti-Palestinian manifestos on its website. (The article will appear in printed version in the February 4 issue.) The article, written by Martin Peretz, is an example of a glaring flaw in The New Republic’s editorial policy: its totally one-sided, unbalanced support for Israel over Palestine. On the whole, The New Republic is the most vocal and influential liberal voice in journalism, which makes it the most effective force for countering the highly aggressive pundit industry of the conservative right, represented by the likes of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Bob Novak. Providing a counter-force to these conservative commentators is essential to ensuring the health of Democrats and liberals in the coming years. Therefore, it would be highly valuable for The New Republic to be as strong and principled a magazine as possible. Unfortunately, The New Republic’s editorial policy towards the Israeli/Palestinian situation is not only a travesty of progressive journalism, it represents a major inconsistency in the political stance of the magazine. While staunchly supporting many key liberal positions, The New Republic’s standpoint on Israel and Palestine not only fails to give the Palestinians a fair shake, it compromises the magazine on numerous other foreign policy issues as well. By committing itself to various hawkish positions on Israel, it forces itself to support similar positions on unrelated foreign policy issues. Could this be the reason behind The New Republic’s recurrent hawkish takes on U.S. policy towards Iraq and Korea? Another way of looking at it: the National Review has the same position on this issue that The New Republic does.

The New Republic doesn’t have to be, and shouldn’t be, a cheering squad for the Palestinians. But it should maintain a balanced coverage of the Israel/Palestine situation. It can continue to point out flaws and errors in the Palestinian camp, but it has to acknowledge that there are flaws and errors in the Israeli camp that are on the same level of seriousness and bear a similar level of responsibility. By not utilizing a balanced editorial policy, The New Republic is discrediting itself as an objective source of information and as an advocate of progressivism.

***

Eric Umansky has a gem in his daily headline summary on Slate.com. A consistent tactic of the Bush administration is to try to prevent the voices of its critics and enemies from being heard, rather than debating them openly. Tactics range from accusing its critics of being unpatriotic or disloyal, to suspending the rights to attorney and other rights of due process, to criticizing the press for using unnamed sources, a practice well within the standards of journalistic ethics. Umansky quotes a story in the Washington Post that shows the latter practice for the political demagoguery it is.

The Post's "White House Notebook," written by Dana Milbank, decides to note a bit of hypocrisy in the administration: The piece points out that spokesman Ari Fleischer is deeply opposed to unattributed quotes from "administration sources." Last year, for instance, when an unnamed official was quoted as saying the White House might support a coup in Venezuela, Fleischer retorted, "The person obviously doesn't have enough confidence in what he said to say it on the record." Milbank then recounts an episode recently in which a reporter asked Fleischer about the president's poll numbers. Happy to discuss that, said Fleischer, so long as it's "on background."

***

According to the latest USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll, “the public is now split 47 percent to 47 percent on whether they have more trust in Bush or the United Nations ‘to make the right decisions regarding Iraq,’" as reported by Walter Shapiro on Slate.com. Shapiro also notes that “The same poll finds that 76 percent of those surveyed believed that Blix and Company are doing a ‘good job.’" This is a very good sign, because building trust in the U.N. is the first step towards creating a true rule of law in international relations, which ultimately is the only possible solution for reducing the level of global danger.

Probably the most important Iraq news to be printed yesterday was buried in the twentieth paragraph of the New York Times article “Rebuffing 2 Allies…”: “But they [American officials] made it clear that after weeks of circling the question, the United States had rejected the desire of most Security Council members for more time to allow weapons inspections to go forward.”

***

On a lighter note, in the same article Paul Wolfowitz is quoted as using a metaphor that may strike one as a tad ironic, considering the President’s and the SEC’s ongoing rollbacks of previously enacted accounting reforms. Comparing Iraq to a corporation guilty of fraud and UNSCOM to an auditing company, he said: "When an auditor discovers discrepancies in the books, it is not the auditor's obligation to prove where the embezzler has stashed his money. It is up to the person or institution being audited to explain the discrepancy." If the Bush administration really believes this, why are they doing everything in their power to make sure that auditors will not discover and prosecute such discrepancies?

***

What happened to Colin Powell? The dispute between the State Department and Defense Department that has been going on since the topic of Iraq first entered the national debate seems to have been terminated, in Defense’s favor, at least for now. Powell, in his latest statement, is sounding exactly like Rumsfeld and his crew. Powell said, "The question isn't how much longer do you need for the inspections to work. Inspections will not work." This is the first major defeat for Powell and the State Department, but what exactly caused this reversal remains opaque.

***

Kerry had a good quote in yesterday’s New York Times. In a speech at Georgetown, he said “I say to the president, show respect for the process of international diplomacy because it is not only right, it can make American stronger." If Democrats are going to capitalize on Bush’s dropping approval ratings, they are going to have to dispel the notion that they are weak and the Republicans are strong. As Clinton said sometime last week, in times of danger and uncertainty the most important thing to the public is the appearance of strength. The Democrats can combine this with the public’s other concern, avoiding an unnecessary war, if they make the same point that Kerry did yesterday, that going to war will actually make the U.S. weaker, not stronger.

***

In his daily rundown of the major newspapers’ top stories on Slate.com, Eric Umansky quotes a disturbing statistic that was cited briefly in a USA Today article. According to the article, between 1998 and 2001 “Median net worth for whites rose 17 percent to $120,900 but fell 4.5 percent to $17,000 for minorities.” As Umansky says, “If those stats are correct, they deserve a lot more attention.” It would be a disservice to the national interest if they don’t receive that attention.

***

The nascent Hart campaign for President continues to pick up steam, now moving from the pages of The New Republic to The New York Times. What Hart lacks is money and a campaign organization, so the more free ink he gets from journalists, the closer he gets to being able to make a legitimate run at the nomination. Hart is easily the smartest candidate in the Democratic field, and potentially the most charismatic as well, if he can overcome the public’s memory of the extramarital affair that drove him out of the 1984 race. If he does, then his wealth of ideas for reinventing government will kick in, and he could become a Clintonian type of optimistic populist, but with more hard-core policy experience. If anyone has a chance of beating Bush ’43 (and the chances of this happening are only getting better right now), it may be Hart.

Bush’s justification for eliminating the dividend tax, a massive $300 billion spending increase, is that it double taxes corporate profits. But, as this New York Times article from a few days ago points out, most earnings are taxed more than once. All the money that most people spend is taxed once as income tax. Then it is taxed again as sales tax or property tax. Imported goods may be taxed an additional time when they are brought into the country. According to the Consumer Expenditure Survey prepared by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and quoted in the Times article, when income, sales, property, excise taxes, and payroll taxes are taken into account, most households pay almost exactly the same tax rate: “For individuals and families in the lowest fifth, with an average income of $7,946 (including just $25 in dividends), the cumulative tax rate was 18 percent. For the top fifth, with an average income of $116,666 (including $1,188 in dividends), the rate was 19 percent.”

So as it currently stands, although the income tax is graduated, the overall tax rate is actually flat. That means that lowering taxes for the wealthy will actually push the tax system towards reverse-graduation. Since not even President Bush is not a proponent of the flat tax, if he wants to be faithful to his own position, he should be raising taxes on the wealthy in order to make our tax system as a whole graduated.

There’s a great article in The New Republic (online version only) about Lieberman’s plans (rumors?) to emphasize his devotion to orthodox Judaism in his presidential campaign. The article makes the excellent point that Dems are needlessly letting Republicans horsewhip them over their (the Republicans’) supposed superiority on the religion issue. Polls show that Republicans have a huge advantage when it comes to religious voters, who comprise a large and dependable portion of the Republican base. Winning just some of those voters away from the Republicans would go a long way to making the ’04 election a better one for Democrats than the ’02 one was. Traditionally, Democrats have been shy about broadcasting a religious message because they don’t want to be seen as excluding anyone (an attitude they should be proud of). But as this article shows, religion doesn’t have to run counter to the Democrats’ message. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that religious teaching supports the Democrats’ platform than the Republicans’, a point illustrated by the following story that appeared in the New Republic article concerning the Reverend Jim Wallis, the founding editor of Sojourners, a bi-monthly progressive Christian commentary on faith, politics, and culture

Wallis recently spoke out in favor of the estate tax alongside William Gates Sr. at an event near Capitol Hill, where both men dwelled on the importance of preserving progressivity as a feature of the tax code and highlighted the importance of the estate tax in slowing the widening of the gap between rich and poor. But Wallis's sermon-like address went beyond the social and economic implications of the U.S. tax code. He cited the prophets Isaiah and Amos who warned their societies against the ills of excessive wealth inequality. Then he related a story about one of his colleagues, who took a Bible and cut out every verse and passage that had to do with issues of poverty and social justice. The result, Wallis explained, was an empty, tattered, torn object that hardly resembled the complete Book. The point was clear: the Bible has much to say about the estate tax.

A review of ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s book, titled Leadership, appears in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. As the Review points out, this book was obviously intended to provide Giuliani with a jumping-off point into the corporate lecture circuit, before the 9/11 disaster made such an introduction unnecessary for the now famous Mayor of America. Largely as a result of this, Leadership is almost entirely devoid of any real content regarding what it takes to be a leader. A book like this is good for Giuliani’s image, and his pocketbook, but as a manual of leadership – what it claims itself to be – it is horrendous. This is not an instruction course in how to lead. You can not learn anything about leadership by reading this book. Furthermore, it completely glosses over all the difficulties Giuliani encountered in leading New York. A meaningful book on how to lead could have been written by analyzing Giuliani’s mistakes as well as his successes, and making a thoughtful commentary on how he could have accomplished his goals without causing the problems he encountered along the way, but that is not what Giuliani is done. Instead, we are left with an empty homile that offers nothing new or educational that innumerable “leadership” books have not offered countless times before. Real dialogue on leadership is essential to keeping a state’s leaders and its people in touch with each other and the state on the right track. This book does neither, and it gets in the way of a real dialogue occurring thanks to the public attention it takes away from legitimate issues.

The Washington Post reports today that Bush's approval rating has dropped 7 points from last month, to 59%, his lowest yet. However, I take no comfort in this. For more than a year, Bush has enjoyed a stratospheric approval rating through no fault of his own. All he did was happen to be in office (and receiving only mediocre approval ratings at that) when terrorists attacked the U.S., and then not sound unpatriotic afterwards. He didn't actually have to earn his ratings; the country rallied around him as a result of the external threat, not because of anything he did. Now his approval ratings are dropping, and once again it has nothing to do with him. His approval ratings are dropping because the U.S. is facing two international crises at the same time, and the American people don't like that. They want the President to make the problems go away, which he can't, so they give him low approval ratings. The public does the exact same thing whenever the economy goes bad: they blame the incumbent. It doesn't matter if it has nothing to do with him, like the current recession has nothing to do with Bush. He wasn't in office for long enough to cause the economy to plummet, just like Clinton didn't really have anything to do with the dot.com boom that made the 90's such an economic success. Presidents should be judged on what they do - and by that criteria, Bush deserves a far lower approval rating than the 59% he has now - not by events they have no control over.

Two letters to the Editor in today's New York Times voice the sensible and necessary complaint that the current designs for the WTC site are still not up to snuff. (See my post from 12/31/02.) Hopefully the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation will once again heed the public's dissatisfaction with the WTC site designs and take one last bite at the apple. If they can come even close to the mammoth progress that they made last time they went back to the drawing board, one more try should be all it takes.

Remember the Raelians? With the acceleration of the North Korea and Iraq crises, the bizarre story of the Raelian religious cult and the baby which they allegedly cloned have been pushed out of the headlines. So you probably didn't hear that Dr. Michael A. Guillen, the former science editor for ABC News who was overseeing the DNA test has resigned from the project, saying that he has not been given any access to the baby and her mother. Guillen also said that he thought the project might be "an elaborate hoax." You don't say?

The problem with the Bush policy on Iraq isn't that Saddam Hussein is a nice guy and we should just leave him alone. Saddam Hussein is a dictator who is even more dangerous to his own people than he is to his neighbors. The problem is that the Bush policy on Iraq simply isn't consistent. Bush constantly uses Hussein's attacks on the Kurds and Shiites as a justification for attacking Iraq. But it makes no sense ot use this as a justification for invasion, because there are numerous other dictators around the world whose records are just as bad as Hussein's. Of course, Bush also claims that Hussein poses a threat to the U.S. If this were the case, then that would be a reason to consider military action against him. But as I said on 12/20 and again on 12/29, Hussein isn't a danger to the U.S. or its citizens. And in any case, if Hussein's crimes against his people aren't a reason to go to war against him in the absence of a threat to the U.S., they aren't any more of a reason to go to war against him if he is a threat to the U.S. Either crimes against your own people are a reason for an invasion (a statement which flies in the face of international law), or they aren't. And if Bush does want to take a tough stand against dictators abusing their own people, he should do it through international bodies like the U.N. and he should be concerned about dictators all over the world, not just ones in the Middle East.

The New Republic has a great item in an article on the North Korea crisis. Apparently, three months ago National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice described North Korea's 1994 attempt to build nuclear weapons as "the crisis on the Korean Penninsula in 1994." So why was it a crisis in 1994, but not in 2002/03? Good question. This quote reveals that not only does the Bush response to North Korea's nuclear program make no sense, but that the Bush administration knows it makes no sense, and it expressly contradicts the Bush administration's own past statements.

One of the Republicans' favorite explanations for why Bush is reacting so disproportionately to North Korea and Iraq is that we don't have to have a "cookie cutter" foreign policy that treats all international crises the same. This of course is true, so true that it amounts to a virtual tautology. But if you're going to treat each crisis on a case-by-case basis - what other basis would you treat them on? Is any other way to treat crises even possible? - then you have to tailor your response to each crisis to fit the particular circumstances of that crisis. What Republicans never explain is what makes the North Korea crisis less urgent than Iraq. If each crisis is different, then you have to provide an analysis and justification specific to each one. What is Bush's rationale for putting the pressure on Iraq but not North Korea? No rationale, not even an illogical one, has been provided yet. Colin Powell made a statement on North Korea, but it didn't shed much light on the reasoning behind the administration's response. If you're going to claim that you approach each crisis differently, then you have to provide some specific analysis to back up your thinking. So far, Bush hasn't done that.

Matt Bivens has an article in The Nation that could turn out to be one of the biggest stories of the next few months. It definitely deserves to be, because it involves a question of basic Constitutional law that has apparently been overlooked by everyone from the President to the media to the majority of Congress: did President Bush have the right to unilaterally (without the approval of Congress) withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. The Constitution says that once a treaty has been approved by Congress and signed by the White House, it has legal authority equivalent to that of a federal law. The President does not have the right to repeal laws by executive order, so it follows that he does not have the right to repeal a treaty, either. Yet that is exactly what the President did, without so much as a peep from the media. However, 31 members of Congress took to the courts to try to constrain the President from riding roughshod over Constitutional guarantees.

What was the result? Federal judge John Bates, the same judge who ruled that the Government Accounting Office (GAO) did not have the right to access the notes from Dick Cheney's meetings with the energy industry lobbyists who helped him draft the administration's energy legislation, agreed with the White House's attorneys that Congress had "other means" to redress Bush's decision. This completely misses the point, of course. The issue isn't whether Congress has other means to do something about Bush's repeal of the ABM treaty, the issue is whether it's Constitutional for Bush to do so, which it clearly isn't. This is the most heinous abuse of Constitutional guarantees put forth by the Bush White House so far, even more than the infringements on privacy and freedom of the Patriot Act or the use of military tribunals against U.S. citizens. If the media has any capability to stand up to the party that now controls the White House and both houses of Congress, they won't let Bush bury this issue. And hopefully neither will the appeals judges who will be reviewing Bates' decision. (On a side note, Bates hasn't always been such a staunch protector of Presidential privilege: he was one of Ken Starr's chief deputies during the Clinton administration.)

The New Republic is flirting with neo-conservatism once again in an article on Iraq. The New Republic spends a lot of time making significant liberal arguments, but it also spends a lot of time trying to cover its flank by making arguments designed to appeal to more conservative groups, which is fine. You have to try to reach out to more moderate segments of society if you want you position to gain any influence. The problem with The New Republic is that it keeps overshooting the moderates and making arguments that appeal more to conservatives than the average American, which completely undercuts the original purpose of its strategy.

Of course, one side-effect of this strategy is that it ends up defending all kinds of positions that simply miss the point. For instance, in today's article, author Reihan Salam states that

the U.S. government turned a blind eye to many of Saddam's most egregious abuses during its war with Iran and, worse yet, indirectly aided his efforts to build weapons of mass destruction. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was, according to Dobbs, "instrumental in tilting U.S. policy toward Baghdad." As a private citizen, Rumsfeld served as a special envoy to Baghdad during the Reagan administration; in this capacity, he paved the way for an extensive intelligence relationship and transfers of dual-use technologies.

Salam goes on to point out that while these facts are "by no means entirely unknown," they do "shed light on an uncomfortable past," all of which is true. But then instead of following these thoughts to their logical conclusion, he takes an abrupt right-angle turn into irrelevance.

But what exactly does it tell us? That the American government once behaved in a manner that proved short-sighted? Some will argue that the U.S. relationship with Iraq in the 1980s should serve as a cautionary example, and they'd be right to do so. But they'd be wrong to argue that this bolsters the case against regime change. If anything, the fact of American assistance does precisely the opposite: Once you realize you've created a monster, the thing to do is slay it, not pretend it doesn't exist.

What Salam doesn't say, but should, is that the U.S.'s entire Middle East strategy, going back all the way to the end of World War II, and following in the footsteps of British policy there back to World War I, is to create a system of alliances designed to provide spheres of influence for the western government by bolstering despotic regimes, and trying to play the despotic pro-western regimes off against the despotic anti-western regimes. The change in U.S. policy towards Iraq doesn't signal a shift in policy strategy, it signals that Saddam has gone from being a pro-western despot to an anti-western despot. If U.S. policy were actually changing, we would give up all our despotic allies and adopt a completely new policy. There has been a fair amount of talk in the last several months about seriously reconsidering our alliance with Saudi Arabia. Egypt should receive similar consideration, as should Israel. I'm not saying we should go from supporting these countries to opposing them. I'm saying that our policy in the Middle East needs to go from influence-mongering to peace-and-democracy facilitating. Furthermore, we should start pursuing energy policies that don't require us to be beholden to oil quite so much by exploring alternate fuel sources. Increasing fuel-efficiency requirements, which is opposed by car-makers and oil companies in the U.S., would be a good first step. But is this really likely coming from the same White House that let Ken Lay play a major hand in determining its energy policy? I don't think so. It would be a complete 180-degree reversal, so don't expect it anytime soon.

We're starting to hear a lot of noises indicating that the chances of war with Iraq are lower now than they have been at any point over the last few months. The media heat on North Korea is really starting to pick up, putting pressure on Bush to act on that before taking on Iraq; inspections in Iraq have produced "no smoking gun", in the words of the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Dr. Mohamed El Baradei, making it harder for Bush to go to war against Iraq; without proof of WMD in Iraq, Bush will find it very hard to get UN Security Council clearance for a war, and without UN Security Council clearance the American people will never get behind a war in Iraq. If the whole war in Iraq does fall through, it will look in hindsight as if Bush had wasted an entire year with a project that was ultimately pointless. Maybe then it will be possible to address some substantial Middle East issues, like bringing Israel and Palestine back to the bargaining table, trying to develop alternative energy sources to lessen our dependence on oil (fat chance with Bush in office), and promoting democratic changes in our putative allies.